Does Internal Migration Lead to Faster Regional Convergence in Turkey? an Empirical Investigation

In this study, using econometric methods, we examine whether internal migration in the last 30 years in Turkey has had any effect on the speed of convergence across Turkish provinces. According to standard neoclassical theory, migration across regions is conducive to faster convergence in income per capita: migration occurs from regions with low per capita income towards regions with higher per capita income, thus per capita income in in-migration regions would fall while that in out-migration regions would tend to rise, holding all else constant. In this study, we first test for absolute convergence across 67 Turkish provinces for 1975-2000 using non-linear least squares method. We find that there occurs no absolute convergence, meaning that provinces with initial-low-income per capita had no tendency to grow at a faster rate than provinces with initial-higher-income per capita. This result may be due to the fact that there are significant structural differences among provinces. To test this likelihood, regional dummies and sectoral shares in gross provincial product variables (agriculture, industry and services) are added to the convergence regressions. As expected, when we control for regional and sectoral differences across provinces, convergence across provinces occurs. Lastly, in order to assess the contribution of migration to convergence, we include net migration rates as explanatory variables to convergence regressions. We use the Instrumental Variables method in order to control for endogeneity between growth in per capita income and migration. According to our preliminary results, contrary to the predictions of the standard neoclassical theory, for 1975-2000, internal migration is not conducive to faster per capita income convergence across provinces in Turkey. One probable reason is that the marginal returns to capital in most net out-migration provinces and regions are relatively lower than those in the net in-migration provinces and regions in Turkey. Accordingly, the incentives to invest in capital in net-out migration regions may well be less than those in the net in-migration regions. Faced with lower investment in gross capital formation, and thus lower economic growth, net out-migration provinces and regions may not benefit from out-migration in terms of convergence in per capita income.

Regional Convergence and The Causal Impact of Migration on Regional Growth Rates

The standard growth theory predicts that allowing for labor mobility across regions would increase the speed of convergence in per capita income levels and that migration has a negative causal impact on regional growth rates. Although the empirical literature has uncovered some evidence for the former implication, the latter has not been verified empirically. This paper provides empirical evidence for the negative causal impact of migration on provincial growth rates in a developing country with a high level of internal migration that is characterized by unskilled labor exiting rural areas for urban centers. We utilize instrumental variables estimation method with an instrument unique to the country examined and also control for provincial fixed effects.Regional convergence; Regional growth; Internal migration; Fixed effects; IV estimation

Two Phase Description Logic Reasoning for Efficient Information Retrieval

Description Logics are used more and more frequently for knowledge representation, creating an increasing demand for efficient automated DL reasoning. However, the existing implementations are inefficient in the presence of large amounts of data. This paper summarizes the results in transforming DL axioms to a set of function-free clauses of first-order logic which can be used for efficient, query oriented data reasoning. The described method has been implemented in a module of the DLog reasoner openly available on SourceForge to download

OWL-POLAR : semantic policies for agent reasoning

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comPostprin

Get my pizza right: Repairing missing is-a relations in ALC ontologies (extended version)

With the increased use of ontologies in semantically-enabled applications, the issue of debugging defects in ontologies has become increasingly important. These defects can lead to wrong or incomplete results for the applications. Debugging consists of the phases of detection and repairing. In this paper we focus on the repairing phase of a particular kind of defects, i.e. the missing relations in the is-a hierarchy. Previous work has dealt with the case of taxonomies. In this work we extend the scope to deal with ALC ontologies that can be represented using acyclic terminologies. We present algorithms and discuss a system

A Semantic Model for Enhancing Network Services Management and Auditing

The road toward ubiquity, heterogeneity and virtualization of network services and resources urges for a formal and systematic approach to network management tasks. In particular, the semantic characterization and modeling of services provided to users assume an essential role in fostering autonomic service management, service negotiation and auditing. This paper is centered on the definition of an ontology for multiservice IP networks which intends to address multiple service management goals, namely: (i) to foster client and service provider interoperability; (ii) to manage network service contracts, facilitating the dynamic negotiation between clients and ISPs; (iii) to access and query SLA/SLSs data on an individual or aggregated basis to assist service provisioning in the network; and (iv) to sustain service monitoring and auditing. In order to take full advantage of the proposed semantic model, a service model API is provided to allow service management platforms to access the ontological contents. This ontological development also takes advantage of SWRL to discover new knowledge, enriching the possibilities of systems described using this support

The limits of social class in explaining ethnic gaps in educational attainment

This paper reports an analysis of the educational attainment and progress between age 11 and age 14 of over 14,500 students from the nationally representative Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE). The mean attainment gap in national tests at age 14 between White British and several ethnic minority groups were large, more than three times the size of the gender gap, but at the same time only about one-third of the size of the social class gap. Socio-economic variables could account for the attainment gaps for Black African, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students, but not for Black Caribbean students. Further controls for parental and student attitudes, expectations and behaviours indicated minority ethnic groups were on average more advantaged on these measures than White British students, but this was not reflected proportionately in their levels of attainment. Black Caribbean students were distinctive as the only group making less progress than White British students between age 11 and 14 and this could not be accounted for by any of the measured contextual variables. Possible explanations for the White British-Black Caribbean gap are considered

Annotations for Rule-Based Models

The chapter reviews the syntax to store machine-readable annotations and describes the mapping between rule-based modelling entities (e.g., agents and rules) and these annotations. In particular, we review an annotation framework and the associated guidelines for annotating rule-based models of molecular interactions, encoded in the commonly used Kappa and BioNetGen languages, and present prototypes that can be used to extract and query the annotations. An ontology is used to annotate models and facilitate their description

Rewetting offers rapid climate benefits for tropical and agricultural peatlands but not for forestry‐drained peatlands

Peat soils drained for agriculture and forestry are important sources of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. Rewetting effectively reduces these emissions. However, rewetting also increases methane emissions from the soil and, on forestry-drained peatlands, decreases the carbon storage of trees. To analyze the effect of peatland rewetting on the climate, we built radiative forcing scenarios for tropical peat soils, temperate and boreal agricultural peat soils, and temperate and boreal forestry-drained peat soils. The effect of tree and wood product carbon storage in boreal forestry-drained peatlands was also estimated as a case study for Finland. Rewetting of tropical peat soils resulted in immediate cooling. In temperate and boreal agricultural peat soils, the warming effect of methane emissions offsets a major part of the cooling for the first decades after rewetting. In temperate and boreal forestry-drained peat soils, the effect of rewetting was mostly warming for the first decades. In addition, the decrease in tree and wood product carbon storage further delayed the onset of the cooling effect for decades. Global rewetting resulted in increasing climate cooling, reaching -70 mW (m(2)Earth)(-1)in 100 years. Tropical peat soils (9.6 million ha) accounted for approximately two thirds and temperate and boreal agricultural peat soils (13.0 million ha) for one third of the cooling. Forestry-drained peat soils (10.6 million ha) had a negligible effect. We conclude that peatland rewetting is beneficial and important for mitigating climate change, but abandoning tree stands may instead be the best option concerning forestry-drained peatlands.Peer reviewe