Decomposing Total Factor Productivity Change of Cotton Cultivars (Barakat-90 and Barac (67)B) in the Gezira Scheme (1991 – 2007) Sudan

The main objective of this paper was to decompose Total Factor Productivity Change (TFPCH) of cotton cultivars Barakat-90 and Barac(67)B in the Gezira scheme in 1991-2007, based on Data Envelopment Analysis Program (DEAP) Software Version 2.1, using model of input–oriented Malmquist indices Total Factor Productivity (TFP). This model could give meaningful results regarding technological and economic behavior relationship over time using balance panel data on Barac(67)B and Barakat-90 cultivars, Relevant secondary data were collected and analyzed to meet the stated objectives. This paper was aimed to decompose TFPCH into two components Technological Change (TECH) and Technical Efficiency Change (EFCH) and the latter was further divided into Scale Efficiency Change (SEFCH) and Pure Efficiency Change (PEFCH). The methodology allowed the recovery of various efficiency and productivity measures. The paper was mainly to answer the questions related to technical efficiency, scale efficiency and productivity changes. In the study on cotton cultivars, the innovation was improving up and down of TECH over time. Scale inefficiency was the main problem in efficiency analysis and mainly due to production operating at increasing returns to scale in Barac(67)B and Barakat-90 operating at constant return to scale. TFPCH was -1.3%, the contribution of EFCH was -1.6% and TECH was 0.30%, the main problem was efficiency change and this was mainly due to scale inefficiency, Barac(67)B contributed to this negative at an average annual rate -3.3%. This implying that the Barac(67)B was ailing due to efficiency change. The study has recommended, substantial improvement in knowledge about productivity and efficiency using scientific approaches, the scheme administration should take full advantage of Barac(67)B cultivar to be extensively grown, Barakat-90 requires further investigation benefiting from technological innovation, additional, improvement in agricultural processing to increase the value added, and the benefit of scientific breakthrough in agricultural science are also recommended.Crop Production/Industries,

Exact solutions for vibrational levels of the Morse potential via the asymptotic iteration method

Exact solutions for vibrational levels of diatomic molecules via the Morse potential are obtained by means of the asymptotic iteration method. It is shown that, the numerical results for the energy eigenvalues of $^{7}Li_{2}$ are all in excellent agreement with the ones obtained before. Without any loss of generality, other states and molecules could be treated in a similar way

Homalg: A meta-package for homological algebra

The central notion of this work is that of a functor between categories of finitely presented modules over so-called computable rings, i.e. rings R where one can algorithmically solve inhomogeneous linear equations with coefficients in R. The paper describes a way allowing one to realize such functors, e.g. Hom, tensor product, Ext, Tor, as a mathematical object in a computer algebra system. Once this is achieved, one can compose and derive functors and even iterate this process without the need of any specific knowledge of these functors. These ideas are realized in the ring independent package homalg. It is designed to extend any computer algebra software implementing the arithmetics of a computable ring R, as soon as the latter contains algorithms to solve inhomogeneous linear equations with coefficients in R. Beside explaining how this suffices, the paper describes the nature of the extensions provided by homalg.Comment: clarified some points, added references and more interesting example

Women and Entrepreneurship in the Contemporary Middle East

The purpose of this paper is to assess the nature of relative female entrepreneurship in the contemporary Middle East, using data from the seven Middle Eastern countries that participated in the GEM Consortium in 2016 (GEM Global Report, 2016). This data will show that while some of these countries are approaching parity in terms of gender shares in new business start-up’s, in others the rate of female early stage entrepreneurship is a half or even less of the rate for males. Interestingly it is the richer Middle Eastern countries that are closest to parity, even though this includes some of the traditionally more conservative and patriarchal Gulf countries. There are important lessons for the development of policy here – some countries are foregoing substantial opportunities to increase the pool of new female-owned businesses and their subsequent economic development impacts. The data analysis will include statistical tests for significant differences between countries, and will introduce a new methodology for comparing the ratios of sample proportions. The literature on entrepreneurship evidences a continuing debate on the nature of female early-stage entrepreneurial activity, and whether female owned and run businesses grow more slowly and are less profitable than male owned businesses, (see for example Minniti and Naude 2010 & 2011). While GEM data says little about the actual performance of new businesses, that performance may be closely related to the plans and expectations of the entrepreneur, an area that is specifically addressed by GEM. Hence this paper will assess differences in attitudes and expectations by gender, including job creation and international orientation, as well as differences in opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship. The paper will conclude with some lessons for policy development

Changing Patterns of Entrepreneurship in Lebanon

Despite some significant enterprise initiatives, relatively little is known about the level, pattern and distribution of entrepreneurship in Lebanon. Whilst Lebanon is typically regarded as entrepreneurial, and there is no shortage of Lebanese role models, there is a shortage of hard evidence about who are the entrepreneurs, and how the level of entrepreneurship varies by gender, across age groups, by level of educational attainment and by location. This paper will address these issues head-on, providing comprehensive survey data on the pattern of entrepreneurship across Lebanon and how that pattern is changing over time. However the paper will go beyond simply describing the level of entrepreneurship – it will also offer some evidence-based conjecture as to why that pattern is changing, and how policies may be adapted to encourage further growth. The research instrument for this evidence is the annual GEM survey of 2000+ adults in Lebanon, asking about their entrepreneurial activities, as well as their perceptions and demographics. In the past decade, Lebanon has participated in GEM in three years, (2009, 2015 & 2016), allowing patterns and trends to be established. The level of total early stage entrepreneurial activity, (TEA, or those actively starting or running a new business), increased from 15% in 2009 to 30% in 2015, before falling to 21% in 2016. However these averages are very blunt measures, which the detail of GEM allows to be unpicked. There are reasons to expect the level of TEA to have increased fastest in young people, given the emphasis on enterprise education and growth in entrepreneurial finance for hi-technology start-ups. There is some evidence for this – between 2009 and 2015, TEA for 18-24 year olds increased from 10% to 27%, before falling to 19% in 2016 – still almost twice the level of 2009. However, TEA for 45-54 year olds almost trebled between 2009 and 2015, (from 11% to 31%), before falling to 15% in 2016. In 2009, 45-54 year olds had been more entrepreneurial than 18-24 year olds. By 2016 this had reversed, with the younger age group being almost a third more likely to be starting or running a new business than the older age group. This paper will explore a number of key relationships with entrepreneurship, testing changes for their statistical significance and using results to develop evidence-based recommendations for the development of early-stage entrepreneurship in Lebanon

Risk, Resilience and Reward: Impacts of Shifting to Digital Sex Work

Workers from a variety of industries rapidly shifted to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing work has examined the impact of this shift on office workers, little work has examined how shifting from in-person to online work affected workers in the informal labor sector. We examine the impact of shifting from in-person to online-only work on a particularly marginalized group of workers: sex workers. Through 34 qualitative interviews with sex workers from seven countries in the Global North, we examine how a shift to online-only sex work impacted: (1) working conditions, (2) risks and protective behaviors, and (3) labor rewards. We find that online work offers benefits to sex workers' financial and physical well-being. However, online-only work introduces new and greater digital and mental health risks as a result of the need to be publicly visible on more platforms and to share more explicit content. From our findings we propose design and platform governance suggestions for digital sex workers and for informal workers more broadly, particularly those who create and sell digital content

Banking on Start-ups: The Changing Role of Lebanon’s Central Bank

Although there is a long global tradition of Central Bank support for economic development, the early years of the twenty-first century saw Central Banks increasingly focussed on a single objective – price stability, typically targeted by interest rate policy. However, the global financial crisis saw a rapid shift to policies to promote employment and economic growth, including for a number of European Central Banks, (France, Italy and Belgium; see [1; The Role of Central Banks, Briefing Paper 8/2015, German Development Institution (DIE)]), pursuing innovative policies such as prioritized lending to specific sectors via variable reserve asset requirements. At least one Central Bank has gone further – in incentivizing commercial banks to invest in high-technology start-ups, as well as to incubators and accelerators. This article focuses on the entrepreneurship-support role of Lebanon’s Central Bank (Banque du Liban or BdL) for years regarded as deeply conservative in imposing cash reserve requirements well in excess of international norms and prohibiting banks from speculating in risky packages of bundled debts. BdL has been credited with ameliorating the impacts of the global financial crisis on the Lebanese economy and has for some years facilitated loans to specific sectors at low interest rates. However, BdL took a more radical step in August 2013 by issuing Circular 331, providing significant incentives to commercial banks to invest in technology start-ups, either directly or through Venture Capital funds, by facilitating the banks to then access a seven-year interest-free loan invested in Lebanese Treasury Bonds. Investments in approved start-ups were guaranteed up to 75% by BdL and 100% for investments in accelerators or incubators. This article will seek to develop an impact framework for 331 and make some early assessment of its potential economic development consequences

P2RP:a Web-based framework for the identification and analysis of regulatory proteins in prokaryotic genomes

BACKGROUND: Regulatory proteins (RPs) such as transcription factors (TFs) and two-component system (TCS) proteins control how prokaryotic cells respond to changes in their external and/or internal state. Identification and annotation of TFs and TCSs is non-trivial, and between-genome comparisons are often confounded by different standards in annotation. There is a need for user-friendly, fast and convenient tools to allow researchers to overcome the inherent variability in annotation between genome sequences. RESULTS: We have developed the web-server P2RP (Predicted Prokaryotic Regulatory Proteins), which enables users to identify and annotate TFs and TCS proteins within their sequences of interest. Users can input amino acid or genomic DNA sequences, and predicted proteins therein are scanned for the possession of DNA-binding domains and/or TCS domains. RPs identified in this manner are categorised into families, unambiguously annotated, and a detailed description of their features generated, using an integrated software pipeline. P2RP results can then be outputted in user-specified formats. CONCLUSION: Biologists have an increasing need for fast and intuitively usable tools, which is why P2RP has been developed as an interactive system. As well as assisting experimental biologists to interrogate novel sequence data, it is hoped that P2RP will be built into genome annotation pipelines and re-annotation processes, to increase the consistency of RP annotation in public genomic sequences. P2RP is the first publicly available tool for predicting and analysing RP proteins in users’ sequences. The server is freely available and can be accessed along with documentation at http://www.p2rp.org

Rational matrix pseudodifferential operators

The skewfield K(d) of rational pseudodifferential operators over a differential field K is the skewfield of fractions of the algebra of differential operators K[d]. In our previous paper we showed that any H from K(d) has a minimal fractional decomposition H=AB^(-1), where A,B are elements of K[d], B is non-zero, and any common right divisor of A and B is a non-zero element of K. Moreover, any right fractional decomposition of H is obtained by multiplying A and B on the right by the same non-zero element of K[d]. In the present paper we study the ring M_n(K(d)) of nxn matrices over the skewfield K(d). We show that similarly, any H from M_n(K(d)) has a minimal fractional decomposition H=AB^(-1), where A,B are elements of M_n(K[d]), B is non-degenerate, and any common right divisor of A and B is an invertible element of the ring M_n(K[d]). Moreover, any right fractional decomposition of H is obtained by multiplying A and B on the right by the same non-degenerate element of M_n(K [d]). We give several equivalent definitions of the minimal fractional decomposition. These results are applied to the study of maximal isotropicity property, used in the theory of Dirac structures.Comment: 20 page

Modelling SDG scenarios for Educational Attainment and Development. CESDEG: Education for all Global Monitoring Report (EFA-GMR)

The scenarios of educational expansion underlying the population projections presented here result from a further refinement of the education model presented in Lutz et al. (2014). In summary, we project the share of the population ever reaching or exceeding a given attainment level. This is done seperately by country, and gender, but with ‘shrinkage’ within a Bayesian framework (with weakly informative priors). The mean expansion trajectories are modelled as random walks with drift (and potential mean reversion) and independent noise at a probit-transformed scale. The trend parameters are estimated based on reconstructed attainment histories, and extrapolated, subject to additional and some exogenously imposed convergence within regions and between females and males. Under the target scenarios, SDG targets are treated as ‘future data’ (in other words, target trajectories are modeled looking back from 2030 under the assumption that the target will have been met), with a potential trend break in 2015. Limitations shared with all existing global projections of educational development include the fact that in the absence of a detailed theoretical basis, they are forced to rely heavily on statistical extrapolations. For example, there is little consensus on whether “higher education is the new secondary education” (as claimed by Andreas Schleicher of OECD), or is fundamentally different from lower levels of schooling (e.g. in terms of institutional framework, its role in the life cycle, economic returns. In addition, global projections can necessarily not account in a satisfactory manner for idiosyncratic policy changes or shocks. In addition, the specific modelling choices outlined above imply a number of trade-offs. Using highest school attainment as the underlying measure solves many problems associated with historic enrolment data by allowing the consistent reconstruction of time series of attainment from relatively recent cross-sectional data, but comes with challenges of its own. While nevertheless preferable overall, the principal disadvantage of attainment measures deserves mention, namely the relatively long time lag with which outcomes can be observed. Late attainment is common in many developing countries, so that attainment cannot safely be assumed to be ‘final’ until several years above the typical graduation age