SMUGGLING AS ANOTHER CAUSE OF FAILURE OF THE PPP

In theoretical literature, smuggling is considered as a factor contributing to the deviation of the PPP-based exchange rates from the equilibrium exchange rates with little empirical support. In this paper, we used panel data for 33 developing countries over the period 1982-1995 and used panel unit root and panel cointegration technique along with pooled OLS, fixed effects, random effects, and Parks estimator in an augmented Balassa-Samuelson framework. Using two different proxies for smuggling it is found that smuggling into a country leads to an appreciation of domestic currency that can be considered as another cause of loosing competitiveness by many developing countries.Smuggling, PPP, Real Exchange Rate, Panel Data, Panel Unit Root, Panel Cointegration, LDCs

Communicating via ignorance: Increasing communication capacity via superposition of order

Classically, no information can be transmitted through a depolarising, that is a completely noisy, channel. We show that by combining a depolarising channel with another channel in an indefinite causal order---that is, when there is superposition of the order that these two channels were applied---it becomes possible to transmit significant information. We consider two limiting cases. When both channels are fully-depolarising, the ideal limit is communication of 0.049 bits; experimentally we achieve $(3.4{\pm}0.2){\times}10^{-2}$ bits. When one channel is fully-depolarising, and the other is a known unitary, the ideal limit is communication of 1 bit. We experimentally achieve 0.64${\pm}$0.02 bits. Our results offer intriguing possibilities for future communication strategies beyond conventional quantum Shannon theory

Marketing : Business Promotion - Some Thoughts and a Few Case Studies

The business is increasingly likely to be a network of strategic partnerships among designers, technology providers, manufacturers, distributors and information specialists. The business will be defined by its customers, not by its products or factories or offices. Further, Marketing can no longer be the sole responsibilities of a few specialists. Rather, everyone in the organisation may be charged with responsibility for understanding customers and contributing to developing and deliver value for them. The organisations that are unable to achieve this focus on customer will either disappear or become highly specialised players, taking strategic direction from the customers. At the corporate and business unit levels, marketing may merge with strategic R & D planning or, more generally, the strategy development function, with shared responsibility for information management, environmental scanning and co-ordination of the network activities. In the present paper, some of the above thoughts have been examined and evaluated considering the existing form of promotional practices exhibited by a few selected R & D laboratories