BURDEN SHARING AT THE IMF

In the context of the financial governance of the International Monetary Fund, what are the equity implications of the way in which the IMF distributes the cost of running its regular (non-concessionary) lending operations as well as how it funds its concessionary lending and debt relief operations? While the IMF charges borrowers roughly what it pays its creditor members for the resources used in its regular lending operations, its overhead costs (administrative budget plus addition to reserves) are shared between the two groups of members in a less equitable manner. With overhead costs rising inexorably to meet the increasing number and range of responsibilities being placed on the institution – largely at the instance of the IMF‘s principal creditors by virtue of their dominant majority of voting power – the under-representation of the IMF’s debtors undermines the legitimacy of its decision making. With regard to the concessionary lending and debt relief operations, some of the IMF’s funding modalities have involved a substantial contribution by IMF debtors, sometimes under pressure. While this has been accepted as part of an intra-developing-country burden-sharing exercise, it has also significantly reduced the cost to developed countries of meeting their responsibilities to the poorest members of the international community.

THE FUTURE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND

This paper looks at the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the evolving global financial system from the perspective of developing country interests. It finds that on certain issues, such as the scope and purposes of its lending operations, a consensus has been reached that IMF should continue to serve all its members, including the poorest, and that its resources should be available for supporting macro-relevant structural reforms as well as for dealing with financial crises. On a number of other issues, there remain differences between industrial and developing country views, including on the extension of IMF surveillance to cover the observance of international standards and codes. Largely unsettled are the modalities of the involvement of the private sector in crisis resolution, with special reference to the development of arrangements in the international sphere that would be analogous to domestic bankruptcy procedures, including the declaration of standstills and principles for orderly and equitable debt workouts. The liberalization of the capital account and the choice of exchange regimes are two interconnected areas in which international prescriptions conflict with developing country insistence on the preservation of national autonomy and in favour of intermediate regimes, as opposed to corner solutions. The scope and content of IMF conditionality raises the issue of how to reconcile it with the importance of assuring country ownership. Finally, the governance of IMF poses questions about the exercise of decision-making powers in the institution. Developing country positions are evolving in all these areas, especially on the subject of private-sector involvement in financial crisis prevention and resolution. However, there appears to be a general preference for a more rules-based framework, rather than one derived on a “case-by-case” basis. There are four areas of great interest to developing countries where the international debate has remained muted or has been largely absent in the recent literature: these relate to the surveillance over, and coordination of, the macroeconomic policies of the three principal international currency issuers; the relationship of international and regional arrangements; the distribution of voting power in both IMF and the international system generally, and the future evolution of the international reserve system.

Value Creation And The Pursuit Of Multi Factor Productivity Improvement

This paper links Value Management to macro-economics to explore transformational innovation. It borrows from economics and the relationship between technological progress and rising living standards for citizens. Central to this is seeing 'technology' in a wider sense than devices. What makes this paper different is it attempts to link Government spending on capital projects directly to economic growth in an economy. Whilst macroeconomists use historic data, this paper applies those theories to the conceptual stages of capital-projects to become part of a Government's investment appraisal process. As such, this paper outlines a 'how to' approach that will help Governments prefer Foreign Investments that lead to long-term economic growth. The hope is that this paper will stimulate other researchers to replicate the methodology and in so doing open a new direction for innovation methodologies such as Value Engineering and Value Management that link capital projects to growth in GDP

Iraq : a deeply divided polity and challenges to democracy-building

In the post-2003 Iraq, democratization and state building have contradictorily overlapped with dramatic consequences. The major constraint to Iraq’s statebuilding project is the misfit between identity and sovereignty of the state in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country where the construction of a new national identity (i.e. Iraqi) is sought at the expense of eradicating other existing identities (i.e. Kurd, Assyrian). The Iraqi state is seeming foisting the identity of the ruling majority Shiite-Arabs composing 65% of the population, thus marginalizing the identity of minorities such as the Kurds who constitute 20% of the population. Further, Iraq’s religious diversity and, precisely, the sectarian cleavage between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, impose serious challenges to the notion of democracy and democratic transition. This paper shows that in Iraq, democracy and nation-building have resulted in majority rule in a way that marginalizes minorities and dissenting voices. The processes of state building and democratization, it is argued, are intertwined and their challenges overlap and interlinked, making democracy a contested subject in the Iraqi context

A new sinkhole attack detection algorithm for RPL in wireless sensor networks (WSN)

With the continuous improvement of science and technology, wireless sensor network technology has gradually been widely used, and provides great convenience for people's living, but with the continuous improvement of the degree of application, wireless sensor network security issues also enter people's field of vision. Sensor nodes can be used for continuous sensing, event recognition and event identification. 6LoWPAN plays an important role in this convergence of heterogeneous technologies, which allows sensors to transmit information using IPv6 stack. Sensors perform critical tasks and become targets of attacks. Sinkhole attack is one of the most common attacks to sensor networks, threatening the network availability by dropping data or disturbing routing paths. RPL is a standard routing protocol commonly used in sensor networks. Therefore, this research presents the works in designing and developing Secured-RPL using the eave-listening concept (overhearing) to treating sinkhole attack. The suggested mechanism method could determine transmitted packages then overhear to the received packet, meaning that the node can overhearing to the neighbor node. Furthermore, three different simulation scenarios were applied, which are the scenario without attacker nodes, scenario with attacker nodes and the scenario with attacker and security by using Cooja simulator to Measurement and analysis performance of RPL in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and power consumption over different packet transmission rate. The experimental results show that the proposed recognition method can identify sinkholes attack effectively and with less storage cost under various wireless sensor networks. Where the optimization ratio of the PDR in scenario with attacker node with the security was close to the scenario with a normal node

Efficient Generation of Parallel Spin-images Using Dynamic Loop Scheduling

High performance computing (HPC) systems underwent a significant increase in their processing capabilities. Modern HPC systems combine large numbers of homogeneous and heterogeneous computing resources. Scalability is, therefore, an essential aspect of scientific applications to efficiently exploit the massive parallelism of modern HPC systems. This work introduces an efficient version of the parallel spin-image algorithm (PSIA), called EPSIA. The PSIA is a parallel version of the spin-image algorithm (SIA). The (P)SIA is used in various domains, such as 3D object recognition, categorization, and 3D face recognition. EPSIA refers to the extended version of the PSIA that integrates various well-known dynamic loop scheduling (DLS) techniques. The present work: (1) Proposes EPSIA, a novel flexible version of PSIA; (2) Showcases the benefits of applying DLS techniques for optimizing the performance of the PSIA; (3) Assesses the performance of the proposed EPSIA by conducting several scalability experiments. The performance results are promising and show that using well-known DLS techniques, the performance of the EPSIA outperforms the performance of the PSIA by a factor of 1.2 and 2 for homogeneous and heterogeneous computing resources, respectively