The Rise of the Current Banking System in Japan, 1868-1936

Learning by doing convinced the Japanese government to create in 1882 a relatively transparent and credible central bank, Bank of Japan, and adopted the gold standard in 1898 to prove it. Unfortunately, the government did not see it fit to enforce transparency on other financial and non financial institutions in an effort to maximize the supply of capital and reduce its cost. To remedy for this deficiency, the government imposed on Bank of Japan to offer implicit deposit insurance. For a long period, this arrangement helped the government of Japan to place the Japanese economy on a fast development track but it also created a serious moral hazard problem. Through various subterfuges, the government was able to escape the necessity to enforce a minimum amount of transparency. World War I brought about golden opportunities that the Japanese economy exploited full at the cost of high rates of inflation thanks to the exit of most developed countries, including Japan, out of the gold standard. The return of the US to the gold standard soon after the end of the war at the old parity forced Japan to reconsider moving to a flexible exchange rate regime or returning to the gold standard either at the old parity at the cost of a depression or at a new parity with a devaluation. For ten years, the government of Japan did not make up its mind. Instead, it instructed Bank of Japan to continue offering free implicit deposit insurance. The moral hazard problem became acute dragging the Japanese economy into many financial crises but the government refused to impose transparency. After falling initially for two decades following the creation of Bank of Japan, real and nominal interest rates meandered without any clear direction and remained on average relatively high. Finally, the government decided to return to the gold standard at the old parity to clean up the weaker and inefficient institutions and reduce the cost of capital. We demonstrate that the government walked into this trap knowing well the economic consequences. Thanks to the naivete? of an otherwise brilliant economist and a former governor of Bank of Japan, the return ended up in a disaster and the government still refused to enforce transparency, preferring instead to impose financial repression out of which the current banking system was born.

Politique optimale de change pour la Tunisie

Nonobstant les coûts de transactions et d’incertitude, la théorie économique suggère qu’un taux de change flexible soit le meilleur choix pour un petit pays dont le secteur des produits non échangeables est important et dans lequel les chocs symétriques sont peu importants. Utilisant des données macroéconomiques couvrant la période 1961-1997, on montre dans un premier temps que le secteur des produits non échangeables en Tunisie est important. Dans un deuxième temps on estime un modèle VAR pour la Tunisie et un autre pour la France. Ceci permet d’estimer des chocs d’offre et des chocs de demande monétaires et non monétaires qui ont affecté les deux pays durant la période 1961-1997. L’étude des corrélations entre les chocs montre que les chocs symétriques sont peu importants. On en conclut qu’il serait mieux pour la Tunisie de continuer à opérer avec un régime de taux de change flottant en attendant une intégration plus grande avec l’économie européenne.Transactions and uncertainty costs aside, economic theory suggests that a flexible exchange rate is the optimal choice for a small country that has a relatively large non-traded goods sector and for which the symmetric shocks are not important. The macroeconomic data for Tunisia covering the period 1961-1997 show that the non-traded goods sector is important. Two separate VAR models for Tunisia and France, the principal trading partner of Tunisia, were estimated. The models produced estimates of supply shocks and monetary and non-monetary demand shocks for each country. The study of the correlation of the shocks across the two countries shows that the symmetric shocks are not important. Accordingly, a flexible exchange rate is the optimal choice for Tunisia pending deeper economic integration of Tunisia in the European economy

Cultivating biodiverse futures at the (postcolonial) botanical garden

This article examines ecological practices at the Palestine Museum of Natural History in Bethlehem, West Bank. Through an analysis of the museum's botanical gardens, the article explores what it calls ‘biodiverse futures’ as a spatio-temporal alternative to the ecological domination of settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine. While much scholarship has focused on the environmental imaginaries that have informed colonial conquest in Palestine, this paper draws attention to the ways in which these relationships extend into constructions of the future. Combining the literature on environmental violence with the literature on futurity and decolonisation, this article develops an approach that foregrounds the relevance of ‘ecological temporalities’ in examining alternatives to settler futures in Israel/Palestine. To date, only a limited number of contributions have examined environmentalism as a powerful discursive tool for constructing the future. The case of the museum gardens highlights three interrelated aspects of the production of ecological counter-futures: futures as knowledge, futures as (bio)diversity, and futures as survival. Drawing on ethnographic material and interviews with museum staff and volunteers, this paper contributes to the study of the temporalities of environmental violence and ecological resistance in Israel/Palestine

The Enforcement Of The Fourth Geneva Convention In The Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including Jerusalem

This article expresses a timely and most important subject. It concerns the implementation of international humanitarian law, that branch of law that has recently assumed an ever-growing prominence, as an expression of our generation\u27s ideal of the rule of law in international relations

Politique optimale de change pour la Tunisie

Transactions and uncertainty costs aside, economic theory suggests that a flexible exchange rate is the optimal choice for a small country that has a relatively large non-traded goods sector and for which the symmetric shocks are not important. The macroeconomic data for Tunisia covering the period 1961-1997 show that the non-traded goods sector is important. Two separate VAR models for Tunisia and France, the principal trading partner of Tunisia, were estimated. The models produced estimates of supply shocks and monetary and non-monetary demand shocks for each country. The study of the correlation of the shocks across the two countries shows that the symmetric shocks are not important. Accordingly, a flexible exchange rate is the optimal choice for Tunisia pending deeper economic integration of Tunisia in the European economy. Nonobstant les coûts de transactions et d’incertitude, la théorie économique suggère qu’un taux de change flexible soit le meilleur choix pour un petit pays dont le secteur des produits non échangeables est important et dans lequel les chocs symétriques sont peu importants. Utilisant des données macroéconomiques couvrant la période 1961-1997, on montre dans un premier temps que le secteur des produits non échangeables en Tunisie est important. Dans un deuxième temps on estime un modèle VAR pour la Tunisie et un autre pour la France. Ceci permet d’estimer des chocs d’offre et des chocs de demande monétaires et non monétaires qui ont affecté les deux pays durant la période 1961-1997. L’étude des corrélations entre les chocs montre que les chocs symétriques sont peu importants. On en conclut qu’il serait mieux pour la Tunisie de continuer à opérer avec un régime de taux de change flottant en attendant une intégration plus grande avec l’économie européenne.

Egyptian criminals in suits- analytical study on the criminology of white collar crimes: special focus on Egyptian cases

Criminology is the science of crime and until the year 1939 crimes were limited to street or conventional crimes committed by criminals of lower socio-economic segments in the society. After 1939 the American criminologist, Edwin Sutherland, has challenged this stereotype of crimes and criminals through his introduction of white-collar crimes that are perpetrated by elite offenders. However, the term has been introduced and utilized for more than seventy years across criminologists and law enforcement agencies it is still a foreign concept to the Egyptian legal system; hence the Criminal Law Code is predominately focused on mainstream criminalities. This absence of adequate regard for white-collar crimes in Egypt has caused the increase of it. Therefore, this thesis aims to take the initiative to highlight the importance and need for the criminology of white-collar crimes and fill this serious knowledge gap and demonstrate benefits to the scholarship of crime in Egypt and in specific to the Egyptian Criminal Law that seeks to generally serve the protection of higher social goods. This academic goal will be achieved by means of adopting a criminological perspective approach in analyzing two Egyptian cases of white-collar crimes that are regulated by the same applicable law Competition Law; the Cement Cartel case and Ezz Rebars Steel case. These two cases are characteristic of Egyptian white-collar criminality and also represent two different and distinctive types of white-collar crimes, corporate and state-corporate crimes. This study is also supported by a theoretical framework using the rational choice theory of white-collar crimes which decidedly represents the most comprehensive theoretical approach to investigate the underlying reasons of why and how the given elite criminals violated the law. Finally, investigating these cases from a criminological perspective triggers the question of whether the Egyptian legal system is in need of a new criminal legislation for white-collar crimes

Agent based modelling and simulation: An examination of customer retention in the UK mobile market

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Customer retention is an important issue for any business, especially in mature markets such as the UK mobile market where new customers can only be acquired from competitors. Different methods and techniques have been used to investigate customer retention including statistical methods and data mining. However, due to the increasing complexity of the mobile market, the effectiveness of these techniques is questionable. This study proposes Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation (ABMS) as a novel approach to investigate customer retention. ABMS is an emerging means of simulating behaviour and examining behavioural consequences. In outline, agents represent customers and agent relationships represent processes of agent interaction. This study follows the design science paradigm to build and evaluate a generic, reusable, agent-based (CubSim) model to examine the factors affecting customer retention based on data extracted from a UK mobile operator. Based on these data, two data mining models are built to gain a better understanding of the problem domain and to identify the main limitations of data mining. This is followed by two interrelated development cycles: (1) Build the CubSim model, starting with modelling customer interaction with the market, including interaction with the service provider and other competing operators in the market; and (2) Extend the CubSim model by incorporating interaction among customers. The key contribution of this study lies in using ABMS to identify and model the key factors that affect customer retention simultaneously and jointly. In this manner, the CubSim model is better suited to account for the dynamics of customer churn behaviour in the UK mobile market than all other existing models. Another important contribution of this study is that it provides an empirical, actionable insight on customer retention. In particular, and most interestingly, the experimental results show that applying a mixed customer retention strategy targeting both high value customers and customers with a large personal network outperforms the traditional customer retention strategies, which focuses only on the customer‘s value.This work is funded by the Brunel Department of Information Systems and Computing (DISC

Discourse Analysis of the Palestinian Authority President Abbas’ Address to the UN General Assembly in New York

This study aims to spot the features of the Palestinian President’s address to the UN General Assembly in New York from the perspective of discourse analysis