New product technology, accumulation, and growth

This paper asks whether new technological capacity for producing and exporting additional products provides incentives for greater capital accumulation, without being fully reflected in a higher rate of total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Using a highly disaggregated data set of each country's trade flows into the United States, the author constructs a direct and independent measure of technological improvements for each country over time based on the number of new product varieties exported to the United States. The author shows, in a panel data setting, that acquiring the technological capacity for producing new products stimulates more rapid capital accumulation in developing countries, even after holding fixed the rate of TFP growth. His findings provide evidence against the alternative view that technological improvements are essentially unimportant: a view based on the findings of Young (1995) and others that instances of spectacular economic growth have been associated with unspectacular rates of TFP growth. The author provides a model to show how an expansion in the technological capacity for producing additional products can lead to more rapid factor accumulation, without necessarily improving measured TFP. His findings suggest that while rapid accumulation of physical and human capital may have characterized the East Asian growth experience, these gains were stimulated by stellar improvements in technological capacity.Economic Theory&Research,Economic Growth,Markets and Market Access,Investment and Investment Climate,Inequality

Transformasi Relasi Gender

Transformation of gender relation provides a construction of a gender sensitiveparadigm. Traditionally in the social and symbolic position women belonged to the privaterecesses of society in family relationships controlled and defned men, in silence. Incontrast to the traditional “man focused perspective feminist analyses evaluates not onlyoutcome but the fundamental concept values and assumption embedded in traditionaltheories which are controlled by men and reflect their concerns “gender sensitive feminismseeks to correct the imbalance and unfairness in gender relation system resulting fromthe implementation of perspective excluding attention to the circumstances of women'sgendered lives. Women struggle to transform their position to be equal to men's positionthere has been many things: there has been a strategy for improving the distribution ofsocial goods between women and men, there has been a goal in its own right, there hasbeen a method of defending women against the worst oppression of women, there hasbeen a way to construct the public (in patriarchal terms) for women, and it terms thatwomen can tolerate

Channels of risk-sharing among Canadian provinces: 1961–2006

This paper incorporates recent developments in the literature to quantify the amount of interprovincial risk-sharing in Canada. We find that both capital market and the federal tax-transfer system play an almost equally important role (about 26 percent each) in smoothing shocks to gross provincial product, while only 18 percent of shocks are smoothed by credit markets. The remaining 30 percent are not smoothed. Our results bring to light the critical role that Alberta plays in trading-off credit market smoothing for more capital market risk-sharing to the rest of Canada. Our pairwise risk-sharing analysis has brought up some interesting questions and arguments that are often neglected in discussions of regional risk-sharing. For example, one aspect of the pairwise analysis sheds light on the assessment of the economic effects of Quebec separation.Risk-sharing; pairwise risk-sharing; federal taxes and transfer; panel data; cross-section dependence.

Manusia Jawa Dalam Islamisasi Jawa Refleksi Filsafat Antropologi Metafisik Terhadap Temuan Ricklefs

Tulisan ini berlatarbelakangi oleh temuan-temuan Ricklefs tentang sejarah Islamisasi Jawa yang karenanya merupakan objek materialnya, yaitu manusia Jawa sejauh ditemukan oleh penelitian Ricklefs. Temuan tersebut akan dijadikan objek formal bagi penelitian kefilsafatan ini, yaitu: bagaimanakah gambaran manusia Jawa dalam sejarah Islamisasi manusia Jawa dan bagaimanakah refleksi filsafat manusia (antropologi metafisik) terhadap temuan tersebut? Dengan pendekatan filsafat antropologi metafisik, tulisan ini menemukan bahwa [1] deskripsi tentang manusia Jawa dalam sejarah Islamisasinya menurut Ricklefs digambarkan dalam tiga kecenderungan atau kategori: pertama, [a] sinkretik-mistis [b] polarisasi masyarakat [c] intensifikasi keagamaan. Sementara [2] Refleksi antropologis metafisik atas temuan tersebut menemukan arti yang lebih dasariah, yaitu terjadinya peristiwa-peristiwa itu sendiri. “Aku bersama yang-lain” merupakan “sejarah konkret” dan real yang sedang berjalan dan dihayati. Manusia Jawa menyejarah; artinya manusia Jawa itu – sebagaimana manusia lainnya dari manapun – bersifat historis. Tidak ada sejarah di luar atau di samping manusia Jawa. Sejarah itu tak lain ialah manusia-yang-berkembang sendiri; sejarah dilaksanakan manusia. Motor ketiga perkembangan kecenderungan dan relasi oponensial yang digambarkan Ricklefs tersebut adalah “otonomi-di-dalam-korelasi”. Namun sebenarnya bukan dasar untuk perkembangan. Perkembangan dan historisitas hanya dapat diterima sebagai fakta belaka. Kemungkinannya hanya dapat diketahui dari adanya; dan tidak memiliki dasar yang lebih mendalam lagi di dalam manusia

Model Epidemik Tuberkulosis Seir dengan Terapi pada Individu Terinfeksi

The spread of tuberculosis (TB) among individuals in the population can be described by the epidemic model, which is a mathematical model that divides the population into four subpopulations i.e. susceptible ( ), exposed ( ), infected ( ), and recovered ( ). The objective of this research is to build an epidemic model for TB transmission by involving total therapy rate ( ) in infected subpopulation. To illustrate the effects of , a numerical simulation with different values of was also carried out using R software. The results showed that the greater value of the total therapy rate, the decrease in the number of in­dividuals in infected subpopulation became faster

Optimal Sizing and Power Management Strategies of Islanded Microgrids for Remote Electrification Systems

Over the past few years, electrification of remote communities with an efficient utilization of on-site energy resources has entered a new phase of evolution. However, the planning tools and studies for the remote microgrids are considered inadequate. Moreover, the existing techniques have not taken into account the impact of reactive power on component sizes. Thus, this thesis concentrates on optimal sizing design of an islanded microgrid (IMG), which is composed of renewable energy resources (RERs), battery energy storage system (BESS), and diesel generation system (DGS), for the purpose of electrifying off-grid communities. Owing to the utilization of both BESS and DGS, four power management strategies (PMSs) are modeled upon analyzing the impacts of reactive power to chronologically simulate the IMG. In this work, two single-objective optimization (SOO) and two multiobjective optimization (MOO) approaches are developed for determining the optimal component sizes in an IMG. Chronological simulation and an enumeration-based search technique are adopted in the first SOO approach. Then, an accelerated SOO approach is proposed by adopting an improved piecewise aggregate approximation (IPAA)-based time series and a genetic algorithm (GA). Next, an adaptive weighted sum (AWS) method, in conjunction with an enumeration search technique, is adopted in a bi-objective optimization approach. Finally, an elitist non-dominated sorting GA-II (NSGA-II) technique is proposed for MOO of the IMG by introducing three objective functions. The enumeration-based SOO approach ensures a global optimum, determines the optimal sizes and PMSs simultaneously, and offers a realistic solution. The accelerated SOO approach significantly reduces the central processing unit (CPU) time without largely deviating the life cycle cost (LCC). The bi-objective optimal sizing approach generates a large number of evenly spread trade-off solutions both in regular and uneven regions upon adopting the LCC and renewable energy penetration (REP) as the objective functions. Using the MOO approach, one can produce a diversified set of Pareto optimal solutions, for both the component sizes and PMSs, at a reduced computational effort. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is demonstrated by simulation studies in the MATLAB/Simulink software environment

Factors associated with seizure severity among children with epilepsy in Northern Nigeria

Objective: To describe how seizure severity in children with epilepsy may be affected by certain socio-demographic and clinical variablesDesign: A cross-sectional studySetting: At the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Teaching Hospital, Bauchi, NigeriaParticipants: Sixty children and adolescents who were being followed up for seizure disorder at the child neurology clinicIntervention: Information on socio-demographic characteristics was obtained with a questionnaire, details of neuro-logical co-morbidities were extracted from the participants’ records, and seizure severity was assessed with the Na-tional Hospital Seizure Severity Score 3 tool.Main Outcome Measure: Chi-square test was used to establish the relationship between categorical variables, while the Independent t-test was used in describing the differences between means. Simple linear regression was calculated to assess the predictability of seizure severity.Result: The median age was ten years (IQR = 6-13 years), with a male dominance (1.5:1). The Seizure Severity Score (SSS) ranged between 3 and 24 units, with a mean of 12.22 ± 4.29 units. The only characteristic that had a significant association with SSS on bivariate analysis was the “presence of co-morbidities” (p=0.019). A simple linear regression revealed that the presence of a neurological co-morbidity predicted an increase in the SSS by 2.67 units. [R2 = 0.091, F (1, 58)= 5.837, p = 0.019. ꞵ = 2.67, t= 2.42, p= 0.019.]Conclusion: This study shows that neurological co-morbidities predict worsening seizure severity. This knowledge may influence prognostication and the charting of a treatment trajectory