Papua New Guinea’s vanishing LNG export boom

Papua New Guinea (PNG) must adjust to lower liquefied natural gas (LNG) and oil prices to avoid a crisis. The PNG LNG project is still extremely important for the country, but because of lower prices many of the benefits of the production phase of the project have vanished – probably for at least a decade. Adjustments are urgently required in fiscal, monetary and foreign exchange policies to adapt to the changed realities. KEY POINTS World oil prices are now more than 35 per cent lower than at the time of the 2015 budget. This will have a direct impact on LNG revenues, since LNG prices are directly linked to oil prices. The fall in LNG and oil prices will reduce government revenue by over K1.4 billion in 2015 – more than 10 per cent of all revenue. Revenues in 2016 are now K2.5 billion less than expected at the time of the 2014 budget. PNG’s expected growth rate for 2015 is now 6.9 per cent, still good but far below the budget forecast of 15.5 per cent. Unless the Kina is re-floated and allowed to depreciate, PNG’s international reserves will fall by the end of 2015 to cover just over three months of imports. Reserves would keep falling and be exhausted by early 2017 as the balance of payments would stay in deficit. Without adjustment, PNG’s budget deficit in 2015 will increase to 8.8 per cent. On realistic expenditure assumptions, the deficit will continue rising to well over 10 per cent. The debt to GDP ratio will increase to 75 per cent by 2017 – two and half times the maximum level in the Fiscal Responsibility Act

Wage Concessions and Long-Term Union Wage Flexibility

macroeconomics, wage concessions, union

A Unified Framework for Linear-Programming Based Communication Receivers

It is shown that a large class of communication systems which admit a sum-product algorithm (SPA) based receiver also admit a corresponding linear-programming (LP) based receiver. The two receivers have a relationship defined by the local structure of the underlying graphical model, and are inhibited by the same phenomenon, which we call 'pseudoconfigurations'. This concept is a generalization of the concept of 'pseudocodewords' for linear codes. It is proved that the LP receiver has the 'maximum likelihood certificate' property, and that the receiver output is the lowest cost pseudoconfiguration. Equivalence of graph-cover pseudoconfigurations and linear-programming pseudoconfigurations is also proved. A concept of 'system pseudodistance' is defined which generalizes the existing concept of pseudodistance for binary and nonbinary linear codes. It is demonstrated how the LP design technique may be applied to the problem of joint equalization and decoding of coded transmissions over a frequency selective channel, and a simulation-based analysis of the error events of the resulting LP receiver is also provided. For this particular application, the proposed LP receiver is shown to be competitive with other receivers, and to be capable of outperforming turbo equalization in bit and frame error rate performance.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. To appear in the IEEE Transactions on Communication

Quantum inequalities in two dimensional Minkowski spacetime

We generalize some results of Ford and Roman constraining the possible behaviors of renormalized expected stress-energy tensors of a free massless scalar field in two dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Ford and Roman showed that the energy density measured by an inertial observer, when averaged with respect to that observers proper time by integrating against some weighting function, is bounded below by a negative lower bound proportional to the reciprocal of the square of the averaging timescale. However, the proof required a particular choice for the weighting function. We extend the Ford-Roman result in two ways: (i) We calculate the optimum (maximum possible) lower bound and characterize the state which achieves this lower bound; the optimum lower bound differs by a factor of three from the bound derived by Ford and Roman for their choice of smearing function. (ii) We calculate the lower bound for arbitrary, smooth positive weighting functions. We also derive similar lower bounds on the spatial average of energy density at a fixed moment of time.Comment: 6 pages, no figures, uses revtex 3.1 macros, to appear in Phys Rev D. Minor revisions and generalizations added 7/16/9

Making molehills into mountains: Adult responses to child sexuality and behaviour

Sexual behaviour among children can be perplexing for adults as they negotiate a spectrum of ideas relating to abuse and natural curiosity. In the search for understandings, adults can act in ways that close opportunities for children to explore and describe meanings for the behaviour. This article invites practitioners to check their assumptions in this kind of work, and to take a stance that opposes abusive actions – while taking up a position of enquiry to support the multiple stories that make up children’s lives