6,274 research outputs found
Fiscal Deficits and Debt Dimensions of Pakistan
Pakistan continues to suffer from a syndrome of high fiscal deficits and severe incidence of debt. Its annual fiscal deficit has stayed constantly at over 6 percent of GDP especially since 1990 [Pakistan (1997-98)]. The prevalence of such a high fiscal deficit over the years in a row has propelled increased borrowing from both internal and external sources to cover the resource gap. With inadequate improvement in the repayment capacity of the country debt has continued to accumulate at a massive rate. Serving as the cause and effect of each other, the volumes of both the fiscal deficit and debt have soared continuously. The most devastating consequence of high fiscal deficit and soaring debt has been the continuous accrual of massive debt-servicing. In fact, both the debt and debt-servicing have reached unaffordable limits. How to alleviate this situation has become the foremost issue of the country. While complete elimination of all the debt and thereby debt-servicing may not be easy to accomplish in the short run, efforts are needed to systematically bring the fiscal deficit down to a minimum affordable limit. What may be the minimum financeable level of fiscal deficit and how it may be reduced to that level are the issues addressed in this paper.
February 2001 Crisis in Turkey: Causes and Consequences
Turkey has suffered from different economic crises since 1990. However, the February 2001 crisis has been unprecedented in intensity and repercussions. Although many factors, both internal and external, may have contributed to their occurrences, the former owing to their inducing corruption and waste in the economy, seem to have fomented them more than the latter. Although Turkey has been getting transformed into a market economy since 1980, government intervention is still pervasive in its economy. Government still controls Central Bank, owns commercial banks, and operates public enterprises. It has liberalised market, currency, foreign trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), but still operates sectors like energy, sugar and tobacco. Such a level of state intervention had adverse implications for corruption, waste, effective reforms, etc. in the country. Further, since the transformation of the economy could not be accompanied by concomitant structural, legal and institutional reforms in 1990s, resources have constantly been misused over the years. Further still, groups owning bank, media and holding companies jointly have notoriously precipitated domestic financial crisis by stashing away the home deposits in their offshore branches. Finally, supporting agriculture and industry with politically-motivated credit for voting purposes has constantly been aggravating the drain of resources and thereby financial crises of the country. This paper attempts a critical examination of how such factors may have contributed to the occurrence and accentuation of economic crises suffered by Turkey over the last decade.
Properties of the integrated spectrum of serendipitous 2XMM catalogue sources
Our analysis is aimed at characterizing the properties of the integrated
spectrum of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) such as the ubiquity of the Fe
K{\alpha} emission in AGNs and the dependence of the spectral parameters on the
X-ray luminosity and redshift. We selected 2646 point sources from the 2XMM
catalogue at high galactic latitude (|BII| > 25 degrees) and with the sum of
EPIC-PN and EPIC-MOS 0.2-12 keV counts greater than 1000. Redshifts were
obtained for 916 sources from the NED. The final sample consists of 507 AGN.
Individual source spectra have been summed in the observed frame to compute the
integrated spectra in different redshift and luminosity bins over the range
0<z<5. Detailed analysis of these spectra has been performed. We find that the
narrow Fe K{\alpha} line at 6.4 keV is significantly detected up to z=1. The
line equivalent width decreases with increasing X-ray luminosity in the 2-10
keV band (''IT effect''). The anti-correlation is characterized by the relation
log(EWFe) = (1.66 +/- 0.09) + (-0.43 +/- 0.07) log(LX,44), where EWFe is the
rest frame equivalent width of the neutral iron K{\alpha} line in eV and LX,44
is the 2-10 keV X-ray luminosity in units of 10^{44} erg s^{-1}. The equivalent
width is nearly independent of redshift up to z ~ 0.8 with an average value of
101+/-40 (rms dispersion) eV in the luminosity range 43.5<= logLX <= 44.5. Our
analysis also confirmed the hardening of the spectral indices at low
luminosities implying a dependence of obscuration on luminosity. We confirm
that the neutral narrow Fe K{\alpha} line is an almost ubiquitous feature of
AGNs. We find compelling evidence for the ''IT effect'' over a redshift
interval larger than probed in any previous study. We detect no evolution of
the average rest frame equivalent width of the Fe K{\alpha} line with redshift.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 2 Tables. A&A in pres
Rest-frame stacking of 2XMM catalog sources : Properties of the Fe Kalpha line
The aim of this work is to characterize the average Fe K emission properties
of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in the source rest-frame. We selected a sample
of 248 AGNs from the 2XMM catalog, covering a wide redshift range 0 < z < 5 and
with the EPIC-PN net 2-10 keV rest-frame counts >=200 and power law photon
indices in the range 1.5-2.2. We employed two fully independent rest-frame
stacking procedures to compute the mean Fe K profile. The counting statistics
for the integrated spectrum is comparable to the one available for the best
studied local Seyferts. To identify the artifacts possibly introduced by the
stacking procedure, we have carried out simulations. We report that the average
Fe K line profile in our sample is best represented by a combination of a
narrow and a broad line. The equivalent widths of the narrow and broad
(parametrized with a diskline) components are ~30 eV and ~100 eV, respectively.
We also discuss the results of more complex fits and the implications of the
adopted continuum modeling on the broad line parameters and its detection
significance.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, Accepted for publication in A&
Fiscal Deficits and Debt Dimensions of Pakistan
Pakistan continues to suffer from a syndrome of high fiscal
deficits and severe incidence of debt. Its annual fiscal deficit has
stayed constantly at over 6 percent of GDP especially since 1990
[Pakistan (1997-98)]. The prevalence of such a high fiscal deficit over
the years in a row has propelled increased borrowing from both internal
and external sources to cover the resource gap. With inadequate
improvement in the repayment capacity of the country debt has continued
to accumulate at a massive rate. Serving as the cause and effect of each
other, the volumes of both the fiscal deficit and debt have soared
continuously. The most devastating consequence of high fiscal deficit
and soaring debt has been the continuous accrual of massive
debt-servicing. In fact, both the debt and debt-servicing have reached
unaffordable limits. How to alleviate this situation has become the
foremost issue of the country. While complete elimination of all the
debt and thereby debt-servicing may not be easy to accomplish in the
short run, efforts are needed to systematically bring the fiscal deficit
down to a minimum affordable limit. What may be the minimum financeable
level of fiscal deficit and how it may be reduced to that level are the
issues addressed in this paper
Impact of Ground Truth Annotation Quality on Performance of Semantic Image Segmentation of Traffic Conditions
Preparation of high-quality datasets for the urban scene understanding is a
labor-intensive task, especially, for datasets designed for the autonomous
driving applications. The application of the coarse ground truth (GT)
annotations of these datasets without detriment to the accuracy of semantic
image segmentation (by the mean intersection over union - mIoU) could simplify
and speedup the dataset preparation and model fine tuning before its practical
application. Here the results of the comparative analysis for semantic
segmentation accuracy obtained by PSPNet deep learning architecture are
presented for fine and coarse annotated images from Cityscapes dataset. Two
scenarios were investigated: scenario 1 - the fine GT images for training and
prediction, and scenario 2 - the fine GT images for training and the coarse GT
images for prediction. The obtained results demonstrated that for the most
important classes the mean accuracy values of semantic image segmentation for
coarse GT annotations are higher than for the fine GT ones, and the standard
deviation values are vice versa. It means that for some applications some
unimportant classes can be excluded and the model can be tuned further for some
classes and specific regions on the coarse GT dataset without loss of the
accuracy even. Moreover, this opens the perspectives to use deep neural
networks for the preparation of such coarse GT datasets.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, The Second International Conference on
Computer Science, Engineering and Education Applications (ICCSEEA2019) 26-27
January 2019, Kiev, Ukrain
Nutrient Management for Higher Productivity of Swarna Sub1 Under Flash Floods Areas
Two field experiments were conducted at Regional Agricultural Research Station, Tarahara, Nepal during 2012 and 2013 to determine the effect of agronomic management on growth and yield of Swarna Sub1 under flash floods. The first experiment was laid out in a split plot design with three replications; and four different nutrient combinations at nursery as main plots and three age groups of rice seedlings as sub plots. The second experiment was laid out in a randomized complete block design and replicated thrice; with three post flood nutrient doses at six and 12 days after de-submergence (dad). The experiments were complete submerged at 10 days after transplanting for 12 days. The survival percentage, at 21 dad, was significantly higher in plots planted with 35 (90.25%) and 40 (91.58%) days-old seedlings compared to 30 days-old seedlings (81.75%). Plots with 35 days-old seedlings produced 5.15 t ha-1 with advantage of 18.83% over 30 days-old seedlings. Plots with 100-50-50 kg N-P2O5-K2O/ha at nursery recorded the highest grain filling of 79.41% and grain yield of 5.068 t/ha with more benefit. Post flood application of 20-20 N-K20kg/ha at 6 dad resulted in higher plant survival and taller plants, leading to significantly higher grain yield of 5.183 t/ha and straw yield of 5.315 t/ha. Hence, 35-40 days old seedlings raised with 100-50-50 kg N-P2O5-K2O /ha in nursery and the additional application of20-20 kg N-K2O /ha at 6 dad improved plant survival and enhanced yield of Swarna Sub1 under flash flood conditions. The practice has prospects of saving crop loss with getting rice yield above national average yield leading to enhanced food security in the flood prone areas of Nepal
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