POLICY ALTERNATIVES IN REFORMING POWER UTILITIES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: A CRITICAL SURVEY

This paper examines the policy alternatives faced by developing countries in their endeavours to preserve and develop their electricity and gas systems, two service-oriented industries that - along with oil and coal - provide the bulk of the energy supply in both developed and developing countries. Even in very poor countries, industrially generated energy is indispensable for carrying out most economic activities. Therefore, Governments traditionally recognize that the supply of gas and electricity entails a fundamental public service dimension. Chapter I presents and defines the issues of liberalization, deregulation and privatization of energy utilities, and it attempts to locate energy reforms in a broader historical framework in which developing countries` Governments have faced increasing financial hardship. Chapter II reviews some experiences in energy sector reforms, focusing on some of the largest semi-industrialized countries in Latin America and Asia. A few remarks on the advisability of a flexible approach to reforming energy regimes in developing countries conclude the paper.

The Role of the State in China's Industrial Development: a Reassesment

In this paper, we argue that the role of the State (to be understood as a holistic term referring to the public sector as whole), far from being withering out, is in fact massive, dominant, and crucial to China's industrial development. Actually, it has been strengthened by the successful implementation of the "keep the big dump the small" policy, which in turn is consistent with a more general strategy shift towards re-centralization in many areas of economic and social policies. This trend that not only is still going on, but is inevitably bound to be further accelerated by the massive package of fiscal and other interventions made necessary as a response to the world financial and economic crisis. State-owned and state-holding enterprises are now less numerous, but much larger, more capital- and knowledge-intensive, more productive and more profitable than in the late 1990s. Contrary to popular belief, especially since the mid-2000s, their performance in terms of efficiency and profitability compares favourably with that of private enterprises. The state-controlled sub-sector constituted by state-holding enterprises, in particular, with at its core the 149 large conglomerates managed by SASAC, is clearly the most advanced component of China's industry and the one where the bulk of in-house R&D activities take place. The role of the public sector, moreover, goes beyond that of those enterprises which are owned or controlled by the State. In the specific Chinese context, many of the most advanced formally private industrial enterprises are in fact related to the public domain by a web of ownership, financial, and other linkages, to an extent that is qualitatively different and deeper than that of their counterparts in capitalist countries. The role public sector is paramount in engineering an extraordinary boom in S&T and R&D activities (both inside the industrial sector and outside, in universities and research centers), and in fuelling a massive investment drive aimed at enhancing China's infrastructural and human capital environment. These processes also generate major systemic external economies, which are reaped by public and private enterprises alike, contributing to abating their operative costs and to sustain their competitiveness and profitability. Contrary to many other analysts, we do not view the dominant role of the state in China's industry (and, more generally, in China's economy) as a possibly necessary - albeit wasteful - evil, which will be superseded once the transition from a centrally-planned to a fully capitalist modern economy will be completed. We rather see it as a primitive, embryonic, ever-evolving but permanent form of strategic planning aimed at fostering industrial development, and as a key distinctive, structural, and pioneering characteristic of market socialism.market socialism; China's Economy

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICIES, INDUSTRIAL REFORM AND TECHNICAL PROGRESS IN CHINA. CAN SOCIALIST PROPERTY RIGHTS BE COMPATIBLE WITH TECHNOLOGICAL CATCHING UP?

This paper analyses the quest for technological progress in China, a large, semi-industrialized, socialist developing country. In the introduction, it is argued that international income convergence is not an automatic product of market forces. Therefore, the path of technological progress in a less advanced country is dependent on its bsorptive capacity, which can be enhanced by the development of an effective national innovation system. The specific meaning attached to key terms such as technological progress, market-compatibility and “socialism” are also explained. Section II briefly illustrates the relative position of China in the international division of labour, as well as some basic economic and social indicators. Section III contends that the huge amount of FDI flowing to China is not per se a major source of technical progress, but important gains can be obtained t h r o u g h strategic bargaining with large transnational corporations from industrialized countries. Section IV sketches the main lines of evolution of Chinese technological culture since the inception of the reforms and provides basic data on China’s R&D system. Section V analyses the new focus of innovation and research policies and describes the major science and technology programmes. Section VI shifts the analysis to the level of industrial enterprises, arguing that a kind of symbiosis exists among the two groups of public firms. Collective enterprises reali ze their comparative advantage specializing in simpler industrial activities and benefit from technological spillovers from state-owned enterprises, while the latter are undergoing a process of upgrading and rationalization in order to gain a strong position at the upper end of the technological spectrum. This section also presents and illustrates aggregate data on production and employment trends in China’s industry and proposes a tentative estimate of the technical change component of labour productivity growth in state-owned enterprises, showing that it has been substantial and increased in the late 1990s. Section VII concludes that China’s experience so far shows that a radical improvement in a socialist economy’s ability to achieve technical progress is not inconsistent with the reaffirmation, in a new and diversified form, of a fundamentally public framework of property relations.

Child Malnutrition and Mortality in Developing Countries: Evidence from a Cross-Country Analysis

In this paper we propose and test an interpretative framework on the social and economic determinants of child malnutrition and child mortality, two key human development indicators. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 illustrates the main economic and social factors causing child malnutrition and mortality. Section 2 identifies the main clusters of food insecure and vulnerable households and briefly describes their livelihood profiles. Section 3 exposes our cross-country estimation methodology. Section 4 reports and discusses the results. Section 5 concludes.Malnutrition; Mortality; Cross-Country Analysis; Millenium Development Goals; Food Insecurity

Quasi-Perfect Stackelberg Equilibrium

Equilibrium refinements are important in extensive-form (i.e., tree-form) games, where they amend weaknesses of the Nash equilibrium concept by requiring sequential rationality and other beneficial properties. One of the most attractive refinement concepts is quasi-perfect equilibrium. While quasi-perfection has been studied in extensive-form games, it is poorly understood in Stackelberg settings---that is, settings where a leader can commit to a strategy---which are important for modeling, for example, security games. In this paper, we introduce the axiomatic definition of quasi-perfect Stackelberg equilibrium. We develop a broad class of game perturbation schemes that lead to them in the limit. Our class of perturbation schemes strictly generalizes prior perturbation schemes introduced for the computation of (non-Stackelberg) quasi-perfect equilibria. Based on our perturbation schemes, we develop a branch-and-bound algorithm for computing a quasi-perfect Stackelberg equilibrium. It leverages a perturbed variant of the linear program for computing a Stackelberg extensive-form correlated equilibrium. Experiments show that our algorithm can be used to find an approximate quasi-perfect Stackelberg equilibrium in games with thousands of nodes

Reliability Assessment of a Packaging Automatic Machine by Accelerated Life Testing Approach

Industrial competitiveness in innovation, the time of the market introduction of new machines and the level of reliability requested implies that the strategies for the development of products must be more and more efficient. In particular, researchers and practitioners are looking for methods to evaluate the reliability, as cheap as possible, knowing that systems are more and more reliable. This paper presents a reliability assessment procedure applied to a mechanical component of an automatic machine for packaging using the accelerated test approach. The general log-linear (GLL) model is combined based on a relationship between a number strains, in particular mechanical and time based. The complete Accelerated Life Testing - ALT approach is presented by using Weibull distribution and Maximum Likelihood verifying method. A test plan is proposed to estimate the unknown parameters of accelerated life models. Using the proposed ALT model, the reliability function of the component is evaluated and then compared with data from the field collected by customers referring to 8 years of real work on a fleet of automatic packaging machines. The results confirm that the assessment method through ALT is effective for lifetime prediction with shorter test times, and for the same reason it can improve the design process of automatic packaging machines

Distributed Raman optical amplification in phase coherent transfer of optical frequencies

We describe the application of Raman Optical-fiber Amplification (ROA) for the phase coherent transfer of optical frequencies in an optical fiber link. ROA uses the transmission fiber itself as a gain medium for bi-directional coherent amplification. In a test setup we evaluated the ROA in terms of on-off gain, signal-to-noise ratio, and phase noise added to the carrier. We transferred a laser frequency in a 200 km optical fiber link with an additional 16 dB fixed attenuator (equivalent to 275 km of fiber on a single span), and evaluated both co-propagating and counter-propagating amplification pump schemes, demonstrating nonlinear effects limiting the co-propagating pump configuration. The frequency at the remote end has a fractional frequency instability of 3e-19 over 1000 s with the optical fiber link noise compensation

AR-MoCap: Using augmented reality to support motion capture acting

Technology is disrupting the way films involving visual effects are produced. Chroma-key, LED walls, motion capture (mocap), 3D visual storyboards, and simulcams are only a few examples of the many changes introduced in the cinema industry over the last years. Although these technologies are getting commonplace, they are presenting new, unexplored challenges to the actors. In particular, when mocap is used to record the actors’ movements with the aim of animating digital character models, an increase in the workload can be easily expected for people on stage. In fact, actors have to largely rely on their imagination to understand what the digitally created characters will be actually seeing and feeling. This paper focuses on this specific domain, and aims to demonstrate how Augmented Reality (AR) can be helpful for actors when shooting mocap scenes. To this purpose, we devised a system named AR-MoCap that can be used by actors for rehearsing the scene in AR on the real set before actually shooting it. Through an Optical See-Through Head- Mounted Display (OST-HMD), an actor can see, e.g., the digital characters of other actors wearing mocap suits overlapped in real- time to their bodies. Experimental results showed that, compared to the traditional approach based on physical props and other cues, the devised system can help the actors to position themselves and direct their gaze while shooting the scene, while also improving spatial and social presence, as well as perceived effectiveness