The Taylor Rule and the Macroeconomic Performance in Pakistan

A widely agreed proposition in modern economics is that policy rules have greater advantage over discretion in improving economic performance. Simple monetary policy instrument rules are feasible options for developing countries lacking the pre-requisites for more sophisticated targeting rules. Notwithstanding the focus of modern literature on the issue, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has never declared itself to be following any type of rule. Surprisingly, this topic has remained out of research focus (among the academia and the practitioners) in Pakistan. This is the first attempt to deal with a rulebased monetary policy strategy in the case of the SBP. We have estimated the Taylor rule and simulated the economy using this rule as a monetary policy strategy. Our results indicate that the SBP has not been following the Taylor rule. In fact, the actual policy can be taken as an extreme deviation from it. On the other hand, counterfactual simulation confirms that macroeconomic performance can be improved, in terms of stability in inflation and output, when a simple Taylor rule is adopted. In this regard the parameter values (especially the inflation target) in the rule must be set according to the conditions of the economy under consideration rather than by relying on the ones suggested by the Taylor rule.Taylor Rule, Macroeconomic Performance, Counterfactual Simulation

The Taylor Rule and the Macroeconomic Performance in Pakistan

A widely agreed proposition in modern economics is that policy rules have greater advantage over discretion in improving economic performance. Simple monetary policy instrument rules are feasible options for developing countries lacking the pre-requisites for more sophisticated targeting rules. Notwithstanding the focus of modern literature on the issue, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has never declared itself to be following any type of rule. Surprisingly, this topic has remained out of research focus (among the academia and the practitioners) in Pakistan. This is the first attempt to deal with a rule-based monetary policy strategy in the case of the SBP. We have estimated the Taylor rule and simulated the economy using this rule as a monetary policy strategy. Our results indicate that the SBP has not been following the Taylor rule. In fact, the actual policy can be taken as an extreme deviation from it. On the other hand, counterfactual simulation confirms that macroeconomic performance can be improved, in terms of stability in inflation and output, when a simple Taylor rule is adopted. In this regard the parameter values (especially the inflation target) in the rule must be set according to the conditions of the economy under consideration rather than by relying on the ones suggested by the Taylor rule.Taylor Rule, Macroeconomic Performance, Counterfactual Simulation

The scheduling of manufacturing systems using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in order to find optimal/near-optimal solutions.

This thesis aims to review and analyze the scheduling problem in general and Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) in particular and the solution techniques applied to these problems. The JSSP is the most general and popular hard combinational optimization problem in manufacturing systems. For the past sixty years, an enormous amount of research has been carried out to solve these problems. The literature review showed the inherent shortcomings of solutions to scheduling problems. This has directed researchers to develop hybrid approaches, as no single technique for scheduling has yet been successful in providing optimal solutions to these difficult problems, with much potential for improvements in the existing techniques. The hybrid approach complements and compensates for the limitations of each individual solution technique for better performance and improves results in solving both static and dynamic production scheduling environments. Over the past years, hybrid approaches have generally outperformed simple Genetic Algorithms (GAs). Therefore, two novel priority heuristic rules are developed: Index Based Heuristic and Hybrid Heuristic. These rules are applied to benchmark JSSP and compared with popular traditional rules. The results show that these new heuristic rules have outperformed the traditional heuristic rules over a wide range of benchmark JSSPs. Furthermore, a hybrid GA is developed as an alternate scheduling approach. The hybrid GA uses the novel heuristic rules in its key steps. The hybrid GA is applied to benchmark JSSPs. The hybrid GA is also tested on benchmark flow shop scheduling problems and industrial case studies. The hybrid GA successfully found solutions to JSSPs and is not problem dependent. The hybrid GA performance across the case studies has proved that the developed scheduling model can be applied to any real-world scheduling problem for achieving optimal or near-optimal solutions. This shows the effectiveness of the hybrid GA in real-world scheduling problems. In conclusion, all the research objectives are achieved. Finaly, the future work for the developed heuristic rules and the hybrid GA are discussed and recommendations are made on the basis of the results.Board of Trustees, Endowment Fund Project, KPK University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Peshawar and Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakista

Taylor Rule and the Macroeconomic Performance in Pakistan

A near-consensus position in modern macroeconomics is that policy rules have greater advantage over discretion in improving economic performance. For developing countries in particular, simple instrument rules appear to be feasible options as pre-requisites since more sophisticated targeting rules are generally lacking. Using Pakistan’s data, this study has attempted to estimate the Taylor rule and use it as monetary policy strategy to simulate the economy. Our results indicate that the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has not been following the Taylor rule. In fact, the actual policy has been an extreme deviation from it. On the other hand, counterfactual simulation confirms that macroeconomic performance could have been better in terms of stability of inflation and output, had the Taylor rule been adopted as monetary policy strategy. The study also establishes that further gains are possible if the parameter values of the rule are slightly modified. JEL classification: E47, E31, E52 Keywords: Taylor Rule, Macroeconomic Performance, Counterfactual Simulatio

Novel heuristic for low-batch manufacturing process scheduling optimisation with reference to process engineering

YesScheduling is an important element that has a major impact on the efficiency of all manufacturing processes. It plays an important role in optimising the manufacturing times and costs resulting in energy efficient processes. It has been estimated that more than 75% of manufacturing processes occur in small batches. In such environments, processes must be able to perform a variety of operations on a mix of different batches. Batch-job scheduling optimisation is the response to such low batch manufacturing problems. The optimisation of batch-job process scheduling problem is still a challenge to researchers and is far from being completely solved due to its combinatorial nature. In this paper, a novel hybrid heuristic (HybH) solution approach for batch-job scheduling problem is presented with the objective of optimising the overall Makespan (Cmax). The proposed HybH is the combination of Index Based Heuristic (IBH) and the Finished Batch-Job (FBJ) process schedule. The heuristic assigns the first operation to a batch-job using IBH and the remaining operations on the basis FBJ process schedule. The FBJ process schedule gives priority to the batch-job with early finished operations, without violating the constraints of process order. The proposed HybH is explained with the help of a detailed example. Several benchmark problems are solved from the literature to check the validity and effectiveness of the proposed heuristic. The presented HybH has achieved batch-job process schedules which have outperformed the traditional heuristics. The results are encouraging and show that the proposed heuristic is a valid methodology for batch process scheduling optimisation

Dynamic Properties of an Aggregate Econometric Model of Pakistan's Economy

The use of econometric models for policy planning and decision-making is wide-spread in many developed as well as developing countries. One of the most vexing problems of such an exercise is to construct a model that could adequately reproduce the dynamic behaviour of an economy. The recent experience in modelling has shown that policy objectives could be achieved only by recognising the complex relationship between real and monetary variables. Such an integrated framework .could be used not only to compute impact and dynamic multipliers and to determine the stability of the model, but also to evaluate the relative importance offiscal and monetary policies. In the present paper, this objective is achieved by constructing a linear yet dynamic macro-econometric model of Pakistan's economy.' This model although has a Keynesian structure, but it could easily and meaningfully be solved to determine the values of endogenous variables especially income in terms of pure exogenous variables. In order to establish the dynamic stability of the model, we seek to present the "necessary conditions" that will depend not only on the structure of the model, but also on the estimated paramters of structural equations. After establishing the stability of the model, the next step is policy evaluation. In this regard the impact and the dynamic multipliers will be computed. These multipliers will then be used to assess the relative importance of fiscal and monetary policy variables on income and other dependent variables such as consumption and investment. The time period under consideration ranges between 1959-60 and 1987-88 which includes dramatic events like two wars with India, nationalisation, the oil price hike, recession and floods

Iris recognition Using Fast Walsh Hadamard Transform Based feature Space

The significance of Iris detection and recognition in area of bioinformatics and pattern recognition has been increased from last few decades. Looking at the importance of Iris detection and recognition, we propose a robust, stable and reliable computational model. Features are extracted from iris images using two different approaches such as Hilbert transform and Fast wavelet Hadamard Transform (FWHT).Random forest is used as a classification algorithm. 5-folds cross validation test is applied to evaluate the performance of K-nearest neighbor. Among three feature spaces, FWHT feature space has achieved promising results. The success rate of K-nearest neighbor on FWHT feature space is 94.4%. After examining the results, we have observed that our model might be useful and helpful for iris detection in future work

Trends of expenditure on Immunization in Pakistan since 2000.

World health organization started Expanded Program on Immunization in 1974. At that time only 5% of the children were covered globally in the first year on pro-gram. In Pakistan 16.34% of the total population is under five years’ children. In 2000 Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI) was introduced in Paki-stan. Since 2000 by the finance and HR support from GAVI, additional 370 million children have been vaccinated from deadly disease. It has been noticed that the expenditure on immunization remained inconsistent over the time period. Since 2000 the massive change is seen in the pattern of expenditure on immunization both routine and campaigns to meet the goals. In Pakistan, expenditure on immun-ization has reached to $240 million annually but still the fully immunized children are between 43-62% of all the under-five population of the country. Immunization services needed to be on time and efficiently provided to the communities. The growth in fiscal gap and need for expenditure competition in financing, has subju-gated policymaking. There is a need for reviewing the current policies for budgeting immunization program and needful risk assessment will support future financial crisis.Key Words: Immunization, Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization,Extended Program of Immunization