The role of trust in financial sector development

In any economic environment where decisions are decentralized, agents consider the risk that others might unfairly exploit informational asymmetries to their own disadvantage. Incomplete results, especially, lies at the heart of financial transactions in which agents trade real claims for promises of future real claims. Agents thus need to invest considerable resources to assess the trustworthiness of others with whom they know they can interact only under conditions of limited and asymmetrically distributed information. Thinking of finance as the complex of institutions and instruments needed to reduce the cost of trading promises among anonymous individuals who do not fully trust each other, the author analyzes how incomplete trust shapes the transaction costs in trading assets, and how it affects resource allocation and pricing decisions from rational, forward-looking agents. His analysis leads to core propositions about the role of finance and financial efficiency in economic development. He recommends areas of financial sector reform in emerging economies aimed at improving the financial system's efficiency in dealing with incomplete trust. Among other things, the public sector can improve trust in finance by improving financial infrastructure, including legal systems, financial regulation, and security in payment and trading systems. But fundamental improvements in financial efficiency may best be gained by eliciting good conduct through market forces.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Decentralization,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Banks&Banking Reform,Insurance&Risk Mitigation

Smart Cities and FDI

Smart cities have emerged as a worldwide trend, progressing from the implementation of sensors and technologies to enhance infrastructures and service delivery to the development of city-wide policy through the utilization of big data analysis. The goal of a "Smart City" is to improve standard of life by acquiring knowledge from information gathered from people, technologies, and networked sensors. This research argues that smart cities may attract inflows Foreign Direct Investment FDI by influencing the investment choices of global corporate players in the new age by facilitating the flow of data, technology, innovations, and best practices while offering a livable and productive environment. When deciding where to invest, foreign investors will take new criteria into account. These factors include how sociable the environment is, how stable the economic condition is, and how digitally advanced the destination is. These variables will outweigh conventional investment considerations like inexpensive labor, abundant resources, and a large population. For developing nations and rising economies where businesses need capital and knowledge to increase their worldwide sales, foreign direct investment is crucial. To maintain high growth rates the countries should attract international investors, and, most importantly, provide its citizens with a good standard of living, and therefore, should speed up its investments in sustainable smart cities. &nbsp

Trust, Distrust and Economic Integration. Setting the Stage

© Cambridge University Press 2012. Introduction The concept of integration, the dependent variable of this study, has received different interpretations by lawyers, political scientists and economists. Lawyers generally understand the concept as referring to ‘legal integration’, which is defined as ‘the gradual penetration’ of EU law ‘into the domestic law of its member states’. Economists prefer the concept of ‘economic integration’, defined as ‘the elimination of economic frontiers between two or more economies’. The removal of trade impediments between participating nations and ‘the establishment of certain elements of cooperation and coordination between them’ characterize the process of economic integration, as opposed to other forms of international cooperation. Political scientists have been more reluctant to provide a ready-made definition of ‘integration’ and have focused their analysis on the ‘political context in which integration occurs’, the dependent variable being generally conceived in broad and descriptive terms as the transfer of authority to a supranational level. The relatively recent emergence of the concept of ‘integration’ owes a lot to functionalist theories, which were the first to break away from ‘the traditional link between authority and a definite territory by ascribing authority to activities based in areas of agreement’. States exercise several functions (activities), some of which require action at the international level. This transfer initiates the process of integration, which is driven by the continuous pursuit of these functions, in the context of an international institution created for that purpose. According to functionalism, ‘(e)very function is left to generate others gradually; in every case the appropriate authority is left to grow and develop out of actual performance.’ Based on this approach, neo-functionalism was able to construct a theory of regional integration employing the model of European integration as the archetypical paradigm of the concept. The functionalist approach and the concept of integration are profoundly interlinked: without the functionalist emphasis on the existence of separate functions, where authority can be transferred, there can be no integration, in the sense political scientists give to this term

Digital Library of Duluth

The underlying concept for this thesis is the beginning of discussion overtly looking at how computing technology is used by architects today. The discussion will center around critical analysis of uses of software in processes by designers, how technology may be misunderstood or under appreciated by designers, and how we can maximize our design abilities by using technology to our advantage. In the last 20 years the world has seen a tremendous change in technologies; mobile phones, home computers and the internet all have enabled people to become much more advanced in every field of work. The expediency of new software available to architects grows almost daily, further thickening the misunderstanding of available technologies. With recent development of high-powered and user-friendly software, which promote use of parameterization, 3D modeling and simulations, due to the battle to maintain solvency by architectural firms, the software becomes lost. These conditions, combined with the speed at which designers are expected to produce architectural documents today, lead to a recipe which stifles the architects ability to advantageously use software. This leads to the topic of this compilation of writing

Trustworthy Federated Learning: A Survey

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a significant advancement in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling collaborative model training across distributed devices while maintaining data privacy. As the importance of FL increases, addressing trustworthiness issues in its various aspects becomes crucial. In this survey, we provide an extensive overview of the current state of Trustworthy FL, exploring existing solutions and well-defined pillars relevant to Trustworthy . Despite the growth in literature on trustworthy centralized Machine Learning (ML)/Deep Learning (DL), further efforts are necessary to identify trustworthiness pillars and evaluation metrics specific to FL models, as well as to develop solutions for computing trustworthiness levels. We propose a taxonomy that encompasses three main pillars: Interpretability, Fairness, and Security & Privacy. Each pillar represents a dimension of trust, further broken down into different notions. Our survey covers trustworthiness challenges at every level in FL settings. We present a comprehensive architecture of Trustworthy FL, addressing the fundamental principles underlying the concept, and offer an in-depth analysis of trust assessment mechanisms. In conclusion, we identify key research challenges related to every aspect of Trustworthy FL and suggest future research directions. This comprehensive survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working on the development and implementation of Trustworthy FL systems, contributing to a more secure and reliable AI landscape.Comment: 45 Pages, 8 Figures, 9 Table

A Conceptual Framework for E-Commerce Innovation in Chinese SMES Chun-Sheng Yu

As E-Commerce (EC) is rapidly gaining popularity in China, EC innovation becomes a major growth strategy for many SMEs. Meanwhile, problems and challenges are hindering proliferation of EC innovation. The need exits for a theoretical model to forge EC innovation: a dynamic process with progressive stages of both internal and external e-readiness. Derived from theories and evidenced by the case studies from Hangzhou, China, our conceptual framework reveals top management, organizational learning, government support, market forces, and technology readiness as essential in each development stage, but with different emphasis. Implications of the framework are discussed

Spatial flexibility options in electricity market simulation tools: Deliverable D4.3

Project TradeRES - New Markets Design & Models for 100% Renewable Power Systems: https://traderes.eu/about/ABSTRACT: Deliverable D4.3 addresses the spatial flexibility options that are being considered by TradeRES models. D4.3 presents a report describing the spatial flexibility-related modelling components that are already implemented and those that are being designed for integration in TradeRES agent-based models. This report includes the main definitions, concepts and terminology related to spatial flexibility, as means to support the presentation of the specific models that are being developed by the project, namely about flow based market coupling, market spliting, nodal pricing, dynamic line rating, cross border intraday market, cross border reserve market, cross border capacity market, consumer flexibility aggregation, renewable energy aggregation, storage aggregation, electric vehicle aggregation and grid capacity.N/