Services liberalization in preferential trade arrangements : the case of Kenya

Given the growing importance of commitments to foreign investors in services in regional trade agreements, it is important to develop applied general equilibrium models to assess the impacts of liberalization of barriers to multinational service providers. This paper develops a 55 sector applied general equilibrium model of Kenya with foreign direct investment and Dixit-Stiglitz productivity effects from additional varieties of imperfectly competitive goods or services, and uses the model to assess its regional and multilateral trade options, focusing on commitments to foreign investors in services. To assess the sensitivity of the results to parameter values, the model is executed 30,000 times, and results are reported as confidence intervals of the sample distributions. The analysis reveals that a 50 percent preferential reduction in the ad valorem equivalents of barriers in all business services by Kenya with its African partners would be somewhat beneficial for Kenya. If a preferential agreement with African partners is combined with an agreement with the European Union, the gains would more than triple the gains of an Africa only agreement. Multilateral reduction of services barriers, however, would yield gains about 12 times the gains of an agreement with the Africa region alone. These results suggest that preferential liberalization in the region is a valuable first step, but wider liberalization, with larger partners and liberal rules of origin or multilaterally, will yield much larger gains due to providing access to a much wider set of services providers. The largest gains would come from domestic regulatory reform in services, as this would almost triple the gains of multilateral liberalization.Economic Theory&Research,Emerging Markets,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Free Trade

Modeling Services Liberalization: The Case of Tanzania

This paper employs a 52-sector, small, open-economy computable general equilibrium model of the Tanzanian economy to assess the impact of the liberalization of regulatory barriers against foreign and domestic business service providers in Tanzania. The model incorporates productivity effects in both goods and services markets endogenously, through a Dixit-Stiglitz framework. It summarizes policy notes on the key business service sectors that were prepared for this work, and estimates the ad valorem equivalent of barriers to foreign direct investment based on these policy notes and detailed questionnaires completed by specialists in Tanzania. The authors estimate that Tanzania will gain about 5.3 percent of the value of Tanzanian consumption in the medium run (or about 4.8 percent of gross domestic product) from a full reform package that also includes uniform tariffs. The estimated gains increase to about 16 percent of consumption in the long-run, steady-state model, where the impact on the accumulation of capital from an improvement in the productivity of capital is taken into account. Decomposition exercises reveal that the largest gains to Tanzania will derive from liberalization of costly regulatory barriers that are non-discriminatory in their impacts between Tanzanian and multinational service providers.accounting; accurate estimate; aged; allocation; amount of money; baseline scenario; beneficiaries; beneficiary; Breast Cancer; budget constraint; calculation; central government; child care

IT&C Impact on the Romanian Business and Organizations. The Enterprise Resource Planning and Business Intelligence Methods Influence on Manager’s Decision: A Case Study

The aim of the paper is to study the use of the advanced management methods in the 2010 year in Romania. The research results were obtained with the use of a questionnaire, and our purpose was to demonstrate some hypothesis concerning identify the effect that implementation of ERP and BI applications in all functions of an organization has over the management method and the IT&C based decision. The originality of this article consists in the study realized in computer based advanced management methods implementation. The study is limited to the SIVECO companies portfolio. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate some hypothesis concerning the relationship between the size of the organization, the management method used, and the role of IT&C in decision making. The practical value of this study consists in the measurement of the impacts of contingency factors, including size, and in the assessment of the ERP systems success. The results demonstrate that the relationship between firm size and ERP success is moderated by IT assets.Enterprise Resource Planning, Business Intelligence, Management Methods, Balanced Scorecard

Agricultural Trade Liberalization, Productivity Gain and Poverty Alleviation: a General Equilibrium Analysis

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models have gained continuously in popularity as an empirical tool for assessing the impact of trade liberalization on agricultural growth, poverty and income distribution. Conventional models ignore however the channels linking technical change in agriculture, trade openness and poverty. This study seeks to incorporate econometric evidence of these linkages into a CGE model to estimate the impact of alternative trade liberalization scenarios on poverty and equity. The analysis uses the Latent Class Stochastic Frontier Model (LCSFM) and the metafrontier function to investigate the influence of trade openness on agricultural technological change. The estimated productivity effects induced from higher levels of trade are combined with a general equilibrium analysis of trade liberalization to evaluate the income and prices changes. These effects are then used to infer the impact on poverty and inequality following the top-down approach. The model is applied to Tunisian data using the social accounting matrix of 2001 and the 2000 household expenditures surveys. Poverty is found to decline under agricultural and full trade liberalization and this decline is much more pronounced when the productivity effects are included.Openness, Agriculture, Productivity, Poverty, CGE modeling

Efficient K-Mean Clustering Algorithm for Large Datasets using Data Mining Standard Score Normalization

In this paper, the clustering and data mining techniques has been introduced. The data mining is useful for extract the useful information from the large database/dataset. For extract the information with efficient factor, the data mining Normalization techniques can be used. These techniques are Min-Max, Z-Scaling and decimal Scaling normalization. Mining of data becomes essential thing for easy searching of data with normalization. This paper has been proposed the efficient K-Mean Clustering algorithm which generates the cluster in less time. Cluster Analysis seeks to identify homogeneous groups of objects based on the values of their attribute. The Z-Score normalization technique has been used with Clustering concept. The number of large records dataset has been generated and has been considered for analyze the results. The existing algorithm has been analyzed by WEKA Tool and proposed algorithm has been implemented in C#.net. The results have been analyzed by generating the timing comparison graphs and proposed works shows the efficiency in terms of time and calculatio

K Mean Evaluation in Weka Tool and Modifying It using Standard Score Method

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Solutions to Detect and Analyze Online Radicalization : A Survey

Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research shows that various platforms on the Internet (low barrier to publish content, allows anonymity, provides exposure to millions of users and a potential of a very quick and widespread diffusion of message) such as YouTube (a popular video sharing website), Twitter (an online micro-blogging service), Facebook (a popular social networking website), online discussion forums and blogosphere are being misused for malicious intent. Such platforms are being used to form hate groups, racist communities, spread extremist agenda, incite anger or violence, promote radicalization, recruit members and create virtual organi- zations and communities. Automatic detection of online radicalization is a technically challenging problem because of the vast amount of the data, unstructured and noisy user-generated content, dynamically changing content and adversary behavior. There are several solutions proposed in the literature aiming to combat and counter cyber-hate and cyber-extremism. In this survey, we review solutions to detect and analyze online radicalization. We review 40 papers published at 12 venues from June 2003 to November 2011. We present a novel classification scheme to classify these papers. We analyze these techniques, perform trend analysis, discuss limitations of existing techniques and find out research gaps