When do enterprises prefer informal credit ?

This paper tests the hypothesis that enterprises may forgo formal finance in lieu of informal credit by choice. They do so to avoid the additional regulatory scrutiny and harassment that engaging with the formal financial sector invites. We test this hypothesis using enterprise-level data on 3,564 enterprises in 29 countries. In this sample, enterprises finance approximately 57 percent of their working capital requirements with external finance. This external finance comes from formal sources, such as commercial banks (53 percent) and informal sources (42 percent), such as trade creditors, or family and friends. In our sample, 14 percent of enterprises rely exclusively on informal finance. We find that the likelihood of enterprises preferring to only use informal finance is inversely related to the quality of the regulatory environment, particularly the quality of tax administration and overall governance. For example, we find that when an enterprise has been asked for bribes by tax inspectors, it is 17 percent more likely to prefer informal finance.Access to Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Debt Markets,,Small and Medium Size Enterprises

When do creditor rights work?

Creditor-friendly laws are generally associated with more credit to the private sector and deeper financial markets. But laws mean little if they are not upheld in the courts. The authors hypothesize that the effectiveness of creditor rights is strongly linked to the efficiency of contract enforcement. This hypothesis is tested using firm level data on 27 European countries in 2002 and 2005. The analysis finds that firms have more access to bank credit in countries with better creditor rights, but the association between creditor rights and bank credit is much weaker in countries with inefficient courts. Exploiting the panel dimension of the data and the fact that creditor rights change over time, the authors show that the effect of a change in creditor rights on change in bank credit increases with court enforcement. In particular, a unit increase in the creditor rights index will increase the share of bank loans in firm investment by 27 percent in a country at the 10th percentile of the enforcement time distribution (Lithuania). However, the increase will be only 7 percent in a country at the 80th percentile of this distribution (Kyrgyzstan). Legal protections of creditors and efficient courts are strong complements.Debt Markets,,Banks&Banking Reform,Emerging Markets,Labor Policies

A data Grid prototype for distributed data production in CMS

The CMS experiment at CERN is setting up a Grid infrastructure required to fulfill the needs imposed by Terabyte scale productions for the next few years. The goal is to automate the production and at the same time allow the users to interact with the system, if required, to make decisions which would optimize performance. We present the architecture, design and functionality of our first working Objectivity file replication prototype. The middle-ware of choice is the Globus toolkit that provides promising functionality. Our results prove the ability of the Globus toolkit to be used as an underlying technology for a world-wide Data Grid. The required data management functionality includes high speed file transfers, secure access to remote files, selection and synchronization of replicas and managing the meta information. The whole system is expected to be flexible enough to incorporate site specific policies. The data management granularity is the file rather than the object level. The first prototype is currently in use for the High Level Trigger (HLT) production (autumn 2000). Owing to these efforts, CMS is one of the pioneers to use the Data Grid functionality in a running production system. The project can be viewed as an evaluator of different strategies, a test for the capabilities of middle-ware tools and a provider of basic Grid functionalities

Estimation of the Black Economy of Pakistan through the Monetary Approach

In the recent years the “black economy” has held immense attraction for academics as well as policy-makers. This is because the presence of the black economy is responsible for distortions in the official estimates of macro-economic variables like income generation, employment, rate of inflation, etc., and thus the possible effect on the economic policies cannot be ascertained properly. It, therefore, becomes imperative to investigate this area of research. Researchers have defined the underground economy in alternative ways. The underground economy defined by varied names like black, shadow, hidden, informal, clandestine, second, parallel economy has been divided in four categories for the use of a standard basis of classification.

USE OF CATCHMENT SPECIFIC SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INFORMATION IN MANAGING NATURAL RESOURCES

Catchment specific economic and social information assists catchment management authorities in natural resource planning and decision making. It gives a context to the natural resource management (NRM) planning and decision making by providing an understanding of the economic and social characteristics in a region and tracks economic and social changes overtime. It also enables analysis of factors that influence a community’s competence in undertaking NRM activities. Catchment specific economic and social data is available from the Australian Bureau of Statistics but there are gaps in the availability of this data that may hinder NRM planning and decision making. The aim of this paper is two fold: firstly, it provides a snapshot of the economic and social information of selected catchments in NSW and secondly, it emphasises the need for further data availability that can facilitate NRM planning and decision making at a catchment level.economic, social, data availability, natural resource management, catchment management authorities, decision making, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

An Iterative Soft Decision Based LR-Aided MIMO Detector

The demand for wireless and high-rate communication system is increasing gradually and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the feasible solutions to accommodate the growing demand for its spatial multiplexing and diversity gain. However, with high number of antennas, the computational and hardware complexity of MIMO increases exponentially. This accumulating complexity is a paramount problem in MIMO detection system directly leading to large power consumption. Hence, the major focus of this dissertation is algorithmic and hardware development of MIMO decoder with reduced complexity for both real and complex domain, which can be a beneficial solution with power efficiency and high throughput. Both hard and soft domain MIMO detectors are considered. The use of lattice reduction (LR) algorithm and on-demand-child-expansion for the reduction of noise propagation and node calculation respectively are the two of the key features of our developed architecture, presented in this literature. The real domain iterative soft MIMO decoding algorithm, simulated for 4 × 4 MIMO with different modulation scheme, achieves 1.1 to 2.7 dB improvement over Lease Sphere Decoder (LSD) and more than 8x reduction in list size, K as well as complexity of the detector. Next, the iterative real domain K-Best decoder is expanded to the complex domain with new detection scheme. It attains 6.9 to 8.0 dB improvement over real domain K-Best decoder and 1.4 to 2.5 dB better performance over conventional complex decoder for 8 × 8 MIMO with 64 QAM modulation scheme. Besides K, a new adjustable parameter, Rlimit has been introduced in order to append re-configurability trading-off between complexity and performance. After that, a novel low-power hardware architecture of complex decoder is developed for 8 × 8 MIMO and 64 QAM modulation scheme. The total word length of only 16 bits has been adopted limiting the bit error rate (BER) degradation to 0.3 dB with K and Rlimit equal to 4. The proposed VLSI architecture is modeled in Verilog HDL using Xilinx and synthesized using Synopsys Design Vision in 45 nm CMOS technology. According to the synthesize result, it achieves 1090.8 Mbps throughput with power consumption of 580 mW and latency of 0.33 us. The maximum frequency the design proposed is 181.8 MHz. All of the proposed decoders mentioned above are bounded by the fixed K. Hence, an adaptive real domain K-Best decoder is further developed to achieve the similar performance with less K, thereby reducing the computational complexity of the decoder. It does not require accurate SNR measurement to perform the initial estimation of list size, K. Instead, the difference between the first two minimal distances is considered, which inherently eliminates complexity. In summary, a novel iterative K-Best detector for both real and complex domain with efficient VLSI design is proposed in this dissertation. The results from extensive simulation and VHDL with analysis using Synopsys tool are also presented for justification and validation of the proposed works