Regulation, governance and informality: an empirical analysis of selected countries

The Informal Economy provides employment to more than 60 per cent of the labour population in the developing world despite being a site unfettered by regulations and social norms of fairness governing pay and work conditions. In assessing the factors behind an informal agent’s decision to formalize, it is asserted that rigidity in regulatory mechanism is the primary cause that impedes the process of formalization. However whether flexible regulations can encourage formalization by making gains of formalization more accessible and certain remains a question. In this paper we argue that flexible regulations does not necessarily manifest into the incentives that are essential for formalization. Reducing rigidities in regulation has a significant pay off only in the ambit of good governance. More specifically we hypothesise that degree of intensity of regulation will hardly matter in containing informality; rather what matters is the quality of governance and capability of the institutions to put the regulations into effect. Using secondary data for 46 countries over the period between 1980 and 2008, we empirically investigate into the linkages between governance, regulation and informal employment by developing static and dynamic panel data models and establish that in curbing informality what turns out to be crucial is the interaction between quality of governance and regulation

Low-Effort Specification Debugging and Analysis

Reactive synthesis deals with the automated construction of implementations of reactive systems from their specifications. To make the approach feasible in practice, systems engineers need effective and efficient means of debugging these specifications. In this paper, we provide techniques for report-based specification debugging, wherein salient properties of a specification are analyzed, and the result presented to the user in the form of a report. This provides a low-effort way to debug specifications, complementing high-effort techniques including the simulation of synthesized implementations. We demonstrate the usefulness of our report-based specification debugging toolkit by providing examples in the context of generalized reactivity(1) synthesis.Comment: In Proceedings SYNT 2014, arXiv:1407.493

Modelling and analyzing adaptive self-assembling strategies with Maude

Building adaptive systems with predictable emergent behavior is a challenging task and it is becoming a critical need. The research community has accepted the challenge by introducing approaches of various nature: from software architectures, to programming paradigms, to analysis techniques. We recently proposed a conceptual framework for adaptation centered around the role of control data. In this paper we show that it can be naturally realized in a reflective logical language like Maude by using the Reflective Russian Dolls model. Moreover, we exploit this model to specify, validate and analyse a prominent example of adaptive system: robot swarms equipped with self-assembly strategies. The analysis exploits the statistical model checker PVeStA

Morbidity and pollution: model specification analysis for time-series data on hospital admissions

Time-series analysis of effects of pollutants on emergency hospital admissions indicates important synergistic interactions among pollutants and to a lesser degree nonlinearities in effects of single pollutants. Comparisons of alternative econometric specifications are made to determine the appropriateness of incorporating nonuniform pollution impacts. The data substantially support the existence of synergisms among pollutants with high levels of sulfur dioxide, SO, (particulates), increasing the impact of particulates (SO,) on emergency hospital admissions. Marginal effects of either pollutant are, however, small at current ambient air quality levels. These results indicate that damage estimates were likely to be understated during the 1960’s when pollution levels were high, while, at current levels of those pollutants considered here, marginal damages are lower than would be estimated in studies failing to incorporate synergistic and nonlinear impacts.time series; hospital admissions; pollution and human health; synergisms; nonlinearities; econometric model specification

Development of a software safety process and a case study of its use

The goal of this research is to continue the development of a comprehensive approach to software safety and to evaluate the approach with a case study. The case study is a major part of the project, and it involves the analysis of a specific safety-critical system from the medical equipment domain. The particular application being used was selected because of the availability of a suitable candidate system. We consider the results to be generally applicable and in no way particularly limited by the domain. The research is concentrating on issues raised by the specification and verification phases of the software lifecycle since they are central to our previously-developed rigorous definitions of software safety. The theoretical research is based on our framework of definitions for software safety. In the area of specification, the main topics being investigated are the development of techniques for building system fault trees that correctly incorporate software issues and the development of rigorous techniques for the preparation of software safety specifications. The research results are documented. Another area of theoretical investigation is the development of verification methods tailored to the characteristics of safety requirements. Verification of the correct implementation of the safety specification is central to the goal of establishing safe software. The empirical component of this research is focusing on a case study in order to provide detailed characterizations of the issues as they appear in practice, and to provide a testbed for the evaluation of various existing and new theoretical results, tools, and techniques. The Magnetic Stereotaxis System is summarized

Inferring Concise Specifications of APIs

Modern software relies on libraries and uses them via application programming interfaces (APIs). Correct API usage as well as many software engineering tasks are enabled when APIs have formal specifications. In this work, we analyze the implementation of each method in an API to infer a formal postcondition. Conventional wisdom is that, if one has preconditions, then one can use the strongest postcondition predicate transformer (SP) to infer postconditions. However, SP yields postconditions that are exponentially large, which makes them difficult to use, either by humans or by tools. Our key idea is an algorithm that converts such exponentially large specifications into a form that is more concise and thus more usable. This is done by leveraging the structure of the specifications that result from the use of SP. We applied our technique to infer postconditions for over 2,300 methods in seven popular Java libraries. Our technique was able to infer specifications for 75.7% of these methods, each of which was verified using an Extended Static Checker. We also found that 84.6% of resulting specifications were less than 1/4 page (20 lines) in length. Our technique was able to reduce the length of SMT proofs needed for verifying implementations by 76.7% and reduced prover execution time by 26.7%

Composing features by managing inconsistent requirements

One approach to system development is to decompose the requirements into features and specify the individual features before composing them. A major limitation of deferring feature composition is that inconsistency between the solutions to individual features may not be uncovered early in the development, leading to unwanted feature interactions. Syntactic inconsistencies arising from the way software artefacts are described can be addressed by the use of explicit, shared, domain knowledge. However, behavioural inconsistencies are more challenging: they may occur within the requirements associated with two or more features as well as at the level of individual features. Whilst approaches exist that address behavioural inconsistencies at design time, these are overrestrictive in ruling out all possible conflicts and may weaken the requirements further than is desirable. In this paper, we present a lightweight approach to dealing with behavioural inconsistencies at run-time. Requirement Composition operators are introduced that specify a run-time prioritisation to be used on occurrence of a feature interaction. This prioritisation can be static or dynamic. Dynamic prioritisation favours some requirement according to some run-time criterion, for example, the extent to which it is already generating behaviour