The Direct Substitution Between Government and Private Consumption in East Asia

We investigate empirically the extent to which government consumption substitutes for private consumption in nine East Asia countries. Panel cointegrating regression uncovers a significantly positive elasticity of substitution between government and private consumption, implying on average government and private consumption are substitutes in East Asia. Country-by-country analysis, however, reveals diversity in the substitutability estimates. The four North East countries %u2013 China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea %u2013 tend to share similar and moderate values of the substitution elasticity. For the five ASEAN countries studied in this paper, the relationship between private and government consumption vary substantially, both in the sign and magnitude of the elasticity of substitution. Private and government consumption in Malaysia and Thailand are strong substitutes, but they are found to be complements in Indonesia and Singapore. In between is the Philippines which has a near zero elasticity of substitution.

Hong Kong's Currency Board and Changing Monetary Regimes

The paper discusses the historical background and institutional details of Hong Kong's currency board. We argue that its experience provides a good opportunity to test the macroeconomic implications of the currency board regime. Using the method of Blanchard and Quah (1989), we show that the parameters of the structural equations and the characteristics of supply and demand shocks have significantly changed since adopting the regime. Variance decomposition and impulse response analyses indicate Hong Kong's currency board is less susceptible to supply shocks, but demand shocks can cause greater short-term volatility under the system. The decent performance of Hong Kong's currency board is due mainly to the stable fiscal policy of its government. Counter-factual exercises also show that three-fourths of the reduction in observed output volatility and two-thirds of that in observed inflation volatility are explained by the adoption of the currency board, while the remainder is explained by changes in the external environment. The improvement in stability does not rule out the possibility of monetary collapse, however.

Advanced communications payload for mobile applications

An advanced satellite payload is proposed for single hop linking of mobile terminals of all classes as well as Very Small Aperture Terminal's (VSAT's). It relies on an intensive use of communications on-board processing and beam hopping for efficient link design to maximize capacity and a large satellite antenna aperture and high satellite transmitter power to minimize the cost of the ground terminals. Intersatellite links are used to improve the link quality and for high capacity relay. Power budgets are presented for links between the satellite and mobile, VSAT, and hub terminals. Defeating the effects of shadowing and fading requires the use of differentially coherent demodulation, concatenated forward error correction coding, and interleaving, all on a single link basis

Chow's Method of Optimal Control: A Numerical Solution

Method