The stability of money demand function in Japan: Evidence from rolling cointegration approach

The main purpose of this study is to re-investigate the stability of Japanese M2 money demand function over the period of 1960:Q1 to 2007:Q2. This study propose to incorporate the rolling regression approach into the bounds testing procedure for cointegration within the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework to search for the stability of money demand function in Japan. This study, in general, confirms that real M2 money demand and its determinants, real income and interest rates are cointegrated within the entire sample period. In line to that, the CUSUM and CUSUM of Squares tests show that the money demand function is stable over the analysis period. However, the evidence of rolling ARDL cointegration test implies that Japanese M2 money demand is not stable due to a series of changes in the Japanese monetary policy environment. The finding of this study is vital for policymakers in formulating an appropriate macroeconomic policy. Owing to the low power of CUSUM and CUSUM of Squares tests in the presence of lagged dependent variable(s), this study propose to use the rolling cointegration test to re-investigate the stability of money demand function in Japan.Money Demand; Rolling Cointegration Test; Japan; Stability

A design proposer on policy framework in IPV6 network

Networked systems are increasingly driven by changing business needs, their management becomes even more complex. In order to adapt to changing business requirements, distributed systems switch from the traditional client-server model to a service-driven model: The internet service driven network is a new approach to the provision of network computing that concentrates on the services you want to provide. These services range from the low-level services that manage relationships between networked devices to the value-added services provided to the end-users. The requirements for management systems identified above, can be facilitated with policy-based management approach where the support for distribution, automation and dynamic adaptation of the behaviour of the managed system is achieved by using policies. IPV6 is one of the useful delivery protocols for future fixed and wireless/mobile network environment while multihoming is the tools for delivering such protocol to the end users. This paper proposed interface selection mechanism while the study presents a policy framework in IPv6 multihomed mobile network, policy Framework Architecture, and a case study for the framework

From built environment to health inequalities: An explanatory framework based on evidence

The Health in All Policies strategy aims to engage every policy domain in health promotion. The more socially disadvantaged groups are usually more affected by potential negative impacts of policies if they are not health oriented. The built environment represents an important policy domain and, apart from its housing component, its impact on health inequalities is seldom assessed. Methods: A scoping review of evidence on the built environment and its health equity impact was carried out, searching both urban and medical literature since 2000 analysing socio-economic inequalities in relation to different components of the built environment. Results: The proposed explanatory framework assumes that key features of built environment (identified as density, functional mix and public spaces and services), may influence individual health through their impact on both natural environment and social context, as well as behaviours, and that these effects may be unequally distributed according to the social position of individuals. Conclusion: In general, the expected links proposed by the framework are well documented in the literature; however, evidence of their impact on health inequalities remains uncertain due to confounding factors, heterogeneity in study design, and difficulty to generalize evidence that is still very embedded to local contexts

Microeconomic Motives of Land Use Change in Coastal Zone Area: Agent Based Modelling Approach

Economic growth causes growing urbanization, extension of tourist sector, infrastructure and change of natural landscape. These processes of land use change attract even more attention if they take place in coastal zone area. In that case not only the efficient allocation and preservation of natural area, but also reduction of potential damage from flooding is important. Driven forces of land use at macro and micro levels should be taken into account. This paper presents an agent based model (ABM), which is designed to simulate land use change in coastal zone area based of human behaviour. The aim is to understand motives, types of connections and interactions between different actors and natural environment in order to get a feeling how different policy options and natural conditions might affect land use configuration. Microeconomic motives of land use decisions are in the focus of the research. Individual land use decisions are guided by economic and geomorphologic conditions, spatial planning and coastal protection policy. Each location choice is done according to a set of defined rules and land attributes. Space is represented as a grid of cells. Self-interested economic agents interact with each other trying to benefit from a certain type of land-use. We introduce the perception of risk of flooding in the model of land use as an innovative aspect of ABM simulations for water management problems. Based on decisions of spatially distributed individual economic agents operating in a policy framework, the model produces aggregated land-use patterns as an outcome. Understanding the factors that affect land use decisions will help policy makers design incentives to achieve policy objectives in coastal zone area. The proposed ABM will be applied to a study area in the province of North Holland in the Netherlands

Acceptance of Interoperable Electronic Health Record (EHRs) Systems: A Tanzanian e-Health Perspective

The study assessed factors that influence the acceptance of interoperable electronic Health Records (EHRs) Systems in Tanzania Public Hospitals. The study applied a hybrid model that combined the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE). Snowball sampling technique was applied and a total of 340 questionnaires were distributed to selected clinics, polyclinics and hospitals, of which 261 (77%) received questionnaires were considered to be valid and reliable for subsequent data analysis. IBM SPSS software version 27.0 was employed for data analysis. Findings indicated that relative advantage, compatibility, management support, organizational competency, training and education, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, privacy and security concerns, competitive pressure and regulatory framework have positive and significant effects on acceptance of interoperable EHRs. However, complexity and trading & vendor support were found to have non-significant effects on acceptance of interoperable electronic health records. The study has further provided implications that may assist scholars and policy makers in the implementation of interoperable electronic health systems in the health sector

Game Theory Based Distributed Coordination with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

We study the problem of automated object manipulation using two arms of a Baxter robot. The robot uses a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning strategy to learn how to complete the task without any prior experience. It learns what actions to take by storing its interactions with the environment and uses these experiences to create a policy that guides future actions. Each of Baxter’s arms is modeled as an independent agent that can move and learn separately from the other. Each arm learns independent policies (i.e., environment state to robot action mapping) about how to best move in order to complete a collaborative (i.e., using two arms) task (e.g., push an item, pick-and-place etc.). The individual agents are trained using the standard TD3 algorithm, which uses the experiences that include how well the agent’s past actions guided it towards completing the task. TD3 has two neural networks: the actor network takes the states (joint angles) as an input and outputs the actions (joint movements) and the twin critic networks evaluate the quality of those actions. The actions between the agents are coordinated through a game theory-based distributed coordination strategy for successful coordination. This coordination learning framework produces a policy that produces a good set of actions for each arm to execute. Finally, Baxter uses this policy to complete tasks using both its arms in collaboration. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to use a game theory-based strategy for dual arm manipulation learning

Conceptualizing describing and contrasting school cultures: a comparative case study of school improvement processes

What is school culture? How can it be measured, described and contrasted? Is school culture related to school improvement? This dissertation investigates school culture and its relationship to school improvement. The study is organized into three phases and employs a mixed methods approach to study the cultures of three pairs of matched schools over a 15 month period. Phase I consists of a multi-disciplinary literature review across the fields of psychology, sociology, business management, anthropology, and educational administration. This process resulted in the development of a new conceptualization of school culture based on merging complementary theories. As defined here school culture consists of four dimensions: I: Professional Orientation, II: Organizational Structure, III: Quality of the Learning Environment, and IV: Student-centered Focus. These dimensions are manifested on three levels: artifacts, espoused beliefs, and basic assumptions. Phase II utilizes the new more complex framework to describe the cultures of six schools. Resulting case studies yielded thick descriptions which detail the salient aspects of school culture. Similarities, unique attributes, and points of contrasts in schools were readily apparent in the case studies developed through the new framework. Variations in policy implementation and internal processes were also captured by the study. Possible causal links between processes and products were suggested, such as a link between principal leadership and professional orientation, or between professional orientation and quality of the learning environment, or distributed informal leadership and teacher turnover. Phase III contrasts the cultures of three pairs of matched schools that differ in the amount of improvement they demonstrated over a two year period. In all three cross-case comparisons of matched schools, the school with the more effective culture was also the school that demonstrated the most growth in student achievement. The dimensional framework allowed for more precise point by point comparisons of culture than were previously available. The primary differences found between the cultures of improving versus non-improving matched schools were in Dimension I. Professional Orientation, followed by Dimension II. Organizational Structure

An analysis of the process of policy-making to prevent deforestation in Indonesia

The environmental, social, and economic value of Indonesia’s tropical forests has generated extensive interest and scrutiny, both local and global. International stakeholders are heavily involved in Indonesian forest policies, including in the issue of deforestation, both because of their immense interest in the Indonesian environment, and because of Indonesia’s lack of development capacity. Many of domestic and international stakeholders participating in the policy-making processes with regard to Indonesian forests have discrete views and concerns. A successful policy would be one that meets all the requirements of all such actors. This study was conducted to analyze the policy process including some questions about Indonesia’s policies for the prevention of deforestation: 1. ‘When are such policies formed?’, 2. ‘Who is involved in the policy-making process?’, 3. How are the resulting policies implemented?’ Appropriate research methods and analysis frameworks for the examination of policy processes were developed for this study and were applied to Indonesia’s deforestation prevention policies. The current study interviewed 72 of the 114 people who were involved in the policy-making process identified through this study, to analyze the means and motives that are involved in the policy-making process and to ascertain the respondents’ interactions with the other actors. The environmental contexts of the development of guidelines were examined by analyzing the streams of problems, politics, and policies through the Multiple Streams Framework to assess the manner in which the current Indonesian deforestation prevention policies have been established. Subsequently, the actors involved in the policy-making processes and the interactions between them were identified to create a structure of the policy network. Further, the parties that exert a significant influence on the deforestation prevention policy were identified. The characteristics of this policy network were confirmed, and the general network was classified into the Relation Network, Information Network and Trust Network. The result of the analyses reveals that the situation pertaining to the deforestation of Indonesian tropical forests has not substantially improved, even though the problem of forest degradation has been recognized in Indonesia for a long time now. The burden of environmental duties demanded from Indonesia by the international community has increased. As Indonesia has transformed politically from a long-standing military regime to a democratic government, its municipalities have gradually been strengthened and various levels of stakeholders including regional governments, NGO, and the private sector, have become actively invested in Indonesian policy-design. At the same time, international attention, and demand for preserving Indonesian forests have become more specific. Indonesia operated through a powerful presidential system and its president exerts much authority over the country’s society. In such a situation, the Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY)’s announcement at the G20 Summit in 2009 opened the Policy Window. President SBY declared that Indonesia would reduce emissions of greenhouse gas up to 41% 2020. This proclamation received much attention from both domestic and international groups, and led to sweeping changes in Indonesia’s forest policy. In all three of the above-mentioned sub-networks, the overwhelmingly powerful influence of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, the main policy designer of the Indonesian deforestation prevention policy, was confirmed. The Ministry of Environment and Forestry was found to obtain the highest centrality value in the Relation Network and the gap between this actor and the other policy actors was extremely wide. However, the centrality value of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry was relatively low in the Information and Trust Networks, and this centrality was distributed to the other actors. These outcomes imply that not only the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, but also other organizations such as intergovernmental organizations and academic organizations contribute relevant information with regard to the policy, that the information dependency and trust of the other actors are decentralized, and that these other actors primarily depend on and trust international donors (e.g., World Bank, UN-REDD+ Task Force) and academics who are also interested actors in the formation of the forest policy of Indonesia. Many of the interested actors, especially intergovernmental organizations, academic organizations, NGOs, have access to the policy network of Indonesia’s deforestation prevention policy without any significant barriers. Hence, this policy network may be termed an open system. However, the internal policy actors are judged to be rigid in terms of their systems. The policy network for deforestation prevention has also emerged as a partially vertical hierarchy, as the Indonesian central government’s powerful initiative leads and directs the policy network along with a small number of other influential bodies. According to the classification of policy network types proposed by Marsh and Rhode (1992), the policy network for the prevention of deforestation in Indonesia may be described as an Issue Network with a vertical hierarchy

Proactive cloud management for highly heterogeneous multi-cloud infrastructures

Various literature studies demonstrated that the cloud computing paradigm can help to improve availability and performance of applications subject to the problem of software anomalies. Indeed, the cloud resource provisioning model enables users to rapidly access new processing resources, even distributed over different geographical regions, that can be promptly used in the case of, e.g., crashes or hangs of running machines, as well as to balance the load in the case of overloaded machines. Nevertheless, managing a complex geographically-distributed cloud deploy could be a complex and time-consuming task. Autonomic Cloud Manager (ACM) Framework is an autonomic framework for supporting proactive management of applications deployed over multiple cloud regions. It uses machine learning models to predict failures of virtual machines and to proactively redirect the load to healthy machines/cloud regions. In this paper, we study different policies to perform efficient proactive load balancing across cloud regions in order to mitigate the effect of software anomalies. These policies use predictions about the mean time to failure of virtual machines. We consider the case of heterogeneous cloud regions, i.e regions with different amount of resources, and we provide an experimental assessment of these policies in the context of ACM Framework

Policy-based autonomic control service

Recently, there has been a considerable interest in policy-based, goal-oriented service management and autonomic computing. Much work is still required to investigate designs and policy models and associate meta-reasoning systems for policy-based autonomic systems. In this paper we outline a proposed autonomic middleware control service used to orchestrate selfhealing of distributed applications. Policies are used to adjust the systems autonomy and define self-healing strategies to stabilize/correct a given system in the event of failures