Multilevel Fiscal Governance in a Balanced Policy Environment

The most desirable system of allocations should avoid effi ciency losses, resulting from either fi nancial dependency, or subnational fi scal operations by striking a balance between fi scal autonomy and reliance on federal transfers of SNGs.fiscal federalism; intergovernmental relations; tax policy; fiscal governance.

Infrastructure and Growth in Developing Countries: Recent Advances and Research Challenges

This paper presents a survey of recent research on the economics of infrastructure in developing countries. Energy, transport, telecommunications, water and sanitation are considered. The survey covers two main set of issues: the linkages between infrastructure and economic growth (at the economy-wide, regional and sectoral level) and the composition, sequencing and efficiency of alternative infrastructure investments, including the arbitrage between new investments and maintenance expenditures; OPEX and CAPEX, and public versus private investment. Following the introduction, section 2 discusses the theoretical foundations (growth theory and new economic geography). Section 3 assesses the analysis of 140 specifications from 64 recent empirical papers examining type of data used, level of aggregation, econometric techniques and nature of the sample and discusses both the macro-econometric and microeconometric contributions of these papers. Finally section 4 discusses directions for future research and suggests priorities in data development.

Infrastructure and growth in developing countries : recent advances and research challenges

This paper presents a survey of recent research on the economics of infrastructure in developing countries. Energy, transport, telecommunications, water and sanitation are considered. The survey covers two main set of issues: the linkages between infrastructure and economic growth (at the economy-wide, regional and sectoral level) and the composition, sequencing and efficiency of alternative infrastructure investments, including thearbitrage between new investments and maintenance expenditures; OPEX and CAPEX, and public versus private investment. Following the introduction, section 2 discusses the theoretical foundations (growth theory and new economic geography). Section 3 assesses the analysis of 140 specifications from 64 recent empirical papers-examining type of data used, level of aggregation, econometric techniques and nature of the sample-and discusses both the macro-econometric and micro-econometric contributions of these papers. Finally section 4 discusses directions for future research and suggests priorities in data development.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Economic Theory&Research,Non Bank Financial Institutions,Infrastructure Economics,Political Economy

Self-Healing Distributed Scheduling Platform

International audienceDistributed systems require effective mechanisms to manage the reliable provisioning of computational resources from different and distributed providers. Moreover, the dynamic environment that affects the behaviour of such systems and the complexity of these dynamics demand autonomous capabilities to ensure the behaviour of distributed scheduling platforms and to achieve business and user objectives. In this paper we propose a self-adaptive distributed scheduling platform composed of multiple agents implemented as intelligent feedback control loops to support policy-based scheduling and expose self-healing capabilities. Our platform leverages distributed scheduling processes by (i) allowing each provider to maintain its own internal scheduling process, and (ii) implementing self-healing capabilities based on agent module recovery. Simulated tests are performed to determine the optimal number of agents to be used in the negotiation phase without affecting the scheduling cost function. Test results on a real-life platform are presented to evaluate recovery times and optimize platform parameters

Operability of Mobile Agent Applications in a Protected Environment

There is a shift toward increasingly heterogeneous networks in today�s communications environment. Such diversity requires that network operators have greater experience and increased training. Managing these diverse networks especially in institutions requires the collection of large quantities of data from a dependable network that must be analyzed before management of any activity can be comenced. In this research, we have identified the operability of mobile Agents in a protected network environment