Central Asia: Problems of External Debt and Its Sustainability

This paper is devoted to one of the most urgent problems of Central Asian economies in transition, i.e. external debt and its sustainability within systemic transformation process. On the basis of vast current statistical data the problems of structure and dynamics of external debt are analysed and some policy recommendations are made. Basic transfer equations and two-gap models are used as tools to measure external debt. The paper attempts to find solutions considering both specific causes of the external debt itself and debt problems via related balance of payments issues. In conlcusion, it emphasized the necessity to deal with external debt through policies in all spheres of debt management, foreign trade and the flow of international financial resources implemented simultaneously. It proves that only the cumulative effect of all measures will allow the rather complex and persistent character of external debt to be overcome.Central Asian Independent States, External Debt, Indebtedness Indicators, Debt Sustainability

Codicological Analysis of Manuscripts of “Mukaddamatu-l-Adab” of Mahmud Zamakhshari in the Funds of the World

The scientific heritage of Mahmoud Zamahshari in the field of linguistics, lexicology, and literary studies consists of approximately 70 works. In the scientific heritage of the scientist, a special place is occupied by the work Mukaddamata-l-adab. This work, recognized as the first multilingual dictionary, contains Arabic-Persian-Turkish trilingual, Arabic-Persian-Turkish-Mongolian four-language manuscripts. The work consists of five parts: the first part is devoted to nouns, the second part to the verb, and the words derived from it. Its third part consists of grammatical rules regarding auxiliary words, the fourth part - declension of nouns, and the fifth part - conjugations of verbs. The world funds store copies of the work, consisting of five parts, as well as individual manuscripts of grammatical parts. The vocabulary parts of a work are of great volume and great scientific importance. It should be noted that the Turkic dictionary of the work, including Turkic words, is one of the unexplored and relevant topics in world linguistics. 10 rare manuscripts of the dictionary Mukaddamatu-l-adab are stored in Tashkent funds. To date, 62 copies have been discovered, which are stored in the funds of various countries of the world. Most of them were copied in the XIII-XIV centuries and are an important source for studying the rich semantic features of the Turkic language. The most ancient manuscript of the work is considered to be the Arabic-Persian-Turkish dictionary, copied in 1257 in Khorezm, a copy of which is stored in the Sulaymaniyah Foundation in Turkey. The only copy of the Arabic-Persian-Turkic-Mongolian four-language manuscript of this work in the world, copied in 1492, is stored in the State Museum of Literature of Uzbekistan

Foreign Trade of Central Asian Independent States: What is the main trend- Globalization and Regionalization or Re-integration?

Assessing the most recent data on the foreign trade of the Central Asian states and evaluation its main trends after their independence, the author argues that despite of lack of solid framework the tendency for globalization and regionalization hash been stronger compared to restoration of traditional ties. Elimination of existing institutional, infrastructural and other impediments, as well as proper multilateral regional initiatives could serve for further increase of trade within the region and beyond it both with neighboring countries and the rest of the world. Diversification and optimal combination of different directions of trade tailored according to specific circumstances of each country will serve the best for its development needs.

EControl: Fast Distributed Optimization with Compression and Error Control

Modern distributed training relies heavily on communication compression to reduce the communication overhead. In this work, we study algorithms employing a popular class of contractive compressors in order to reduce communication overhead. However, the naive implementation often leads to unstable convergence or even exponential divergence due to the compression bias. Error Compensation (EC) is an extremely popular mechanism to mitigate the aforementioned issues during the training of models enhanced by contractive compression operators. Compared to the effectiveness of EC in the data homogeneous regime, the understanding of the practicality and theoretical foundations of EC in the data heterogeneous regime is limited. Existing convergence analyses typically rely on strong assumptions such as bounded gradients, bounded data heterogeneity, or large batch accesses, which are often infeasible in modern machine learning applications. We resolve the majority of current issues by proposing EControl, a novel mechanism that can regulate error compensation by controlling the strength of the feedback signal. We prove fast convergence for EControl in standard strongly convex, general convex, and nonconvex settings without any additional assumptions on the problem or data heterogeneity. We conduct extensive numerical evaluations to illustrate the efficacy of our method and support our theoretical findings