Total Factor Productivity growth, Technological Progress, and Efficiency Changes: Empirical Evidence from Canadian Manufacturing Industries

As productivity (growth) appears to be the single most important determinant of a nation’s living standard or its level of real income over long periods of time, it is important to better understand the sources of productivity growth. In Canada, total factor productivity (TFP) growth is the major contributing factor (relative to changes in capital intensity) to labour productivity growth, particularly in manufacturing sector. However, the TFP gap is also the main source of labour productivity gap between Canada and other industrialized (OECD) countries in recent years. In this paper, a stochastic frontier production model is applied to Canadian manufacturing industries to investigate the sources of TFP growth. Using a comprehensive panel data set of eighteen industries over the period 1990-2005 and the approach proposed by Kumbhakar et al. (1991) and Kumbhakar and Lovell (2000), we decompose TFP growth into technological progress, changes in technical efficiency, changes in allocative efficiency and scale effects. The decomposition reveals that during the period under study, technological progress has been the main driving force of productivity growth, while negative efficiency changes observed in certain industries have contributed to reduce average productivity growth. In addition, our empirical results show that research and development (R&D) expenditure and information and communications technology (ICT) investment, as well as trade openness exert a positive impact on productivity growth through the channel of efficiency gains. We argue that the decomposition carried out in this study may be very helpful to elicit the correct diagnosis of Canada’s productivity problem and develop effective policies to reverse the situation, and thereby reduce Canada’s lagging productivity gap.Canadian manufacturing, Stochastic frontier, TFP growth, Efficiency changes.

A study of high calcium limestone around Lenggong Perak to produce type-G Portland cement

This project carried out on Portland cement using high calcium limestone, and other minor raw materials such as clay and iron ore. The raw materials were obtained from a local rock in Lenggong in Perak, Malaysia. Composition of raw materials and mineral phase were investigated or tested by XRF. Portland cement is primary construction materials widely used in oil and gas wells specially class G Portland cement. Portland cement at least to comply with the standards set by the American Petroleum Institute (API). Chemical compositions of limestone, clay, iron ore and raw materials were determined. Modulus of mixture of raw materials was fixed in IM is 1.7, SM is 2.4 and LSM is 9.4. Raw materials were crushed and ground to fine powder to form a mixture raw material and then put in furnace where it is heated and burning to form Portland cement clinker. From the expriremmtal results, the four main Portland cement are CS3, CS2, C3A and C4AF. ii

Understanding Africa’s Food Security Challenges

Africa, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in particular, has for more than 10 years recorded a steady economic growth since the advent of the new millennium. Yet, despite this stellar economic growth, it faces challenges such as rapid population growth, persistent economic inequality, climate change threats, droughts, youth unemployment, undernourishment, and food insecurity. Understanding the state of food security in Africa, and addressing the above-mentioned challenges, should be the highest priority for Africa’s Political Leadership. Not doing so will forever make Africa fail to achieve a sustainable economic development and create an inclusive shared-prosperity for its people. The African Union (AU), as well as respective national governments and regional organizations, and the international community at large, have in recent decades launched a multitude of policy initiatives aimed at addressing and tackling Africa’s food insecurity and nutrition challenges. Despite those efforts and commitments by the disparate stakeholders, much remains to be done. This chapter presents Africa’s food security and nutrition challenges, and sheds light on the climate change threats and potential consequences of the rapid population growth on Africa’s food security. The chapter concludes with policy recommendations and proposals and makes points about Africa’s bright prospects if food security were to be achieved

Density Functional Theory Study of Dry Reforming of Methane

the recent years, the global warming effects are being catastrophic and they start hitting new areas. These effects have a direct relation with the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. CO2 and other greenhouse could be utilized as energy sources by capturing and utilizing them. Dry reforming of methane is one of them and it has economic feasibility that can be commercialized. In this study, density functional theory calculations were performed to study the promising dry reforming process on Ni111 surface by using SIESTA simulation package. SIESTA is considered to be fast reliable way to perform DFT calculations. Moreover, counterpoise correction was used in order to improve the accuracy. The calculations were performed for different potential active sites and orientations. The dissociation of CH4 and CO2 and their possible pathways were investigated in order to understand the kinetic of the process. The first CH4 dissociation was found to be the hard step to begin with. Horizontal CO2 is more favorable for its adsorption on Ni111. In this study, the adsorption energies were calculated using SIESTA and the results were tuned up using van der Waal counterpoise correction. Four different sites and orientations were selected to study the adsorption and know the most active site among them. To produce syngas from DRM, there are a lot of transitional molecules that need to be studied to determine the rate-determining step and these molecules affect the pathway of the reaction. This study shows that carbon can be adsorbed on the surface and that limits the active sites and deactivating the catalyst. This study has found that Ni-based catalysts can be considered as the optimum metals to be used in DRM among the transition metals. Noble metals were not considered due to their lack of economic feasibility even though they give more favorable results

Semantic-Based, Scalable, Decentralized and Dynamic Resource Discovery for Internet-Based Distributed System

Resource Discovery (RD) is a key issue in Internet-based distributed sytems such as grid. RD is about locating an appropriate resource/service type that matches the user's application requirements. This is very important, as resource reservation and task scheduling are based on it. Unfortunately, RD in grid is very challenging as resources and users are distributed, resources are heterogeneous in their platforms, status of the resources is dynamic (resources can join or leave the system without any prior notice) and most recently the introduction of a new type of grid called intergrid (grid of grids) with the use of multi middlewares. Such situation requires an RD system that has rich interoperability, scalability, decentralization and dynamism features. However, existing grid RD systems have difficulties to attain these features. Not only that, they lack the review and evaluation studies, which may highlight the gap in achieving the required features. Therefore, this work discusses the problem associated with intergrid RD from two perspectives. First, reviewing and classifying the current grid RD systems in such a way that may be useful for discussing and comparing them. Second, propose a novel RD framework that has the aforementioned required RD features. In the former, we mainly focus on the studies that aim to achieve interoperability in the first place, which are known as RD systems that use semantic information (semantic technology). In particular, we classify such systems based on their qualitative use of the semantic information. We evaluate the classified studies based on their degree of accomplishment of interoperability and the other RD requirements, and draw the future research direction of this field. Meanwhile in the latter, we name the new framework as semantic-based scalable decentralized dynamic RD. The framework further contains two main components which are service description, and service registration and discovery models. The earlier consists of a set of ontologies and services. Ontologies are used as a data model for service description, whereas the services are to accomplish the description process. The service registration is also based on ontology, where nodes of the service (service providers) are classified to some classes according to the ontology concepts, which means each class represents a concept in the ontology. Each class has a head, which is elected among its own class I nodes/members. Head plays the role of a registry in its class and communicates with I the other heads of the classes in a peer to peer manner during the discovery process. We further introduce two intelligent agents to automate the discovery process which are Request Agent (RA) and Description Agent (DA). Eaclj. node is supposed to have both agents. DA describes the service capabilities based on the ontology, and RA I carries the service requests based on the ontology as well. We design a service search I algorithm for the RA that starts the service look up from the class of request origin first, then to the other classes. We finally evaluate the performance of our framework ~ith extensive simulation experiments, the result of which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed system in satisfying the required RD features (interoperability, scalability, decentralization and dynamism). In short, our main contributions are outlined new key taxonomy for the semantic-based grid RD studies; an interoperable semantic description RD component model for intergrid services metadata representation; a semantic distributed registry architecture for indexing service metadata; and an agent-qased service search and selection algorithm. Vll