World Development Report 2022

This new World Development Report focuses on the interrelated economic risks that households, businesses, financial institutions, and governments worldwide are facing as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis. The Report offers new insights from research on the interconnectedness of balance sheets and the potential spillover effects across sectors. It also offers policy recommendations based on these insights. Specifically, it addresses the question of how to reduce the financial risks stemming from the extraordinary policies adopted in response to the COVID-19 crisis while supporting an equitable recovery. The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has already led to millions of deaths, job losses, business failures, and school closings, triggering the most encompassing economic crisis in almost a century. Poverty rates have soared and inequality has widened both across and within countries. Disadvantaged groups that had limited financial resilience to begin with and workers with lower levels of education—especially younger ones and women— have been disproportionately affected. The response by governments has included a combination of cash transfers to households, credit guarantees for firms, easier liquidity conditions, repayment grace periods for much of the private sector, and accounting and regulatory forbearance for many financial institutions. Although these actions have helped to partially mitigate the economic and social consequences of the pandemic, they have also resulted in elevated risks, including public overindebtedness, increased financial fragility, and a general erosion in transparency. Emerging economies have been left with very limited fiscal space, and they will be made even more vulnerable by the impending normalization of monetary policy in advanced economies. This Report highlights several priority areas for action. First is the need for early detection of significant financial risks. Because the balance sheets of households, firms, financial sector institutions, and governments are tightly interrelated, risks may be hidden. The share of nonperforming loans has generally remained below what was feared at the beginning of the crisis. But this could be due to forbearance policies that delayed debt repayments and relaxed accounting standards. Firm surveys in emerging economies reveal that many businesses expect to be in payment arrears in the coming months, and so private debt could suddenly become public debt, as in many past crises. The interdependence of economic policies across countries matters as well. Public debt has reached unprecedented levels. As monetary policy tightens in advanced economies, interest rates will need to increase in emerging economies as well, and their currencies will likely depreciate. Higher interest rates make debt service more expensive, reinforcing the trend of recent years, and weaker currencies make debt service more burdensome relative to the size of the economy. Liquidity problems could suddenly morph into solvency problems

A Widespread Review of Smart Grids Towards Smart Cities

© 2019 by the authorsNowadays, the importance of energy management and optimization by means of smart devices has arisen as an important issue. On the other hand, the intelligent application of smart devices stands as a key element in establishing smart cities, which have been suggested as the solution to complicated future urbanization difficulties in coming years. Considering the scarcity of traditional fossil fuels in the near future, besides their ecological problems the new smart grids have demonstrated the potential to merge the non-renewable and renewable energy resources into each other leading to the reduction of environmental problems and optimizing operating costs. The current paper clarifies the importance of smart grids in launching smart cities by reviewing the advancement of micro/nano grids, applications of renewable energies, energy-storage technologies, smart water grids in smart cities. Additionally a review of the major European smart city projects has been carried out. These will offer a wider vision for researchers in the operation, monitoring, control and audit of smart-grid systems.publishedVersio

The differential expression of the genes encoding glutamine synthetase in developing root modules

Glutamine synthetase (GS) is one of the key enzymes involved in the assimilation of ammonia into organic nitrogen in plants. It is important in legume root nodules where ammonia, produced by the Rhizobium-legume symbiosis, is converted to organic nitrogen before it can be transported to other parts of the plant. In Phaseolus vulgaris three cytosolic and one plastidic GS polypeptide have been identified. One or more of these polypeptides assemble to form distinct octameric GS isoenzymes. GS activity increases significantly in P. vulgaris during nodulation and this is associated with the Increased (or repressed) expression of the three cytosclic polypeptide genes jln-a, gln-β and gln-γ. The temporal and spatial pattern of mRNA and protein distribution of these genes has been investigated using in situ hybridation and immunocytochemistry. An in situ hybridization protocol has been established using photobiotinylated cRNA probes, visualised with alkaline phosphatase, or streptavidin gold with silver enhancement. The fixation, embedding, section pretreatments and hybridization conditions have all been optimized for legume root nodule sections, the mRNA distributions corresponding to the gln-α, gln-β and gln-γ genes within P. vulgaris root-nodule sections indicate that the the assembly of the GS isoenzymes is at least partially controlled by the differential temporal and spatial expression of these genes throughout the nodule tissues during nodulation. These results have been compared with the expression of the β- glucuronidase (GUS) gene fused with the 5' flanking regions of the P. vulgaris GS genes in chimaeric Lotus corniculatus plants. The GUS expression was demonstrated by the optimized in situ hybridization tecniques in conjunction with immunocytoeheinica1 and GUS histochemical localization tecniques. Results indicate the control of GS gene expression is at the transcriptional level and at least partially determined by the 5' flanking regions of these genes

PCGSs Without a Master

Two new derivation  modes are introduced for parallel communicating grammar systems (PCGSs). One of them is called competitive, the other is called popular, they both eliminate the hierarchy among the component grammars. The generative power of parallel communicating grammar systems working in these new modes is investigated, with different types of grammars and extended Lindenmayer systems as components