Smuggler's Blues at the Central Bank: Lessons from Sudan

The ineffectiveness of real devaluation as stabilization policy does not imply that the nominal exchange rate should be held constant in the face of a domestic inflation. In this circumstance, import duties and export subsidies would have to be escalated to counter the potential erosion of the trade balance. This escalation of trade barriers generates a rising black market premium and offers increasing incentives to smuggling, already a pervasive problem in the African countries. As a consequence, the central bank would find it more and more difficult to hold the nominal exchange rate constant. This leads us to consider a passive exchange rate policy of stabilizing the exchange rate by moving the nominal rate in line with domestic inflation. If such passive policy is not accompanied by the elimination of trade barriers, however, the black market premium will not disappear. Unless exchange rate policy and trade policy are consistent with each other, the smuggler's blues will reach the central bank. Indeed, this is not just a theoretical possibility, it is the major lesson from the recent experience of Sudan.

Adjustment and income distribution : a counterfactual analysis

This paper presents model simulations to quantify the effects of different stabilization packages in the distribution of income and wealth. The simulations suggest that a sharply contractionary stabilization package has a major adverse impact on the distribution of income. The shifts in distribution are likely to make the package less sustainable. The simulations support the view that stabilization packages which do not have specific components targeted to the poor will redistribute income in a way that, although transitory, is likely to permanently harm those below the poverty line - in terms of things like nutrition, health, and education. The sharp redistributive effects of stabilization packages that omit specific targeted policies to alleviate poverty are also likely to endanger the sustainability of the adjustment package.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Stabilization,Banks&Banking Reform,Inequality

The effects of various planes of nutrition upon the cost of maintenance, reproduction, and development of beef cows

Approved, H.O. Allison, May 15, 1916Photographs pasted inTypescriptM.A. University of Missouri 1916The frequency with which valuable animals reproduce themselves has always been a factor of economic importance in the pure bred cattle business. Great economic changes during the last few years have made this an important factor in the grade cattle business as well. When the cost of maintaining a cow for a year was far less and the value of the calf not nearly so great, the annual percentage of calves produced by a herd of grade cows was not a matter of so much importance. The dry cows would fatten, and often the difference in value between a fat dry cow and a cow with calf at side was not great. At present, with higher maintenance cost and greater calf values, the calf crop percentage is one of the most important factors in determining the financial returns from a herd of grade cows. It was with the view of studying the effects of nutrition upon reproduction that this work was undertaken.Includes bibliographical references

Chiral anomaly for local boundary conditions

It is known that in the zeta function regularization and in the Fujikawa method chiral anomaly is defined through a coefficient in the heat kernel expansion for the Dirac operator. In this paper we apply the heat kernel methods to calculate boundary contributions to the chiral anomaly for local (bag) boundary conditions. As a by-product some new results on the heat trace asymptotics are also obtained.Comment: 20 p., late

Heat kernel asymptotics: more special case calculations

Special case calculations are presented, which can be used to put restrictions on the general form of heat kernel coefficients for transmittal boundary conditions and for generalized bag boundary conditions.Comment: Invited talk at International Meeting on Quantum Gravity and Spectral Geometry, Naples, Italy, 2-6 July 2001. 9 pages, LaTe

Spectral Action for Robertson-Walker metrics

We use the Euler-Maclaurin formula and the Feynman-Kac formula to extend our previous method of computation of the spectral action based on the Poisson summation formula. We show how to compute directly the spectral action for the general case of Robertson-Walker metrics. We check the terms of the expansion up to a_6 against the known universal formulas of Gilkey and compute the expansion up to a_{10} using our direct method

Ground State Energy of Massive Scalar Field Inside a Spherical Region in the Global Monopole Background

Using the zeta function regularization method we calculate the ground state energy of scalar massive field inside a spherical region in the space-time of a point-like global monopole. Two cases are investigated: (i) We calculate the Casimir energy inside a sphere of radius $R$ and make an analytical analysis about it. We observe that this energy may be positive or negative depending on metric coefficient $\alpha$ and non-conformal coupling $\xi$. In the limit $R\to\infty$ we found a zero result. (ii) In the second model we surround the monopole by additional sphere of radius $r_0<R$ and consider scalar field confined in the region between these two spheres. In the latter, the ground state energy presents an additional contribution due to boundary at $r_0$ which is divergent for small radius. Additional comments about renormalization are considered.Comment: 30 pages and 2 figures. LATEX fil

Statistical mechanics approach to some problems in conformal geometry

A weak law of large numbers is established for a sequence of systems of N classical point particles with logarithmic pair potential in \bbR^n, or \bbS^n, n\in \bbN, which are distributed according to the configurational microcanonical measure $\delta(E-H)$, or rather some regularization thereof, where H is the configurational Hamiltonian and E the configurational energy. When $N\to\infty$ with non-extensive energy scaling E=N^2 \vareps, the particle positions become i.i.d. according to a self-consistent Boltzmann distribution, respectively a superposition of such distributions. The self-consistency condition in n dimensions is some nonlinear elliptic PDE of order n (pseudo-PDE if n is odd) with an exponential nonlinearity. When n=2, this PDE is known in statistical mechanics as Poisson-Boltzmann equation, with applications to point vortices, 2D Coulomb and magnetized plasmas and gravitational systems. It is then also known in conformal differential geometry, where it is the central equation in Nirenberg's problem of prescribed Gaussian curvature. For constant Gauss curvature it becomes Liouville's equation, which also appears in two-dimensional so-called quantum Liouville gravity. The PDE for n=4 is Paneitz' equation, and while it is not known in statistical mechanics, it originated from a study of the conformal invariance of Maxwell's electromagnetism and has made its appearance in some recent model of four-dimensional quantum gravity. In differential geometry, the Paneitz equation and its higher order n generalizations have applications in the conformal geometry of n-manifolds, but no physical applications yet for general n. Interestingly, though, all the Paneitz equations have an interpretation in terms of statistical mechanics.Comment: 17 pages. To appear in Physica

Heat-kernel coefficients of the Laplace operator on the D-dimensional ball

We present a very quick and powerful method for the calculation of heat-kernel coefficients. It makes use of rather common ideas, as integral representations of the spectral sum, Mellin transforms, non-trivial commutation of series and integrals and skilful analytic continuation of zeta functions on the complex plane. We apply our method to the case of the heat-kernel expansion of the Laplace operator on a $D$-dimensional ball with either Dirichlet, Neumann or, in general, Robin boundary conditions. The final formulas are quite simple. Using this case as an example, we illustrate in detail our scheme ---which serves for the calculation of an (in principle) arbitrary number of heat-kernel coefficients in any situation when the basis functions are known. We provide a complete list of new results for the coefficients $B_3,...,B_{10}$, corresponding to the $D$-dimensional ball with all the mentioned boundary conditions and $D=3,4,5$.Comment: 29 pages, LaTex, lines had been cut in the previous version by transmission, no further change

Spin on the 4-ball

Using known mode properties, the functional determinant for massless spin-half fields on the Euclidean 4-ball is calculated and shown to be different for spectral (nonlocal) and mixed (local) boundary conditions. The local result agrees with that from a conformal argument. Some higher-spin results are also given.Comment: 8p,JyTe