Pensions systems and reform : country experiences and research issues

Pension reform is spreading around the globe, from Latin America to the OECD countries, and major reform projects are being discussed in many other developing, transition, and OECD countries. The authors survey current research issues and country experiences related to old-age social security arrangements by introducing the papers selected for a special June 1994 issue of the Revista de Analisis Economico and presented at the July 1994 Conference on Pension Systems and Reforms sponsored by Fundacao Getulio Vargas. They also present 15 research and policy design issues not addressed by the literature, including macroeconomic effects, conditions of political economy, government's role in easing or reducing old-age poverty, and design features of fully funded pension systems.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Pensions&Retirement Systems,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Stabilization,Economic Theory&Research,Pensions&Retirement Systems

Efficient vasculature investment in tissues can be determined without global information

Cells are the fundamental building blocks of organs and tissues. Information and mass flow through cellular contacts in these structures is vital for the orchestration of organ function. Constraints imposed by packing and cell immobility limit intercellular communication, particularly as organs and organisms scale up to greater sizes. In order to transcend transport limitations, delivery systems including vascular and respiratory systems evolved to facilitate the movement of matter and information. The construction of these delivery systems has an associated cost, as vascular elements do not perform the metabolic functions of the organs they are part of. This study investigates a fundamental trade-off in vascularization in multicellular tissues: the reduction of path lengths for communication versus the cost associated with producing vasculature. Biologically realistic generative models, using multicellular templates of different dimensionalities, revealed a limited advantage to the vascularization of two-dimensional tissues. Strikingly, scale-free improvements in transport efficiency can be achieved even in the absence of global knowledge of tissue organization. A point of diminishing returns in the investment of additional vascular tissue to the increased reduction of path length in 2.5- and three-dimensional tissues was identified. Applying this theory to experimentally determined biological tissue structures, we show the possibility of a co-dependency between the method used to limit path length and the organization of cells it acts upon. These results provide insight as to why tissues are or are not vascularized in nature, the robustness of developmental generative mechanisms and the extent to which vasculature is advantageous in the support of organ function

Governing Fiscal Commons in the Enlarged EU

This study explores the achievements of the acceding countries in the sphere of procedural fiscal rules (labeled as fiscal governance). The primary goal is to answer two questions: what is the current state of fiscal governance in the “novice” EU comparing to the “old” EU-15? Can we prescribe the acceding states any country-specific fiscal procedures? Three major sections of the study aim at three different issues. Section 2 reviews the rationale for fiscal governance, and the main focus draws upon the common-pool problem. The next section reviews methods to find the fiscal governance suitable for countries with differing political environments. Next, observed fiscal governance is reported by means of indices from survey data gathered in May-June 2004. Group by group, the author compares the observations with what has been measured for EU-15 countries. The findings reveal the existence of groups of countries with similar characteristics and similar institutional potential.fiscal governance; fiscal rules; political fragmentation

Creating new distributions by blunting cusps

A simple method is proposed for `blunting' cusped distributions, ie removing the cusp. No additional parameters are required. The method is applied to the asymmetric Laplace distribution, to the van Dorp and Kotz double-sided power distribution, and to the double-sided asymmetric Pareto distribution, and some properties of the blunted distributions are derived. An example of fitting the blunted asymmetric Pareto distribution to data is given

Product Family Design Using Product Simulation and Multi-objective Optimization

This study is concerned with the design of a range of products intended to cover different applications. The prominent example throughout the thesis is that of a family of industrial trucks that need to cater for a wide range of load capacities. That product range is normally built around platforms, i.e. basic sets of components that are common to some or all of the products in the range. With this approach, each product is made up of those common components and additionally other components that are specifically suited for each particular product. The outcome of this thesis is a novel method to assess the possible combinations of common/specific components to build up a product range to cover a predetermined set of user applications and provide the company with a clear view of the trade-off between offering customer appealing products and keeping the costs down. The method uses a combination of mathematical modelling and simulation for estimating the relevant performance attributes of each possible product design, fuzzy logic to reduce the naturally large number of objectives to a manageable one and a multi-objective searching algorithm to find a Pareto set of solutions to provide the decision makers with clear and useful information with which they can take a better decision