Do PRSPs Empower Poor Countries And Disempower The World Bank, or is it the Other Way Round?

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) have been introduced by the World Bank and the IMF as a necessary aspect of securing HIPC debt relief and access to other funds. They are intended to increase national 'ownership' of programmes, through extensive participation. This paper assesses whether they actually do empower poor countries, by exploring the process and content of the PRSPs. It finds that as far as civil society is concerned, the PRSPs currently permit little significant contribution to programme design. Governments appear to take a bigger role, but are also heavily constrained, especially with respect to macro-policy. The fact that the content of PRSPs is very similar to previous adjustment packages suggest that little real change has occurred through this process. Moreover, some large IFI programmes are unaffected by the process. Hence PRSPs do not significantly empower poor countries. They may give the appearance of greater ownership, but so long as there is no significant underlying change, such a change in perceptions about ownership, which could make IFI designed programmes more effective and thereby empower them, is likely to be short lived

Flux distribution of solar intranetwork magnetic fields

Big Bear deep magnetograms of June 4, 1992 provide unprecedented observations for direct measurements of solar intranetwork (IN) magnetic fields. More than 2500 individual IN elements and 500 network elements are identified and their magnetic flux measured in a quiet region of 300 × 235 arc sec. The analysis reveals the following results: 1. (1) IN element flux ranges from 10¹⁶ Mx (detection limit) to 2 × 10¹⁸ Mx, with a peak flux distribution of 6 × 10¹⁶ Mx. 2. (2) More than 20% of the total flux in this quiet region is in the form of IN elements at any given time. 3. (3) Most IN elements appear as a cluster of mixed polarities from an emergence center (or centers) somewhere within the network interior. 4. (4) The IN flux is smaller than the network flux by more than an order of magnitude. It has a uniform spatial distribution with equal amount of both polarities. It is speculated that IN fields are intrinsically different from network fields and may be generated from a different source as well

Towards Efficient Data Valuation Based on the Shapley Value

"How much is my data worth?" is an increasingly common question posed by organizations and individuals alike. An answer to this question could allow, for instance, fairly distributing profits among multiple data contributors and determining prospective compensation when data breaches happen. In this paper, we study the problem of data valuation by utilizing the Shapley value, a popular notion of value which originated in coopoerative game theory. The Shapley value defines a unique payoff scheme that satisfies many desiderata for the notion of data value. However, the Shapley value often requires exponential time to compute. To meet this challenge, we propose a repertoire of efficient algorithms for approximating the Shapley value. We also demonstrate the value of each training instance for various benchmark datasets