Peak Energy and the Limits to China’s Economic Growth: Prospect of Energy Supply and Economic Growth from Now to 2050

This working paper evaluates the prospects for China’s energy supply and its impact on economic growth between 2008 and 2050. After considering China’s domestic potential of coal, oil, and gas production, the potential of energy imports from the rest of the world, as well as potential developments of renewable and nuclear energy, the author finds that China is likely to face an insurmountable energy crisis beyond 2020. Even with optimistic assumptions, drastic declines in the economic growth rate and the eventual end of economic growth cannot be avoided.Peak Oil; Peak Coal; Energy Crisis; Limits to Growth; Chinese Economy

Neoliberalism, Global Imbalances, and Stages of Capitalist Development

This paper examines certain structural macroeconomic relations in the neoliberal global economy. The current global economy rests upon three unsustainable trends: the debt-driven U.S. consumption expansion; China’s excessive investment expansion; and the large and rising U.S. current account deficits. When these trends are eventually reversed or corrected, there could be major upheavals in the world economy. The decline of neoliberalism may pave the way for a new set of economic, political, and social institutions.Neoliberalism, U.S. Economy, Chinese Economy, Imbalances, Long Waves

Simulation Factor Screen in Binary Response Models

To eliminate unimportant factors so that the remaining important factors can be further studied in later experimentation, screening experiments (which may be physical or simulation based) are typically performed. This thesis proposes a hybrid statistical procedure for efficient factor screening via simulation experiments. The hybrid procedure is particularly developed for cases where the system response is binary, as opposed to continuous; such a factor-screening procedure does not exist yet in the literature.;The proposed hybrid procedure integrates two screening methods: the sequential factorial design with multivariate sequential test (SFD-MT), which is newly developed in this work, and the modified controlled sequential bifurcation (CSB), which is adapted from the existing CSB method. At the beginning of the procedure, a pre-screening process is conducted to obtain the preliminary estimates of factor effects, and to determine whether SFD-MT or modified CSB will be used for factor screening. Then the selected screening method (either SFD-MT or modified CSB) are performed to identify the important factors based on simulation experiments. In both SFD-MT and CSB, the type I and type II errors are approximately controlled through appropriate hypothesis tests. The efficiency of the hybrid procedure over the CSB in the literature is demonstrated via empirical experiments

Rise of China and the demise of the capitalist world-economy: exploring the historical possibilities in the 21st century

Journal ArticleChina's rising importance in the capitalist world economy raises questions of world-historic significance. How is China's internal social structure likely to evolve as China assumes different positions in the existing world system? Will China's current regime of accumulation survive the potential pressures arising out of the transformation? How will other peripheral and semi-peripheral states be affected? Can the reemerging China centered civilization provide solutions to the problems left behind by U. S. hegemony? If not, how will the rise of China affect the underlying dynamics of the existing world system? The existing world system may have entered into a structural crisis. Can the system survive the rise of China? In the age of transition, instead of expecting the same pattern of systemic dynamics with which we have become familiar, it may be more appropriate to expect bifurcation, chaos, transformations, and the 'turns' and 'tricks' of history

A Metamodel-Based Monte Carlo Simulation Approach for Responsive Production Planning of Manufacturing Systems

Production planning is concerned with finding a release plan of jobs into the manufacturing system so that its actual outputs over time match the customer demand with the least cost. The biggest challenge of production planning lies in the difficulty to quantify the performance of a release plan, which is the necessary basis for plan optimization. Triggered by an input plan over a time horizon, the system outputs, work in process (WIP) and job departures, are non-stationary bivariate time series that interact with customer demand (another time series), resulting in the fulfillment/non-fulfillment of demand and in the holding cost of both WIP and finished-goods inventory. The relationship between a release plan and its resulting performance metrics (typically, mean/variance of the total cost and the demand fulfill rate is far from being adequately quantified in the existing literature of production planning. In this dissertation, a metamodel-based Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) method is developed to accurately capture the dynamic and stochastic behavior of a manufacturing system, and to allow for real-time evaluation of a release plan in terms of its performance metrics. This evaluation capability is embedded in a multi-objective optimization framework to enable the quick search of good (or optimum) release plans. The developed method has been applied to a scaled-down semiconductor fabrication system to demonstrate the quality of the metamodel-based MCS evaluation and the plan optimization results

Bayesian nonparametric modeling and its applications

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Bayesian nonparametric methods (or nonparametric Bayesian methods) take the benefit of unlimited parameters and unbounded dimensions to reduce the constraints on the parameter assumption and avoid over-fitting implicitly. They have proven to be extremely useful due to their flexibility and applicability to a wide range of problems. In this thesis, we study the Bayesain nonparametric theory with Lévy process and completely random measures (CRM). Several Bayesian nonparametric techniques are presented for computer vision and pattern recognition problems. In particular, our research and contributions focus on the following problems. Firstly, we propose a novel example-based face hallucination method, based on a nonparametric Bayesian model with the assumption that all human faces have similar local pixel structures. We use distance dependent Chinese restaurant process (ddCRP) to cluster the low-resolution (LR) face image patches and give a matrix-normal prior for learning the mapping dictionaries from LR to the corresponding high-resolution (HR) patches. The ddCRP is employed to assist in learning the clusters and mapping dictionaries without setting the number of clusters in advance, such that each dictionary can better reflect the details of the image patches. Experimental results show that our method is efficient and can achieve competitive performance for face hallucination problem. Secondly, we address sparse nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) problems by using a graph-regularized Beta process (BP) model. BP is a nonparametric method which lets itself naturally model sparse binary matrices with an infinite number of columns. In order to maintain the positivity of the factorized matrices, an exponential prior is proposed. The graph in our model regularizes the similar training samples having similar sparse coefficients. In this way, the structure of the data can be better represented. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on different databases. Thirdly, we consider face recognition problem by a nonparametric Bayesian model combined with Sparse Coding Recognition (SCR) framework. In order to get an appropriate dictionary with sparse coefficients, we use a graph regularized Beta process prior for the dictionary learning. The graph in our model regularizes training samples in a same class to have similar sparse coefficients and share similar dictionary atoms. In this way, the proposed method is more robust to noise and occlusion of the testing images. The models in this thesis can also find many other applications like super-resolution, image recognition, text analysis, image compressive sensing and so on

China: six years after Tiananmen

Journal ArticleSix years ago, immediately after the democratic movement was repressed in China, almost all Chinese liberal intellectuals and Western observers predicted that, without "political reform," "economic reform" would fail in China. Despite their warnings, tens of billions of dollars have continued to pour into China. Now it is obvious that the capitalists themselves had a better estimate of Chinese reality than their theoreticians. In fact, judging from subsequent events, it could be said that the army's success in breaking up the Tiananmen demonstration and attacking its working-class supporters helped pave the way for further capitalist development

Socialization of Risks without Socialization of Investment: The Minsky Paradox and the Structural Contradiction of Big Government Capitalism

A big government sector is indispensable for the normal operations of modern capitalist economy. However, the very success of the big government institutions encourages private investors to engage in excessive risk-taking activities, leading to growing financial fragility and frequent financial crises. The crises necessitate government interventions, forcing the government to run large deficits during recessions. These deficits, however, are not offset by surpluses during expansions. As a result, there is a tendency for the government debt to rise in relation to GDP. The government debt-GDP ratios cannot keep rising indefinitely. Beyond certain point, the debt-GDP ratio could be so high that the government’s ability to intervene with and stabilize the economy would be severely undermined. This may be characterized as the structural contradiction of big government capitalism.

U.S., China, and the Unraveling of Global Imbalances

Since 2003, world economic growth has accelerated and there has been strong improvement in corporate profitability. The U.S. current account deficits and China’s dramatic economic rise have been the two pillars underpinning the current global economic expansion. The coming years are likely to see the unraveling of the external and internal imbalances of the U.S. economy and the Chinese economy has been characterized by excessive dependence on investment and exports. Whether global economic expansion can be sustained to a large extent depends on whether the Chinese economy can be successfully restructured to be led by domestic consumption and to effectively address the question of long-term ecological sustainability.Neoliberalism; Global Economy; US Current Account Deficit; Chinese Economy; Peak Oil

China: hyper-development and environmental crisis

Journal ArticleChina's spectacular economic growth has been one of the most dramatic developments in the global economy over the past quarter century. Between 1978 and 2004 the Chinese economy expanded at an annual rate of 9.4 per cent. No other large economy has ever grown so rapidly for so long in the economic history of the world. As a result, measured by purchasing power parity, China now accounts for about 15 per cent of the world output, and about one-third of the world economic growth that has taken place since 2000. However, China's economic growth has taken place at an enormous social and environmental price. A rapid increase in social and economic inequality, environmental degradation, mounting rural crisis, growing urban unemployment and poverty, pervasive government corruption, deteriorating public services (especially in basic education and health care), as well as escalating social unrest, have grown to dangerous levels and could potentially lead to an explosive situation. We focus in this essay on the environmental impact of accumulation and profit-oriented development in China. Given its enormous population and its growing importance in the global economy, the implications of China's environmental crisis go far beyond China itself. It has become an important and growing element in the developing global environmental crisis