Politics and Economic Reform in Malaysia

Malaysia’s admirable economic growth is often attributed to liberal, open economic policies. Aggregate measures of openness, however, often veil the way coalitional politics drove illiberal government intervention in the economy to correct ethnically based economic inequality, create national heavy industries, and favor politically well-connected entrepreneurs. A more nuanced analysis reveals a complex mix of liberal and illiberal economic policies designed to balance competing coalitional interests. These policies created a “dual economy” that successfully replaced growing political and social instability with rapid economic growth sufficient to support redistributive politics. Yet this same dual economy also slowed further reform and retarded technological development, leaving Malaysia mired in mediocrity: neither price competitive with China nor technologically competitive with Singapore, the East Asian NICs, or the OECD countries.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40041/3/wp655.pd

Politics and Economic Reform in Malaysia

Malaysia’s admirable economic growth is often attributed to liberal, open economic policies. Aggregate measures of openness, however, often veil the way coalitional politics drove illiberal government intervention in the economy to correct ethnically based economic inequality, create national heavy industries, and favor politically well-connected entrepreneurs. A more nuanced analysis reveals a complex mix of liberal and illiberal economic policies designed to balance competing coalitional interests. These policies created a “dual economy” that successfully replaced growing political and social instability with rapid economic growth sufficient to support redistributive politics. Yet this same dual economy also slowed further reform and retarded technological development, leaving Malaysia mired in mediocrity: neither price competitive with China nor technologically competitive with Singapore, the East Asian NICs, or the OECD countries.Malaysia, Economic Reform, Technological Upgrading, Coalitions, Dualism

Efficient Factor Graph Fusion for Multi-robot Mapping

This work presents a novel method to efficiently factorize the combination of multiple factor graphs having common variables of estimation. The fast-paced innovation in the algebraic graph theory has enabled new tools of state estimation like factor graphs. Recent factor graph formulation for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) like Incremental Smoothing and Mapping using the Bayes tree (ISAM2) has been very successful and garnered much attention. Variable ordering, a well-known technique in linear algebra is employed for solving the factor graph. Our primary contribution in this work is to reuse the variable ordering of the graphs being combined to find the ordering of the fused graph. In the case of mapping, multiple robots provide a great advantage over single robot by providing a faster map coverage and better estimation quality. This coupled with an inevitable increase in the number of robots around us produce a demand for faster algorithms. For example, a city full of self-driving cars could pool their observation measurements rapidly to plan a traffic free navigation. By reusing the variable ordering of the parent graphs we were able to produce an order-of-magnitude difference in the time required for solving the fused graph. We also provide a formal verification to show that the proposed strategy does not violate any of the relevant standards. A common problem in multi-robot SLAM is relative pose graph initialization to produce a globally consistent map. The other contribution addresses this by minimizing a specially formulated error function as a part of solving the factor graph. The performance is illustrated on a publicly available SuiteSparse dataset and the multi-robot AP Hill dataset

ESTIMATING THE EFFECTS OF TRADE POLICY

This paper reviews empirical methods used to estimate the impact of trade policies under imperfect competition. We decompose the welfare effects of trade policy into four possible channels: (i) a deadweight loss from distorting consumption and production decisions; (ii) a possible gain from improving the terms of trade; (iii) a gain or loss due to changes in the scale of firms; and, (iv) a gain or loss from shifting profits between countries. For each channel, we discuss the appropriate empirical methods to determine the sign or magnitude of the effect, and illustrate the results using recent studies. Two other channels by which trade policy affects social or individual welfare - through changes in wages and changes in product variety - are discussed more briefly. Recent developments in the analysis of trade policies under perfectly competition are also reviewed.

The Case for Data Driven Strategic Decision Making

The study examines the case for data driven strategic decision making. The quality of strategic decision making and effectiveness of implementing the selected strategies is increasing becoming more important in organizational developments. This calls for the adoption and usage of data driven decision making process in strategy management. Strategic data-driven decision making involves collecting data, analyzing that data, getting the data into the hands of the people who need it, using the data to increase efficiencies and improve performance and communicating data-driven decisions to key stakeholders. The elements of data driven strategic decision making and the various models are outlined. An application is considered of usage of data in strategic decision making in schools. This powerful tool in the education sector facilitates data collection, data analysis and application into the improvement plans. Its premium value is in facilitating informed decision making, boosting overall school performance and improved student achievement. A proactive leader who understands the vision and able to champions the cause is required in creating momentum behind any data-driven decision making tasks.  Strategic decision making is an indispensable tool in moving organization on a sustainable success drive. Keywords: Data, strategic, decisions, models, quality, performance, tools, analysi

The Developmental Effectiveness of Remittances: Case Study on Huedin Town, Romania

Relying on survey data from Huedin, a town in Romania, we seek to provide an empirical evidence for the hypothesis according to which remittances could have either a positive or negative developmental impact at community level. For this, we inquire about the perceptions of migratory processes with focus on the possible effects of remittances in the local economy. Our first finding is that residents share a common view on the reasons of migration, namely that it has been triggered by the large pay levels that exists between the level of local and the Western European labor markets and that migration opportunity was enhanced by the lifting of visa requirements for Schengen countries. We have also found that remittances constitute a significant source of liquidity inflow and that the ways in which repatriated earnings were spent have influenced the performance of the local economy. We conclude that a reinterpretation of migration is required in order to capture the investment and entrepreneurial aspects of the phenomenon. In the formal model proposed in Appendix 2, we make a first attempt to conceptualise migration as a sector of the local economy in which migrants are entrepreneurs, who invest in migration activities to produce the composite commodity remittance.Remittances, migration, development, Romania

Risk Response for Municipal Solid Waste Crisis Using Ontology-Based Reasoning

Many cities in the world are besieged by municipal solid waste (MSW). MSW not only pollutes the ecological environment but can even induce a series of public safety crises. Risk response for MSW needs novel changes. This paper innovatively adopts the ideas and methods of semantic web ontology to build an ontology-based reasoning system for MSW risk response. Through the integration of crisis information and case resources in the field of MSW, combined with the reasoning ability of Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL), a system of rule reasoning for risk transformation is constructed. Knowledge extraction and integration of MSW risk response can effectively excavate semantic correlation of crisis information along with key transformation points in the process of crisis evolution through rule reasoning. The results show that rule reasoning of transformation can effectively improve intelligent decision-making regarding MSW risk response

Evaluating Public Per-Student Subsidies to Low-Cost Private Schools: Regression-Discontinuity Evidence from Pakistan

This study estimates the causal effects of a public per-student subsidy program targeted at low-cost private schools in Pakistan on student enrollment and schooling inputs. Program entry is ultimately conditional on achieving a minimum stipulated student pass rate (cutoff) in a standardized academic test. This mechanism for treatment assignment allows the application of regression-discontinuity (RD) methods to estimate program impacts at the cutoff. Data on two rounds of entry test takers (phase 3 and phase 4) are used. Modeling the entry process of phase-4 test takers as a sharp RD design, the authors find evidence of large positive impacts on the number of students, teachers, classrooms, and blackboards. Modeling the entry process of phase-3 test takers as a partially-fuzzy RD design given treatment crossovers, they do not find evidence of significant program impacts on outcomes of interest. The latter finding is likely due to weak identification arising from a small jump in the probability of treatment at the cutoff