Is There a Rationale for Rebating Environmental Levies?

Political pressure often exists for rebating environmental levies, particularly when incomplete regulatory coverage allegedly creates an “unlevel playing field” with other, unregulated firms or industries. This paper assesses the conditions under which rebating environmental levies is justified for the regulated sector. It combines a theoretical approach based on second-best modeling with numerical simulations aimed at determining the most sensitive parameters. We find that if an adequate tax on production can be levied in the unregulated sector, no rebate is justified for the regulated sector. Moreover, even in the case of constrained taxation in the unregulated sector, a tax rebate or a subsidy in the regulated sector is not necessarily a welfare-increasing policy. The exception occurs when the goods of the competing sectors are close substitutes. We find that these kinds of policy contraints can be quite costly in terms of welfare.environmental levy, tax rebate, fiscal distortions

Growth and employment in Mexico: A quantitative analysis of policies

Mexico has sustained unusual rates of real income growth (6.4 % of average annual GDP growth between 19 50 and 1970) by following an economic policy giving first priority to manufacturing industries. Import substitution has been the dominating trade strategy since the late 1940s with only cautious steps to a more export oriented strategy since the mid-1960s. Mexico has not been spared the well known problems of regional and sectoral imbalances, a skewed personal income distribution and unemployment accompanying the industrialization of other developing countries. Beginning with the presidentship of Diaz Ordaz (1966-70) the attenuation of imbalances and inequities is proclaimed as a specific policy goal in plan documents, while employment creation is added to the list in the Echeverrîa administration. Although based on another stratum of the Mexican political economy the stepwise execution of a massive land reform has obvious complementary effects to the industrial policy. The agricultural sector absorbs much of the fast growing labor force which cannot be employed in the more capital-intensive industries under socially acceptable conditions. The land reform allows for a minimum wage and a working conditions policy in urban regions without increasing the urban unemployment to a level where it would disrupt the political system. Land reform and minimum wages help to keep political stability despite the social strains created by rapid industrialization as well as population growth.

Economic Crisis in Argentina and no way out?

Argentina has made the headlines of international media not only for its successful return to democratic political rules in December 1983 but also for its renewed slump into economic crisis. The country is no longer able to meet the debt servicing requirements and to repay loans due this year while auspices for rescheduling and extending foreign debt are bleak. As a corollary tovexternal problems, there are high public sector deficits, inflation is accelerating at a galopping pace, and net private investment has turned negative. Up to now, the new democratic government has not lived up to expectations since it did not present a reform package designed to overcome the severe economic problems of the country. Rather, the government has relied on some ad-hoc emergency measures in an attempt to prevent the crisis from turning into catastrophy.

Domestic resource mobilization in Thailand

This study reviews the process of financial deepening in Thailand over the period 1970-1985. The success in deposit mobilization is attributed to the branch expansion of commercial banks and attractive interest rates. On the lending side inefficient allocation of funds and lack of long term finance are mainly the result of selective rediscount policies of the Central Bank. Lower barriers of entry especially for new and innovative financial institutions together with an improved supervisional framework are suggested to reach both enforced competition and the stability of the financial system

Neoclassical theory versus new economic geography. Competing explanations of cross-regional variation in economic development

This paper uses data for 255 NUTS-2 European regions over the period 1995-2003 to test the relative explanatory performance of two important rival theories seeking to explain variations in the level of economic development across regions, namely the neoclassical model originating from the work of Solow (1956) and the so-called Wage Equation, which is one of a set of simultaneous equations consistent with the short-run equilibrium of new economic geography (NEG) theory, as described by Fujita, Krugman and Venables (1999). The rivals are non-nested, so that testing is accomplished both by fitting the reduced form models individually and by simply combining the two rivals to create a composite model in an attempt to identify the dominant theory. We use different estimators for the resulting panel data model to account variously for interregional heterogeneity, endogeneity, and temporal and spatial dependence, including maximum likelihood with and without fixed effects, two stage least squares and feasible generalised spatial two stage least squares plus GMM; also most of these models embody a spatial autoregressive error process. These show that the estimated NEG model parameters correspond to theoretical expectation, whereas the parameter estimates derived from the neoclassical model reduced form are sometimes insignificant or take on counterintuitive signs. This casts doubt on the appropriateness of neoclassical theory as a basis for explaining cross-regional variation in economic development in Europe, whereas NEG theory seems to hold in the face of competition from its rival. (authors' abstract

An open-source multi-FPGA modular system for fair benchmarking of true random number generators

International audienceTrue Random Number Generators (TRNG) are cryptographic primitives that exploit intrinsic noise sources in electronic devices. Their quality is linked to the underlying technology, activity of the neighboring circuitry and device environment (temperature, power supply, electromagnetic emanations). Consequently, when comparing TRNGs, they should be tested in identical technology, system architecture and operating conditions. We present a unified hardware platform and related open source tools aimed at fair benchmarking of TRNGs implemented in different FPGA technologies. The platform is accessible remotely. Designers can download related tools from the web site and they can upload their configuration bitstream to the remote FPGA and download random data generated in the same hardware and in the same conditions as other concurrent designs and state-of-the-art generators. The proposed tools were approved in many applications and they guarantee safe acquisition of random sequences at data rates of up to 400 Mbits/s

Large volume behavior of Yang-Mills propagators

We summarize results on finite-volume effects in the propagators of Landau gauge Yang-Mills theory using Dyson-Schwinger equations on a 4-dimensional torus. We demonstrate explicitly how the solutions for the gluon and the ghost propagator tend towards their respective infinite volume forms in the corresponding limit. We discuss the relation of our solutions with results from lattice Monte-Carlo simulations.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, Presented by CF at the XXV International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 30 - August 4 2007, Regensburg, German

White Organic Light-Emitting Diodes with fine chromaticity tuning via ultrathin layer position shifting

Non-doped white organic light-emitting diodes using an ultrathin yellow-emitting layer of rubrene (5,6,11,12-tetraphenylnaphtacene) inserted on either side of the interface between a hole-transporting NPB (4,4'-bis[N-(1-naphtyl)-N-phenylamino]biphenyl) layer and a blue-emitting DPVBi (4,4'-bis(2,2'-diphenylvinyl)-1,1'-biphenyl) layer are described. Both the thickness and the position of the rubrene layer allow fine chromaticity tuning from deep-blue to pure-yellow via bright-white with CIE coordinates (x= 0.33, y= 0.32), a external quantum efficiency of 1.9%, and a color rendering index of 70. Such a structure also provides an accurate sensing tool to measure the exciton diffusion length in both DPVBi and NPB (8.7 and 4.9 nm respectively)

Implementation of Ring Oscillators Based Physical Unclonable Functions with Independent Bits in the Response

International audienceThe paper analyzes and proposes some enhancements of Ring Oscillators based Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). PUFs are used to extract a unique signature of an integrated circuit in order to authenticate a device and/or to generate a key. We show that designers of RO PUFs implemented in FPGAs need a precise control of placement and routing and an appropriate selection of ROs pairs to get independents bits in the PUF response. We provide a method to identify which comparisons are suitable when selecting pairs of ROs. Dealing with power consumption, we propose a simple improvement that reduces the consumption of the PUF published by Suh et al. in 2007 by up to 96.6%. Last but not least, we point out that ring oscillators significantly influence one another and can even be locked. This questions the reliability of the PUF and should be taken into account during the design

On the assumption of mutual independence of jitter realizations in P-TRNG stochastic models

International audienceSecurity in true random number generation in cryptography is based on entropy per bit at the generator output. The entropy is evaluated using stochastic models. Several recent works propose stochastic models based on assumptions related to selected physical analog phenomena such as noise or jittery signal and on the knowledge of the principle of randomness extraction from the obtained analog signal. However, these assumptions simplify often considerably the underlying analog processes, which include several noise sources. In this paper, we present a new comprehensive multilevel approach, which enables to build the stochastic model based on detailed analysis of noise sources starting at transistor level and on conversion of the noise to the clock jitter exploited at the generator level. Using this approach, we can estimate proportion of the jitter coming only from the thermal noise, which is included in the total clock jitter