Debate: Can Sustainable Tourism include Flying?

Can Sustainable tourism include flying? was the question addressed by the debate at the University of Central Lancashire (University of Central Lancashire), UK on March 30th 2012. There was an unexpected degree of consensus among the speakers that tourism had severe environmental impacts, mainly from flying and that many countries currently benefitting from tourism development were likely to suffer from climate change. They also agreed that corporate tourism often diverted funds from destination areas into their own profits. Those arguing for flying stressed the balance of environmental, social and economic benefits, while those arguing against prioritised the environmental damage of increasing aviation. The pro-fliers were optimistic about technological advances in aircraft and fuels but the others doubted their potential to reduce emissions from current or increased levels of aviation. Both sides admitted behavioural change was difficult, but saw hope in recent trends

The return of the CC(C)TB: First critical analysis (including hybrid mismatches with non-Eu countries)

International and EU reactions against hybrid mismatche

Tax avoidance revisited: exploring the boundaries of anti-avoidance rules in the EU BEPS context

Analysis of Belgian anti-avoidance rules in tax legislatio

Modelling unemployment in the presence of excess labour supply:An application to Egypt

Due to its pyramid population structure, Egypt needs to create jobs at a high pace to absorb the many new entrants at its labour market. This article structurally models and quantifies the impact of these demographic shocks and the shedding of public sector jobs on unemployment. The findings indicate that Egypt needs to grow at 5% for many years to come. Job creation better occurs in the private than in the public sector. Egypt’s public sector has been driving up government expenditures disproportionably, not only because of the numerous public sector employees but also because of high public wage growth. Keywords: Demography, labour supply, employment, public sector employment, public finance.

Cadabra: reference guide and tutorial

Cadabra is a computer algebra system for the manipulation of tensorial mathematical expressions such as they occur in “field theory problems”. It is aimed at, but not necessarily restricted to, high-energy physicists. It is constructed as a simple tree-manipulating core, a large collection of standalone algorithmic modules which act on the expression tree, and a set of modules responsible for output of nodes in the tree. All of these parts are written in C++. The input and output formats closely follow TEX, which in many cases means that cadabra is much simpler to use than other similar programs. It intentionally does not contain its own programming language; instead, new functionality is added by writing new modules in C++

Measuring monetary conditions in Europe: use and limitations of the monetary conditions index. MRPA Paper No. 23534, 1999

The Monetary Conditions Index is a composite index of interest and exchange rates frequently used by central banks, the IMF, and the OECD. This paper considers the benefits and weaknesses of the MCI in the light of large macroeconometric models. It follows that the impact of the exchange rate on GDP relative to the impact of the short-term interest rate is substantially lower under a monetary union. For most countries, including a long-term interest rate in the MCI only affects the level of the MCI and not its turning points

“Better Safe than Sorry” - Individual Risk-free Pension Schemes in the European Union - Macroeconomic Benefits, the Mobile Working Citizen’s Perspective and Why Nots

Variations between the diverse pension systems in the member states of the European Union hamper labour market mobility, across country borders but also within the countries of the European Union. From a macroeconomic perspective, and in the light of demographic pressure, this paper argues that allowing individual instead of collective pension building would greatly improve labour market flexibility and thus enhance the functioning of the monetary union. I argue that working citizens would benefit, for three reasons, from pension saving in a risk-free savings account. First, citizens would have a clear picture of the accumulation of their own pension savings throughout their working life. Second, they would pay hardly any extra costs and, third, once retired they would not be subject to the whims of government or other pension fund managers. This paper investigates the feasibility of individual pension building under various parameter settings by calculating the pension saved during a working life and the pension dis-saved after retirement. The findings show that there are no reasons why the European Union and individual member states should not allow individual risk-free pension savings accounts. This would have macroeconomic benefits and provide a solid pension provision that can enhance mobility, instead of engaging workers in different mandatory collective pension schemes that exist around in the European Union

Monte-Carlo simulation of the coherent backscattering of electrons in a ballistic system

We study weak localization effects in the ballistic regime as induced by man-made scatterers. Specular reflection of the electrons off these scatterers results into backscattered trajectories which interfere with their time-reversed path resulting in weak localization corrections to the resistance. Using a semi-classical theory, we calculate the change in resistance due to these backscattered trajectories. We found that the inclusion of the exact shape of the scatterers is very important in order to explain the experimental results of Katine et al. [Superlattices and Microstructures 20, 337 (1996)].Comment: 3 pages, 7 ps figures, accepted for publication in Superlattices and Microstructure