Debt-deficit dynamics in India and macroeconomic effects: A structural approach

The structural approach adopted in this paper aims to trace out the evolution of public debt and deficits over a medium term horizon and its dynamic interaction with other key macroeconomic variables such as interest rate, inflation, trade gap and output. The policy simulations for India reveal that persistence of high level of fiscal deficits and debt may have adverse impact on interest rate, output, inflation and trade balance in the medium to long run. The passive evolution of fiscal deficits leads to an unstable regime over the medium to long term as debt-GDP ratio rises asymptotically. The findings of the paper imply that fiscal adjustment with compositional shifts in expenditure to achieve convergence not only leads to acceleration in the investment rate in the economy, it also facilitates monetary management by moderating inflation expectations and contributing to stable interest rate regime. The adjusted converging debt path is consistent with the higher growth trajectory. Such corrections also do not pose the challenge of growth inflation trade-off.Public debt; Fiscal deficit; Prices; Interest rates.

Gradient-orientation-based PCA subspace for novel face recognition

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Face recognition is an interesting and a challenging problem that has been widely studied in the field of pattern recognition and computer vision. It has many applications such as biometric authentication, video surveillance, and others. In the past decade, several methods for face recognition were proposed. However, these methods suffer from pose and illumination variations. In order to address these problems, this paper proposes a novel methodology to recognize the face images. Since image gradients are invariant to illumination and pose variations, the proposed approach uses gradient orientation to handle these effects. The Schur decomposition is used for matrix decomposition and then Schurvalues and Schurvectors are extracted for subspace projection. We call this subspace projection of face features as Schurfaces, which is numerically stable and have the ability of handling defective matrices. The Hausdorff distance is used with the nearest neighbor classifier to measure the similarity between different faces. Experiments are conducted with Yale face database and ORL face database. The results show that the proposed approach is highly discriminant and achieves a promising accuracy for face recognition than the state-of-the-art approaches

Electrodeposition and hot corrosion of nickel-based cermet coatings

Imperial Users onl

Determinants of net interest margin under regulatory requirements: an econometric study

Using data for the period 1995-96 to 1999-2000, this paper seeks to identify the factors influencing spreads of Scheduled Commercial Banks in India. Among the explanatory variables, we incorporate, in addition to the standard set of variables, regulatory requirement variables. Our analysis reveals that (i) size does not necessarily correlate with higher spread, and (ii) higher fee income enables banks to tolerate lower spreads. With regard to regulatory requirement variables, it is found that (i) capital plays an important role in affecting spreads of public sector banks, and (ii) non-performing assets is uniformly important across all bank groups in influencing spreads.Net interest margin; regulatory requirements; banking; India