10,194 research outputs found
Agricultural growth, poverty, and nutrition in Tanzania:
Rapid economic growth has failed to significantly improve poverty and nutrition outcomes in Tanzania. This raises concerns over a decoupling of growth, poverty, and nutrition. We link recent production trends to household incomes using a regionalized, dynamic computable general equilibrium and microsimulation model. Results indicate that the structure of economic growth—not the level—is currently constraining the rate of poverty reduction in Tanzania. Most importantly, agricultural growth trends have been driven by larger-scale farmers and by crops grown in only a few regions of the country. The slow expansion of food crops and livestock also explains the weak relationship between agricultural growth and nutrition outcomes. Additional model simulations find that accelerating agricultural growth, particularly in maize, greatly strengthens the growth–poverty relationship and enhances households' caloric availability. We conclude that low productivity, market constraints (including downstream agroprocessing), and barriers to import substitution for major food crops are among the more binding constraints to reducing poverty and improving nutrition in Tanzania.economic growth, Poverty, Nutrition, household incomes, Computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling, Agricultural growth, Microsimulation model, livestock, Food crops, low productivity, market constraints, Development strategies,
Equilibrium Bank Runs
We analyze a banking system in which the class of feasible deposit contracts, or mechanisms, is broad. The mechanisms must satisfy a sequential service constraint, but partial or full suspension of convertibility is allowed. Consumers must be willing to deposit, ex ante. We show, by examples, that under the so-called "optimal contract," the post-deposit game can have a run equilibrium. Given a "propensity" to run, triggered by sunspots, the optimal contract for the full pre-deposit game can be consistent with runs that occur with positive probability. Thus, the Diamond-Dybvig framework can explain bank runs, as emerging in equilibrium under the optimal deposit contract.
Constraining new resonant physics with top spin polarisation information
We provide a comprehensive analysis of the power of including top
quark-polarisation information to kinematically challenging resonance
searches, for which ATLAS and CMS start losing sensitivity. Following the
general modeling and analysis strategies pursued by the experiments, we analyse
the semi-leptonic and the di-lepton channels and show that including
polarisation information can lead to large improvements in the limit setting
procedures with large data sets. This will allow us to set limits for parameter
choices where sensitivity from is not sufficient. This highlights
the importance of spin observables as part of a more comprehensive set of
observables to gain sensitivity to BSM resonance searches.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure
Distributed representations accelerate evolution of adaptive behaviours
Animals with rudimentary innate abilities require substantial learning to transform those abilities into useful skills, where a skill can be considered as a set of sensory - motor associations. Using linear neural network models, it is proved that if skills are stored as distributed representations, then within- lifetime learning of part of a skill can induce automatic learning of the remaining parts of that skill. More importantly, it is shown that this " free- lunch'' learning ( FLL) is responsible for accelerated evolution of skills, when compared with networks which either 1) cannot benefit from FLL or 2) cannot learn. Specifically, it is shown that FLL accelerates the appearance of adaptive behaviour, both in its innate form and as FLL- induced behaviour, and that FLL can accelerate the rate at which learned behaviours become innate
Topological inference for EEG and MEG
Neuroimaging produces data that are continuous in one or more dimensions.
This calls for an inference framework that can handle data that approximate
functions of space, for example, anatomical images, time--frequency maps and
distributed source reconstructions of electromagnetic recordings over time.
Statistical parametric mapping (SPM) is the standard framework for whole-brain
inference in neuroimaging: SPM uses random field theory to furnish -values
that are adjusted to control family-wise error or false discovery rates, when
making topological inferences over large volumes of space. Random field theory
regards data as realizations of a continuous process in one or more dimensions.
This contrasts with classical approaches like the Bonferroni correction, which
consider images as collections of discrete samples with no continuity
properties (i.e., the probabilistic behavior at one point in the image does not
depend on other points). Here, we illustrate how random field theory can be
applied to data that vary as a function of time, space or frequency. We
emphasize how topological inference of this sort is invariant to the geometry
of the manifolds on which data are sampled. This is particularly useful in
electromagnetic studies that often deal with very smooth data on scalp or
cortical meshes. This application illustrates the versatility and simplicity of
random field theory and the seminal contributions of Keith Worsley
(1951--2009), a key architect of topological inference.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS337 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Implications of the July 2004 WTO Framework Agreement for Canadian Agriculture
International Relations/Trade,
Canadian Agriculture and the Doha Development Agenda: The Challenges
The WTO Framework Agreement that negotiators accepted in July 2004, and built upon at the 2005 Hong Kong Ministerial meeting provides a guide to the commitments a Doha Development Agenda agreement may contain. These commitments will relate to direct and indirect export subsidies, domestic support and market access. Commitments in each of these areas will have implications for Canadian agriculture. This article explores these implications for supply management, the Canadian Wheat Board and domestic support programs.Canadian agriculture, Doha, trade liberalization, WTO, International Relations/Trade,
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