Measuring the Degree of Central Bank Independence in Egypt

The past few years have witnessed a trend of increased delegation of authority to central banks. Increasing central bank independence is a recommended strategy for governments to establish a credible commitment to price stability as the final objective of the monetary authority, even at the cost of other objectives that may be more appealing to the political authorities. Existing literature on measuring central bank independence focuses on developed countries where quantifying the independence of central banks is easier, since quantifying the legal charter is sufficient to reflect the degree of central bank independence. However, in developing countries this task is thorny as quantifying the legal charter is often insufficient, since laws are often incomplete, ambiguous, or simply not respected. Thus, quantifying other indicators that reflect actual practice is required to capture any divergence between legal and actual practices. This paper attempts to quantify the degree of independence in the central bank of Egypt (CBE), from both a legal and behavioural context, since its establishment in 1961 until 2004. The study uses four indices in line with the work of Jacome (2001), Cukierman, et al. (1992), and Cukierman and Webb (1995), where each index is designed in such a way to capture a somewhat different aspect of independence. This study captures the discrepancies between the degree of independence conferred to the CBE by law and actual practice. The empirical findings of this paper offers insights about the direction of efforts that should be made to enhance central bank independence which is the key to achieving price stability and the stability of the financial system in general.Central bank independence, Central Bank of Egypt, price stability, central bank credibility, indices of central bank independence, monetary policy

The Nature of Formal and Informal Sino-Russian Political Networks: The Case of Syria

The world is governed economically and politically by supra-national conglomerates, in which both Russia and China are players seeking leadership and supporting the multi-polar system. This paper seeks to understand and analyze the geopolitical importance of the Arab region, with emphasis on Syria, for both Russia and China. It is further interested in the likelihood of a unified Syrian state in light of new concepts such as supportive sovereignty and security co-operation based on a balance of interests between allies instead of strategic security based on the balance of powers. Keywords:Sino-Russian political networks, The Syrian crisis, Supportive sovereignty, Syrian Geopolitical importance.

Colored model based testing for software product lines (CMBT-SWPL)

Over the last decade, the software product line domain has emerged as one of the mostpromising software development paradigms. The main benefits of a software product lineapproach are improvements in productivity, time to market, product quality, and customersatisfaction.Therefore, one topic that needs greater emphasis is testing of software product lines toachieve the required software quality assurance. Our concern is how to test a softwareproduct line as early as possible in order to detect errors, because the cost of error detectedIn early phases is much less compared to the cost of errors when detected later.The method suggested in this thesis is a model-based, reuse-oriented test technique calledColored Model Based Testing for Software Product Lines (CMBT-SWPL). CMBT-SWPLis a requirements-based approach for efficiently generating tests for products in a soft-ware product line. This testing approach is used for validation and verification of productlines. It is a novel approach to test product lines using a Colored State Chart (CSC), whichconsiders variability early in the product line development process. More precisely, the vari-ability will be introduced in the main components of the CSC. Accordingly, the variabilityis preserved in test cases, as they are generated from colored test models automatically.During domain engineering, the CSC is derived from the feature model. By coloring theState Chart, the behavior of several product line variants can be modeled simultaneouslyin a single diagram and thus address product line variability early. The CSC representsthe test model, from which test cases using statistical testing are derived.During application engineering, these colored test models are customized for a specificapplication of the product line. At the end of this test process, the test cases are generatedagain using statistical testing, executed and the test results are ready for evaluation. Inxaddition, the CSC will be transformed to a Colored Petri Net (CPN) for verification andsimulation purposes.The main gains of applying the CMBT-SWPL method are early detection of defects inrequirements, such as ambiguities incompleteness and redundancy which is then reflectedin saving the test effort, time, development and maintenance costs

Quantification of efficiency improvements from integration of battery energy storage systems and renewable energy sources into domestic distribution networks

Due to the increasing use of renewable, non-controllable energy generation systems energy storage systems (ESS) are seen as a necessary part of future power delivery systems. ESS have gained research interest and practical implementation over the past decade and this is expected to continue into the future. This is due to the economic and operational benefits for both network operators and customers, battery energy storage system (BESS) is used as the main focus of this research paper. This paper presents an analytical study of the benefits of deploying distributed BESS in an electrical distribution network (DN). The work explores the optimum location of installing BESS and its impact on the DN performance and possible future investment. This study provides a comparison between bulk energy storage installed at three different locations; medium voltage (MV) side and low voltage (LV) side of the distribution transformer (DT) and distributed energy storage at customers’ feeders. The performance of a typical UK DN is examined under different penetration levels of wind energy generation units and BESS. The results show that the minimum storage size is obtained when BESS is installed next to the DT. However, the power loss is reduced to its minimum when BESS and wind energy are both distributed at load busbars. The study demonstrates that BESS installation has improved the loss of life factor of the distribution transformer