Can Europe recover without credit?

Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in middle-income countries and 3.2 percent per year in high-income countries. However, the implications of these historical episodes for the current European situation are limited, for two main reasons. First, creditless recoveries are much less common in highincome countries, than in low-income countries which are financially undeveloped. European economies heavily depend on bank loans and research suggests that loan supply played a major role in the recent weak credit performance of Europe. There are reasons to believe that, despite various efforts, normal lending has not yet been restored. Limited loan supply could be disruptive for the European economic recovery and there has been only a minor substitution of bank loans with debt securities. Second, creditless recoveries were associated with significant real exchange rate depreciation, which has hardly occurred so far in most of Europe. This stylised fact suggests that it might be difficult to re-establish economic growth in the absence of sizeable real exchange rate depreciation, if credit growth does not return

Functional differentiation within the monkey cortex as revealed by near-infrared spectroscopy

The role of prefrontal cortex in working memory (WM) is well established. However, questions remain regarding the topography and “domain-specific differentiation” of different types of information processing in the cortex. While it has been theorized that dorsolateral (DPFC) and ventrolateral (VPFC) prefrontal cortex preferentially process spatial and object WM, respectively, both electrophysiological evidence in the monkey and neuroimaging in the human have largely failed to demonstrate such regional differentiation. In this study we use near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to detect functional changes, across relatively large cortical cell populations, simultaneously from prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices. Imaging data were recorded from a Rhesus macaque performing two types of WM tasks: a spatial task in which the animal had to retain the spatial position of a visual stimulus, and a non-spatial task where he had to retain its color (red or green) during a 20s delay. During performance of the spatial WM task, cerebral activation trends were found in which DPFC exhibited stronger activation than did the VPFC, and posterior parietal cortex maintained higher delay activation than did frontal regions. These differences were less pronounced during performance of the non-spatial task. Additionally, incorrect trials generally elicited lower activations during the delay period than did trials ending with a correct response. Furthermore, NIRS data collected during the performance of a haptic WM task also appear to exhibit inter-regional differences in delay activation. The data thus suggest the presence of preferential cognitive processing between and within posterior and frontal cortical regions

Molecular dynamics simulations of the water adsorption around malonic acid aerosol models

Water nucleation around a malonic acid aggregate has been studied by means of molecular dynamics simulations in the temperature and pressure range relevant for atmospheric conditions. Systems of different water contents have been considered and a large number of simulations have allowed us to determine the phase diagram of the corresponding binary malonic acid–water systems. Two phases have been evidenced in the phase diagrams corresponding either to water adsorption on a large malonic acid grain at low temperatures, or to the formation of a liquid-like mixed aggregate of the two types of molecules, at higher temperatures. Finally, the comparison between the phase diagrams simulated for malonic acid–water and oxalic acid–water mixtures emphasizes the influence of the O : C ratio on the hydrophilic behavior of the aerosol, and thus on its ability to act as a cloud condensation nucleus, in accordance with recent experimental conclusions

HyPLC: Hybrid Programmable Logic Controller Program Translation for Verification

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) provide a prominent choice of implementation platform for safety-critical industrial control systems. Formal verification provides ways of establishing correctness guarantees, which can be quite important for such safety-critical applications. But since PLC code does not include an analytic model of the system plant, their verification is limited to discrete properties. In this paper, we, thus, start the other way around with hybrid programs that include continuous plant models in addition to discrete control algorithms. Even deep correctness properties of hybrid programs can be formally verified in the theorem prover KeYmaera X that implements differential dynamic logic, dL, for hybrid programs. After verifying the hybrid program, we now present an approach for translating hybrid programs into PLC code. The new tool, HyPLC, implements this translation of discrete control code of verified hybrid program models to PLC controller code and, vice versa, the translation of existing PLC code into the discrete control actions for a hybrid program given an additional input of the continuous dynamics of the system to be verified. This approach allows for the generation of real controller code while preserving, by compilation, the correctness of a valid and verified hybrid program. PLCs are common cyber-physical interfaces for safety-critical industrial control applications, and HyPLC serves as a pragmatic tool for bridging formal verification of complex cyber-physical systems at the algorithmic level of hybrid programs with the execution layer of concrete PLC implementations.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. ICCPS 201

Financial Transaction Tax: Small is Beautiful

The case for taxing financial transactions merely to raise more revenues from the financial sector is not particularly strong. Better alternatives to tax the financial sector are likely to be available. However, a tax on financial transactions could be justified in order to limit socially undesirable transactions when more direct means of doing so are unavailable for political or practical reasons. Some financial transactions are indeed likely to do more harm than good, especially when they contribute to the systemic risk of the financial system. However, such a financial transaction tax should be very small, much smaller than the negative externalities in question, because it is a blunt instrument that also drives out socially useful transactions. There is a case for taxing over-the-counter derivative transactions at a somewhat higher rate than exchange-based derivative transactions. More targeted remedies to drive out socially undesirable transactions should be sought in parallel, which would allow, after their implementation, to reduce or even phase out financialtransaction taxes

And the first shall be the last

This study analyzes the puzzle of Hungarian economic drifting in a long run perspective. The underlying puzzle for the investigation is why bad policies are invariably popular and good policies unpopular, thus why political and economic rationality never overlap. The first part of the article summarizes in eight points the basic features of the postwar period. Then six lessons are offered, which might be useful for other countries in transition or for students of comparative economics and politics, lessons that can be generalized on the basis of the individual country experience

Environmental and Toxicological Impacts of Glyphosate with Its Formulating Adjuvant

Environmental and toxicological characteristics of formulated pesticides may substantially differ from those of their active ingredients or other components alone. This phenomenon is demonstrated in the case of the herbicide active ingredient glyphosate. Due to its extensive application, this active ingredient was found in surface and ground water samples collected in Békés Country, Hungary, in the concentration range of 0.54–0.98 ng/ml. The occurrence of glyphosate appeared to be somewhat higher at areas under intensive agriculture, industrial activities and public road services, but the compound was detected at areas under organic (ecological) farming or natural grasslands, indicating environmental mobility. Increased toxicity of the formulated herbicide product Roundup compared to that of glyphosate was observed on the indicator aquatic organism Daphnia magna Straus. Acute LC50 values of Roundup and its formulating adjuvant polyethoxylated tallowamine (POEA) exceeded 20 and 3.1 mg/ml, respectively, while that of glyphosate (as isopropyl salt) was found to be substantially lower (690-900 mg/ml) showing good agreement with literature data. Cytotoxicity of Roundup, POEA and glyphosate has been determined on the neuroectodermal cell line, NE-4C measured both by cell viability test and holographic microscopy. Acute toxicity (LC50) of Roundup, POEA and glyphosate on NE-4C cells was found to be 0.013±0.002%, 0.017±0.009% and 6.46±2.25%, respectively (in equivalents of diluted Roundup solution), corresponding to 0.022±0.003 and 53.1±18.5 mg/ml for POEA and glyphosate, respectively, indicating no statistical difference between Roundup and POEA and 2.5 orders of magnitude difference between these and glyphosate. The same order of cellular toxicity seen in average cell area has been indicated under quantitative cell visualization. The results indicate that toxicity of the formulated herbicide is caused by the formulating agent, but in some parameters toxicological synergy occurs between POEA and glyphosate

Using theorem provers to increase the precision of dependence analysis for information flow control

Information flow control (IFC) is a category of techniques for enforcing information flow properties. In this paper we present the Combined Approach, a novel IFC technique that combines a scalable system-dependence-graph-based (SDG-based) approach with a precise logic-based approach based on a theorem prover. The Combined Approach has an increased precision compared with the SDG-based approach on its own, without sacrificing its scalability. For every potential illegal information flow reported by the SDG-based approach, the Combined Approach automatically generates proof obligations that, if valid, prove that there is no program path for which the reported information flow can happen. These proof obligations are then relayed to the logic-based approach. We also show how the SDG-based approach can provide additional information to the theorem prover that helps decrease the verification effort. Moreover, we present a prototypical implementation of the Combined Approach that uses the tools JOANA and KeY as the SDG-based and logic-based approach respectively