LETTER GRADING GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY

We mailed letters to non‐existent business addresses in 159 countries (10 per country), and measured whether they come back to the return address in the United States and how long it takes. About 60% of the letters were returned, taking over six months, on average. The results provide new objective indicators of government efficiency across countries, based on a simple and universal service, and allow us to shed light on its determinants. The evidence suggests that both technology and management quality influence government efficiency, just as they do that of the private sector.     

THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION OF PRODUCTIVITY AND DEMAND SHOCKS IN THE US ECONOMY

This paper analyzes the cross‐country effects of productivity and demand disturbances in the United States identified with sign restrictions based on standard theory. Productivity gains in US manufacturing increase US consumption and investment vis‐à‐vis foreign countries, resulting in a trade deficit and higher international prices of US goods, despite the rise in their supply. Financial adjustment works via a higher global value of US equities, real dollar appreciation, and an expansion of US gross foreign liabilities as well as assets. Positive demand shocks to US manufacturing also increase investment and cause a real dollar appreciation, but have limited effects on the trade balance and net foreign assets. Our findings emphasize the importance for macroeconomic interdependence of endogenous fluctuations in aggregate demand across countries in response to business cycle shocks.     

Does gold act as a safe haven against exchange rate fluctuations? The case of Pakistan rupee

Investors often look for a refuge to avoid undesirable exposures to risk during period of extreme downturns in currency returns. We investigate daily gold and rupee exchange rates depreciation against set of currencies over the period of 1992–2015. Using wavelets at multiple time horizons; we find that gold act as a consistent short run hedge against exchange rate hence validating the exchange rate destruction hypothesis. This finding is helpful for speculators in their decision making while taking long and short positions accordingly. This finding suggests that central bank also need to keep other safe haven assets in reserves because the hedging ability of gold is only limited to short run. Further, the role of gold in providing protection against currency risks is also confirmed using quantile regression. These results assist portfolio managers and governments in formulating effectual diversification strategy for preserving investment portfolio during extreme event condition. Our results also suggest that gold has a lead relationship with exchange rate; however, this relationship switches over specific time intervals. This finding is of major concern for policy makers in determining the extent of stabilization in gold prices to bring consistency to exchange rate. Finally, the Granger coherence coefficients confirm that the strength of the causal relationship varies across over all frequencies. These conclusions have important implications for policy makers, economic analysts, portfolio managers and institutional investors.     

Trade and poverty nexus: A case study of Sri Lanka

The link between trade liberalisation and poverty has become one of the most debated topics in recent years. There is a growing body of empirical literature on this topic and many studies provide mixed results. In this study, Sri Lanka is used as a detailed case study and a computable general equilibrium (CGE) approach is used as an analytical framework to examine the trade-poverty nexus. The results suggest that, liberalisation of the manufacturing industries is more pro-poor than that of the agricultural industries. Overall, this study suggests that trade reforms may widen the income gap between the rich and the poor creating uneven gains across different household groups in Sri Lanka. While short-term complementary policies are needed to compensate vulnerable income groups, long-term policies are needed to make gains from trade liberalisation more inclusive and equitable to maintain economic and political stability in Sri Lanka.     

A menu on output gap estimation methods

This paper presents a review of output gap modeling techniques, which are of special interest for policy making institutions. We distinguish between univariate – which estimate trend output on the basis of actual output, without taking into account the information contained in other variables –, and multivariate methods — which incorporate useful information on some other variables, based on economic theory. We present the main advantages and drawbacks of the different methods.     

Corporate ownership,efficiency and performance under state capitalism: Evidence from China

This paper studied the relationship between business performance and the ownership structure of firms focusing on Chinese state owned enterprises (SOEs) using a firm level panel data set of China from 1999 to 2011. By classifying all firms into different types based on their ultimate controlling shareholders, we found that SOEs in general underperform in the marketplace than private enterprises. However, among the SOEs in our sample, the SOEs controlled by central government outperformed all types of firms because they offered the highest asset turnover ratio and lowest business administration ratio by receiving favourable government treatment. We conclude that firm ownership type and work efficiency are the main factors that influence the differences in firm performance. In particular, the performance of SOEs controlled by central government is greatly determined by the degree of government intervention, which is referred to as State Capitalism.     

Windows下微机与单片机联机通信系统设计

本文介绍了在Windows 95下利用Delphi软件实现与 80 98单片机进行联机串行通信的原理和方法 ,经过硬、软件的设计 ,只需利用该联机通信系统就能在Windows下直接完成对80 98单片机的控制和操作 ,实现了对 80 98单片机的集中管理     

A practical method for analysing heavy tailed data

An important practical issue of applying heavy tailed distributions is how to choose the sample fraction or threshold, since only a fraction of upper order statistics can be employed in the inference. Recently, Guillou & Hall ( 2001 ; Journal of Royal Statistical Society B, 63, 293–305) proposed a simple way to choose the threshold in estimating a tail index. In this article, the author first gives an intuitive explanation of the approach in Guillou & Hall ( 2001 ; it Journal of Royal Statistical Society B, 63, 293–305) and then proposes an alternative method, which can be extended to other settings like extreme value index estimation and tail dependence function estimation. Further the author proposes to combine this method for selecting a threshold with a bias reduction estimator to improve the performance of the tail index estimation, interval estimation of a tail index, and high quantile estimation. Simulation studies on both point estimation and interval estimation for a tail index show that both selection procedures are comparable and bias reduction estimation with the threshold selected by either method is preferred. The Canadian Journal of Statistics © 2009 Statistical Society of Canada     

基于Windows Sockets的通信应用程序开发

本文阐述了开发Windows Sockets通信程序的软、硬件环境、基本步骤和技术要点,并以在Windows NT环境下,用Visual C 6.0编程为例,进一步阐述了开发Windows Sockets通信程序的经验与实践。