Exploring the Relationship Between Military Spending & Income Inequality in South Asia

The basic objective of this paper is to examine the effect of military spending on income inequality in four major South Asian economies. In the process, we also control for other possible key determinants of income inequality subject to data availability. Using panel regression fixed effects analysis for the study period 1975 to 2005, we find from our estimates that there is a positive effect of military expenditure on income inequality.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64381/1/wp918.pd

Speeding up Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition by Gr\"obner Bases

Gr\"obner Bases and Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition are generally thought of as two, rather different, methods of looking at systems of equations and, in the case of Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition, inequalities. However, even for a mixed system of equalities and inequalities, it is possible to apply Gr\"obner bases to the (conjoined) equalities before invoking CAD. We see that this is, quite often but not always, a beneficial preconditioning of the CAD problem. It is also possible to precondition the (conjoined) inequalities with respect to the equalities, and this can also be useful in many cases.Comment: To appear in Proc. CICM 2012, LNCS 736

(WP 2010-06) How Do Structural and Policy Factors Affect a Country’s Probability to Achieve the Most (or the Least) Favorable Growth Path?

We ask which economic policies can help a country create the most favourable conditions for development. We observe that the dynamics of several development indicators can be grouped into four clusters, each cluster corresponding to a different combination of growth and changes in inequality. Based on this observation, we define four different development scenarios and use limited dependent variable regressions to study how structural and policy factors affect a country’s probability to achieve the most (or the least) favourable of these scenarios. Our results point to a comforting picture: through the choice of appropriate policies countries can effectively increase their chances to achieve the most favourable development scenarios

Geodesic continued fractions and LLL

We discuss a proposal for a continued fraction-like algorithm to determine simultaneous rational approximations to $d$ real numbers $\alpha_1,\ldots,\alpha_d$. It combines an algorithm of Hermite and Lagarias with ideas from LLL-reduction. We dynamically LLL-reduce a quadratic form with parameter $t$ as $t\downarrow0$. The new idea in this paper is that checking the LLL-conditions consists of solving linear equations in $t$

Incremental closure for systems of two variables per inequality

Subclasses of linear inequalities where each inequality has at most two vari- ables are popular in abstract interpretation and model checking, because they strike a balance between what can be described and what can be efficiently computed. This paper focuses on the TVPI class of inequalities, for which each coefficient of each two variable inequality is unrestricted. An implied TVPI in- equality can be generated from a pair of TVPI inequalities by eliminating a given common variable (echoing resolution on clauses). This operation, called result , can be applied to derive TVPI inequalities which are entailed (implied) by a given TVPI system. The key operation on TVPI is calculating closure: satisfiability can be observed from a closed system and a closed system also simplifies the calculation of other operations. A closed system can be derived by repeatedly applying the result operator. The process of adding a single TVPI inequality to an already closed input TVPI system and then finding the closure of this augmented system is called incremental closure. This too can be calcu- lated by the repeated application of the result operator. This paper studies the calculus defined by result , the structure of result derivations, and how deriva- tions can be combined and controlled. A series of lemmata on derivations are presented that, collectively, provide a pathway for synthesising an algorithm for incremental closure. The complexity of the incremental closure algorithm is analysed and found to be O (( n 2 + m 2 )lg( m )), where n is the number of variables and m the number of inequalities of the input TVPI system