What determines the quality of institutions?

In trying to explain institutional quality, different authors have come to conflicting conclusions. In tackling the problem themselves, the authors show three things. First, openness is positively and pretty robustly associated with institutional quality. To minimize selection bias, the authors use data sets with the greatest cross-country coverage, though they also test the significance of the variables for smaller sample sizes. The results confirm that both natural and policy measures of openness are important. Concentration of trade in natural resource exports continues to be associated with poor institutional quality after openness in trade is accounted for. Second,"social"variables, such as income inequality or ethnic diversity, are not associated with institutional quality. The significance of the inequality variable disappears when continent dummy variables are included for Africa and Latin America. Third, features of specific institutions, such as freedom of the press and checks and balances in the political system, are positively associated with overall perceptions of institutional quality. These findings hold strongly across different data sets and samples even after the authors control for the variables commonly used in the literature.Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Institution Analysis&Assessment,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Governance Indicators,Economic Policy, Institutions and Governance,Public Institution Analysis&Assessment,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis

An overview on the application of FRP composites in piling system

Traditional pile materials such as steel, concrete and timber have limited service life when used in harsh marine environment. Problems coupled with these piles include deterioration of wood, corrosion of steel and degradation of reinforced concrete. To offset this problem, a relatively new trend in deep foundation industry is to use a fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) composite materials as a substitute in piling system. The fundamental advantages of FRP composites compared to other pile materials include lightweight, high strength and possess resistance against corrosion. However, composite materials face hurdle because they do not have a long track record of use in civil engineering application particularly in piling system. To partly address this obstacle, this paper presents an overview in testing, design, and practice of composite piles. Importance is given to history, material types and properties, structural behaviour, geotechnical performance, and durability of composite piles

Trade and the Environment

Trade, the exchange of goods and services across countries, is often viewed as an engine of economic growth. Benefits of liberalized trade include access to a larger variety of goods and services to consumers, easier access to foreign technologies, access to larger markets for producers, and increased efficiency in resource allocation. The impact of trade on the environment, however, is a contentious issue; air and water pollution, the degradation of natural habitats and loss of species, and global pollutants, particularly carbon dioxide emissions, are major concerns.Environmental Economics and Policy, International Relations/Trade,

When Government Spending Serves the Elites: Consequences for Economic Growth in a Context of Market Imperfections

Government spending should be regarded as a social and political phenomenon, not merely as a technical choice. We argue that there is an implicit contract between the organized elites and politicians which often leads to a pro-elite allocation of public resources. A natural and simple taxonomy of government spending follows from this view: spending in public goods broadly defined which mitigate market failures versus spending in non-social subsidies, mainly a vehicle to serve the elites. We theoretically and empirically show that pro-elite spending biases are costly in terms of economic growth. The empirical findings are exceptionally robust.government spending, economic growth, market imperfections, investment, subsidies, International Development, Labor and Human Capital, Political Economy, Public Economics,

Transfer Learning with Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for Pneumonia Detection using Chest X-ray

Pneumonia is a life-threatening disease, which occurs in the lungs caused by either bacterial or viral infection. It can be life-endangering if not acted upon in the right time and thus an early diagnosis of pneumonia is vital. The aim of this paper is to automatically detect bacterial and viral pneumonia using digital x-ray images. It provides a detailed report on advances made in making accurate detection of pneumonia and then presents the methodology adopted by the authors. Four different pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)- AlexNet, ResNet18, DenseNet201, and SqueezeNet were used for transfer learning. 5247 Bacterial, viral and normal chest x-rays images underwent preprocessing techniques and the modified images were trained for the transfer learning based classification task. In this work, the authors have reported three schemes of classifications: normal vs pneumonia, bacterial vs viral pneumonia and normal, bacterial and viral pneumonia. The classification accuracy of normal and pneumonia images, bacterial and viral pneumonia images, and normal, bacterial and viral pneumonia were 98%, 95%, and 93.3% respectively. This is the highest accuracy in any scheme than the accuracies reported in the literature. Therefore, the proposed study can be useful in faster-diagnosing pneumonia by the radiologist and can help in the fast airport screening of pneumonia patients.Comment: 13 Figures, 5 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2003.1314

Pollution and the State: The Role of the Structure of Government

Government spending has significant environmental implications. This paper analyzes the effect of the allocation of government spending between public goods broadly defined and private goods or non-social subsidies on air and water pollution. The theoretical model predicts that a reallocation of expenditures from private subsidies to public goods improves environmental quality by reducing production pollution. We estimate an empirical model that shows that such a reallocation causes a significant reduction in air pollutants namely sulfur dioxide and lead and an improvement in water quality measures including dissolved oxygen and biological oxygen demand.