FOOD DEMAND IN URBAN CHINA: AN APPLICATION OF A MULTI-STAGE CENSORED DEMAND SYSTEM

Since its economic reform, China has changed significantly as it makes its transition from a centrally-planned to a consumer-oriented economy and thus has gradually increased household income and changed consumption patterns in urban China. This study attempts to provide an in-depth understanding of heterogeneous consumer patterns in urban China by developing a multi-stage censored demand system using household data. Specifically, this study develops an economic model considering heterogeneous consumption patterns across households and commodity groupings and estimates econometric models of a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QAIDS) using household data. Three methodologies are integrated including constructing a multi-stage demand system, incorporating demographic variables using the 'ordinary budget share scaling and translation' (OBSSAT), and employing a two-step estimator to deal with zero consumption problems. This study covers three provinces in China, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Guangdong, and uses household data from 1998 provided by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Based on the Chinese food guide pyramid, a three-level utility tree is constructed dividing 18 food items into five subgroups. An empirical analysis is conducted by estimating econometric models to examine the impact of the potential factors, e.g., income and demographic variables, on food demand. The results show the uniqueness of this study in three dimensions. First, using the OBSSAT helps answer the question of "how to break down the heterogeneous consumption patterns in urban China?" In addition, our findings also show that China should be treated as several markets instead of one. Second, the QAIDS has not previously been applied to the study of food demand in urban China. Our results show that the QAIDS is superior to the AIDS; however, the degree of importance for the quadratic term decreases as demographic and censoring effects are considered in a demand system. Finally, 18 food items are broken down into five food subgroups and are estimated by a multi-stage censored QAIDS. Including this large food bundle in a demand system provides us detailed information of the relationship among food items.Demand and Price Analysis,

TRANSLATING AND SCALING OF BUDGET SHARES: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF CHINESE URBAN HOUSEHOLD DEMAND FOR MEAT

The importance of incorporating demographic effects into a demand system is demonstrated using Lewbel's unified functions. In this study, the empirical analysis of meat demand in urban China shows the benefit of utilizing the translation and scaling of budget shares.Demand and Price Analysis,

Patient acceptability, safety and access : A balancing act for selecting age-appropriate oral dosage forms for paediatric and geriatric populations

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The selection and design of age-appropriate formulations intended for use in paediatric and geriatric patients are dependent on multiple factors affecting patient acceptability, safety and access. The development of an economic and effective product relies on a balanced consideration of the risks and benefits of these factors. This review provides a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of oral dosage forms considering key aspects of formulation design including dosage considerations, ease of use, tolerability and safety, manufacturing complexity, stability, supply and cost. Patient acceptability has been examined utilising an evidence-based approach to evaluate regulatory guidance and literature. Safety considerations including excipients and potential risk of administration errors of the different dosage forms are also discussed, together with possible manufacturing and supply challenges. Age appropriate drug product design should consider and compare i) acceptability ii) safety and iii) access, although it is important to recognise that these factors must be balanced against each other, and in some situations a compromise may need to be reached when selecting an age-appropriate formulation.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Plug-and-Play Methods Provably Converge with Properly Trained Denoisers

Plug-and-play (PnP) is a non-convex framework that integrates modern denoising priors, such as BM3D or deep learning-based denoisers, into ADMM or other proximal algorithms. An advantage of PnP is that one can use pre-trained denoisers when there is not sufficient data for end-to-end training. Although PnP has been recently studied extensively with great empirical success, theoretical analysis addressing even the most basic question of convergence has been insufficient. In this paper, we theoretically establish convergence of PnP-FBS and PnP-ADMM, without using diminishing stepsizes, under a certain Lipschitz condition on the denoisers. We then propose real spectral normalization, a technique for training deep learning-based denoisers to satisfy the proposed Lipschitz condition. Finally, we present experimental results validating the theory.Comment: Published in the International Conference on Machine Learning, 201

Read/write holographic memory versus silicon storage

This paper compares the read/write holographic memory with silicon storage on issues of cost, density, size and speed. With a photorefractive crystal on top of a silicon interface, the holographic memory is of cost efficiency, volume compactness and fast data accessing. Key challenges to implement the competitive holographic memory are discussed

International friends and enemies

We develop sufficient statistics of countries’ bilateral income and welfare exposure to foreign productivity shocks that are exact for small shocks in the class of models with a constant trade elasticity. For large shocks, we characterize the quality of the approximation, and show it to be almost exact. We compute these sufficient statistics for over 140 countries from 1970-2012. We show that our exposure measures depend on market-size, cross-substitution and cost of living effects. As countries become greater economic friends in terms of welfare exposure, they become greater political friends in terms of United Nations voting and strategic rivalries

Productivity growth in one country affects the relative income and welfare of its trade partners

Large-scale changes in relative economic size necessarily involve heightened political tension and realignments, write Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen Reddin