Growth trends in the developing world : country forecasts and determinants

The authors present real per capita GDP growth forecasts for all developing countries for the period 2005-14. For 55 of these countries, representing major world regions and accounting for close to 80 percent of the developing world's GDP, they forecast the growth effects of the main forces underpinning growth, assuming that these evolve following past trends. The authors find that for the average developing country the largest growth dividend comes from continued improvement in public infrastructure, followed by the growth contributions of rising secondary school enrollment, trade openness, and financial deepening. The joint contribution of these four growth determinants to average, annual per capita GDP growth in the next decade is estimated to be 1 percentage point. Failure to keep improving public infrastructure alone could reduce this growth dividend by 50 percent. The forecasted growth contributions differ by country qualitatively and quantitatively.Achieving Shared Growth,Economic Theory&Research,Governance Indicators,Inequality,Economic Growth

Informants in Organizational Marketing Research

Organizational research frequently involves seeking judgmental data from multiple informants within organizations. Researchers are often faced with determining how many informants to survey, who those informants should be and (if more than one) how best to aggregate responses when disagreement exists between those responses. Using both recall and forecasting data from a laboratory study involving the MARKSTRAT simulation, we show that when there are multiple respondents who disagree, responses aggregated using confidence-based or competence-based weights outperform those with data-based weights, which in turn provide significant gains in estimation accuracy over simply averaging respondent reports. We then illustrate how these results can be used to determine the best number of respondents for a market research task as well as to provide an effective screening mechanism when seeking a single, best informant.screening;marketing research;aggregation;organizational research;survey research

The Impact of Channel Function Performance on Buyer-Seller Relationships in Marketing Channels

Distributors, across sectors and countries, are faced by the threat of disintermediation. In many industries, horizontal consolidation and advances in information technology have made it easier for manufacturers to bypass distributors and do business directly with consumers. Distributors have responded to this threat or other destructive acts in a number of different ways that can be represented through Hirschman's (1970) Exit-Voice-Loyalty framework. One additional response that distributors frequently adopt is developing countervailing power through dependence-balancing actions. These actions are designed to strengthen bonds with customers and often manifest themselves in the provision of improved channel services to customers. Does this strategy work? We seek to address this in our paper. Specifically, we examine the nature and magnitude of the direct and interactive effects of (a) the performance of marketing functions and services by a distributor and (b) the dependence structure of its relationship with its customers on different dimensions of relationship quality - satisfaction, trust, commitment and conflict. Of particular interest to us is the effect of functional performance on relationship quality in situations characterized by high relative dependence of the distributor on the customer - this closely approximates the situation that many distributors, faced by the threat of disintermediation, find themselves in. Hypotheses from our model are tested using data collected from the paint industry in the Netherlands and Belgium.buyer-seller relationships;channel management;channel services;relationship marketing;empirical

A city hall for Delhi and New Delhi (India)

Thesis (M.Arch)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1960.Accompanying drawings held by MIT Museum.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 44).by R. N. Kacker.M.Arc

A Survey of Binary Covering Arrays

Binary covering arrays of strength t are 0–1 matrices having the property that for each t columns and each of the possible 2[superscript t] sequences of t 0's and 1's, there exists a row having that sequence in that set of t columns. Covering arrays are an important tool in certain applications, for example, in software testing. In these applications, the number of columns of the matrix is dictated by the application, and it is desirable to have a covering array with a small number of rows. Here we survey some of what is known about the existence of binary covering arrays and methods of producing them, including both explicit constructions and search techniques

The Impact of Channel Function Performance on Buyer-Seller Relationships in Marketing Channels

Distributors, across sectors and countries, are faced by the threat of disintermediation. In many industries, horizontal consolidation and advances in information technology have made it easier for manufacturers to bypass distributors and do business directly with consumers. Distributors have responded to this threat or other destructive acts in a number of different ways that can be represented through Hirschman's (1970) Exit-Voice-Loyalty framework. One additional response that distributors frequently adopt is developing countervailing power through dependence-balancing actions. These actions are designed to strengthen bonds with customers and often manifest themselves in the provision of improved channel services to customers. Does this strategy work? We seek to address this in our paper. Specifically, we examine the nature and magnitude of the direct and interactive effects of (a) the performance of marketing functions and services by a distributor and (b) the dependence structure of its relationship with its customers on different dimensions of relationship quality - satisfaction, trust, commitment and conflict. Of particular interest to us is the effect of functional performance on relationship quality in situations characterized by high relative dependence of the distributor on the customer - this closely approximates the situation that many distributors, faced by the threat of disintermediation, find themselves in. Hypotheses from our model are tested using data collected from the paint industry in the Netherlands and Belgium

Informants in Organizational Marketing Research

Organizational research frequently involves seeking judgmental data from multiple informants within organizations. Researchers are often faced with determining how many informants to survey, who those informants should be and (if more than one) how best to aggregate responses when disagreement exists between those responses. Using both recall and forecasting data from a laboratory study involving the MARKSTRAT simulation, we show that when there are multiple respondents who disagree, responses aggregated using confidence-based or competence-based weights outperform those with data-based weights, which in turn provide significant gains in estimation accuracy over simply averaging respondent reports. We then illustrate how these results can be used to determine the best number of respondents for a market research task as well as to provide an effective screening mechanism when seeking a single, best informant

Social transfers and labor supply: Long run rvidence from South Africa

How do large social transfers affect labor supply? This study analyses the South African pension program to answer this question. I exploit a major demand shock - the South African recession that began in 2008 - in a regression discontinuity design to �nd prime aged adult labor supply falls in response to pension arrival in the household only during the recession for sectors and types of workers affected by the recession. Post-recession, these workers witness an increase in demand and respond by increasing supply. Pension payments consequently have small and statistically insignificant effects on labor supply, a result that contrasts starkly with all existing studies. I argue these results stem from the combination of two forces. When labor demand is weak, the opportunity cost of leisure falls and workers demand more leisure. If a household member draws a pension, with leisure being a normal good, leisure demand increases further

Reinforcement-Learned Lookahead Heuristics for Earth-Observing Satellites

Conventional Earth-observing satellites spend most of their time taking cloudy imagery as two-thirds of Earth’s surface is covered by clouds at any one time. To combat this, a mission concept called dynamic tasking has been proposed. In this mission, a low-resolution, wide field-of-view lookahead scans upcoming tasks. Modern computer vision and onboard compute can then rank these upcoming tasks, which can be used to dynamically re-optimize the schedule onboard. The vision system can additionally be used to add tasks into the schedule for low-frequency phenomena. While previous studies have focused on steerable lookahead instruments (e.g. radar) that can effectively be decoupled from body pointing, this work examines the use of a body-fixed lookahead sensor such as a conventional camera. The coupling of the lookahead sensor’s imaging space with the spacecraft’s attitude and the necessary settling time before primary sensor operation presents additional complications in scheduling. This work looks at using reinforcement learning to develop lookahead heuristics, as an input to a classical scheduler. The development of effective lookahead policies could enhance the capability of smaller spacecraft by facilitating low-cost dynamic tasking, thereby increasing the throughput of valuable data and bridging the gap between monitoring and tasked satellite missions

Correction due to finite speed of light in absolute gravimeters

Correction due to finite speed of light is among the most inconsistent ones in absolute gravimetry. Formulas reported by different authors yield corrections scattered up to 8 $\mu$Gal with no obvious reasons. The problem, though noted before, has never been studied, and nowadays the correction is rather postulated than rigorously proven. In this paper we make an attempt to revise the subject. Like other authors, we use physical models based on signal delays and the Doppler effect, however, in implementing the models we additionally introduce two scales of time associated with moving and resting reflectors, derive a set of rules to switch between the scales, and establish the equivalence of trajectory distortions as obtained from either time delay or distance progression. The obtained results enabled us to produce accurate correction formulas for different types of instruments, and to explain the differences in the results obtained by other authors. We found that the correction derived from the Doppler effect is accountable only for $\frac23$ of the total correction due to finite speed of light, if no signal delays are considered. Another major source of inconsistency was found in the tacit use of simplified trajectory models