12,542 research outputs found
Cape Verde's infrastructure : a continental perspective
Cape Verde stands out in West Africa as a country whose economic geography poses major and unique challenges for infrastructure development. Its small population of half a million people is spread across a nine-island archipelago. The islands need complementary infrastructure in terms of roads, water, transport, ports, power, and ICT. Cape Verde already has well-developed infrastructure networks. Road density is relatively high, and most of the national network is paved. Almost all islands have port and airport facilities. Around 70 percent of the population has power and utility water. Indicators for ICT coverage -- penetration, bandwidth, submarine cable, private sector participation -- are relatively good. Nevertheless, prices for all services are exceptionally high. The quality of services is often deficient. At least half of the national road network is in poor condition; power supply is unreliable; and half of the population receives water from standposts. Cape Verde devotes around 50 million of that is lost each year to operations inefficiencies and underpricing. The country's main challenges are to improve infrastructure management and reduce high costs of services.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Infrastructure Economics,Energy Production and Transportation,E-Business,Banks&Banking Reform
Branching rate expansion around annihilating random walks
We present some exact results for branching and annihilating random walks. We
compute the nonuniversal threshold value of the annihilation rate for having a
phase transition in the simplest reaction-diffusion system belonging to the
directed percolation universality class. Also, we show that the accepted
scenario for the appearance of a phase transition in the parity conserving
universality class must be improved. In order to obtain these results we
perform an expansion in the branching rate around pure annihilation, a theory
without branching. This expansion is possible because we manage to solve pure
annihilation exactly in any dimension.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
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