Capital controls re-examined: the case for ‘smart’ controls

The global financial crisis which began in east Asia in 1997 is not over, neither is the inquest into its implications for adjustment policy. In the wake of this crisis, we focus here on the role of capital controls, which formed a much publicised part of the crisis-coping strategy in one country (Malaysia) and, less openly, were also deployed by other crisis-afflicted countries. Evaluation so far has examined different target variables with different estimation methods, generally concentrating on efficiency and stability indicators and ignoring equity measures; it has also typically treated `control´ as a one-zero dummy variable, ignoring the `quality´ of intervention and in particular the extent to which efficiency gains are obtained in exchange for controls. Partly because of these limitations, the literature has reached no consensus on the impact of controls, nor therefore about where they fit within the set of post-crisis defence mechanisms. We propose an approach in which the government plays off short-term political security against long-term economic gain; the more insecure its political footing, the greater the weight it gives to political survival, which is likely to increase the probability of controls being imposed. The modelling of this approach generates a governmental `policy reaction function´ and an impact function for controls, which are estimated by simultaneous panel-data methods across a sample of thirty developing and transitional countries between 1980-2003, using, for the period since 1996, the `new´ IMF dataset which differentiates between controls by type. We find that controls appear to cause increases in income equality, and are significantly associated with political insecurity and relatively low levels of openness to trade. They do not, in our analysis, materially influence the level of whole-economy productivity or GDP across the sample of countries examined, although they do influence productivity in particular sectors, in particular manufacturing. But the dispersion around this central finding is wide: the tendency for controls to depress productivity by encouraging rent-seeking sometimes is, and sometimes is not, counteracted by purposive government policy actions to maintain competitiveness. Whether or not this happens – whether, as we put it, controls are `smart´, and the manner in which they are smartened - is vital, on both efficiency and equity grounds. We devise a formula for, and make the case for capital controls which are time-limited, and contain an inbuilt incentive to increased productivity, as a means of improving the sustainability and equity of the adjustment process whilst keeping to a minimum the cost in terms of productive efficiency

Restructurable Controls

Restructurable control system theory, robust reconfiguration for high reliability and survivability for advanced aircraft, restructurable controls problem definition and research, experimentation, system identification methods applied to aircraft, a self-repairing digital flight control system, and state-of-the-art theory application are addressed

Controls and Interfaces

Reliable powering of accelerator magnets requires reliable power converters and controls, able to meet the powering specifications in the long term. In this paper, some of the issues that will challenge a power converter controls engineer are discussed.Comment: 16 pages, contribution to the 2014 CAS - CERN Accelerator School: Power Converters, Baden, Switzerland, 7-14 May 201

Inverse stochastic optimal controls

We study an inverse problem of the stochastic optimal control of general diffusions with performance index having the quadratic penalty term of the control process. Under mild conditions on the drift, the volatility, the cost functions of the state, and under the assumption that the optimal control belongs to the interior of the control set, we show that our inverse problem is well-posed using a stochastic maximum principle. Then, with the well-posedness, we reduce the inverse problem to some root finding problem of the expectation of a random variable involved with the value function, which has a unique solution. Based on this result, we propose a numerical method for our inverse problem by replacing the expectation above with arithmetic mean of observed optimal control processes and the corresponding state processes. The recent progress of numerical analyses of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations enables the proposed method to be implementable for multi-dimensional cases. In particular, with the help of the kernel-based collocation method for Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations, our method for the inverse problems still works well even when an explicit form of the value function is unavailable. Several numerical experiments show that the numerical method recover the unknown weight parameter with high accuracy

Import and Export Controls

Denna avhandling är en kvalitativ studie av hur organisationer kan förenkla och förbättra arbetet med kravspecificering vid anskaffning av komponentbaserade informationssystem. Avhandlingens utgångspunkt är att mer verksamhetsnära och användbara informationssystem kan anskaffas genom att använda en integrerad verksamhetsmodell där verksamhetsanalys och kravspecificering slås samman. Fyra kunskapsområden har studerats och analyserats för att generera ett ramverk som riktar uppmärksamhet mot relevant innehåll och utformning av en integrerad verksamhetsmodell, 1) verksamhetsprocesser 2) verksamhetsmodellering 3) mjukvarukomponenter och 4) specificering. Avhandlingens empiri representeras av en rekonstruktion av den komponent- och processorienterade anskaffning av ett komplett vårdinformationssystem som genomförts i Landstinget i Värmland. Analyser och respektive kunskapsområde har skett utifrån ansatsen Multi-Grounded Theory vilket innebär en reorigenerering utifrån en växelverkan mellan existerande teorier och empirisk grundning. Några exempel på kunskapsbidrag är ett vidareutvecklat processbegrepp samt en ny livscykelmodell för komponentbaserade informationssystem. Utifrån kunskapsbidragen inom respektive kunskapsområde har integrationssynpunkter identifierats som legat till grund för utveckling av ramverket för en verksamhetsnära kravspecifikation. I avhandlingen dras slutsatsen att genom att integrera arbetet med verksamhetsanalys och kravspecificering skapas bättre förutsättningar för att kravspecifikationer speglar de behov systemen är avsedda att uppfylla och att gapet mellan krav och lösning minskar genom ett bättre underlag för kommunikation mellan kund och systemleverantör. Ramverket pekar på att en verksamhetsnära kravspecifikation utformas i en integrerad processmodell som beskriver verksamhetsprocesser utifrån identifierade generiska processbegrepp samt ett scenario för användning och klassificering av funktionalitet. Kravspecifikationen bör, enligt ramverket, även innehålla en systemöversikt, kommersiella och leverantörsrelaterade krav, design- och arkitektoniska krav samt utförandekrav. Ramverket har prövats och vidareutvecklats utifrån en extern validering i form av en utvärderingsworkshop där ramverkets relevans och användbarhet diskuterats utifrån de erfarenheter och den dokumentation som genererats i Landstinget i Värmland

Capital account regulations and the trading system: a compatibility review

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. Spanish version produced by the Center for the Study of State and Society, Buenos Aires. Portuguese version coordinated by Daniela Magalhaes Prates, a contributing author of the report, in collaboration with Ana Trivellato (translator), and Maria Inês Amorozo (graphic designer).This report is the product of the Pardee Center Task Force on Regulating Capital Flows for Long-Run Development and builds on the Task Force´s first report published in March 2012. The Pardee Center Task Force was convened initially in September 2011 as consensus was emerging that the global financial crisis has re-confirmed the need to regulate cross-border finance. The March 2012 report argues that international financial institutions – and in particular the International Monetary Fund – need to support measures that would allow capital account regulations (CARs) to become a standard and effective part of the macroeconomic policy toolkit. Yet some policymakers and academics expressed concern that many nations — and especially developing countries — may not have the flexibility to adequately deploy such regulations because of trade and investment treaties they are party to. In June 2012, the Pardee Center, with the Center for the Study of State and Society (CEDES) in Argentina and Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE) at Tufts University, convened a second Task Force workshop in Buenos Aires specifically to review agreements at the WTO and various Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) for the extent to which the trading regime is compatible with the ability to deploy effective capital account regulations. This report presents the findings of that review, and highlights a number of potential incompatibilities found between the trade and investment treaties and the ability to deploy CARs. It also highlights an alarming lack of policy space to use CARs under a variety of FTAs and BITs—especially those involving the United States. Like the first report, it was written by an international group of experts whose goal is to help inform discussions and decisions by policymakers at the IMF and elsewhere that will have implications for the economic health and development trajectories for countries around the world

Attitude controls for VTOL aircraft

Systems consist of single duct system with two sets of reaction control nozzles, one linked mechanically to pilot's controls, and other set driven by electric servomotors commanded by preselected combinations of electrical signals