WTO accession, the changing competitiveness of foreign-financed firms and regional development in Guangdong of southern China

This paper investigates the changing competitiveness of foreign-financed manufacturing firms and its implications for regional development in Guangdong province of southern China in the run-up to World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. It is argued that transnational corporations (TNCs) and some competitive, large-scale, locally-funded firms in Guangdong will triumph after WTO accession. The crowding-out process of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Guangdong will be accelerated in the near future, as they are competing directly with TNCs, and as their competitive advantages are diminishing, due to bureaucratic red tape and the rigorous enforcement of new government policies. Due to close business linkages with local privately-funded firms, the competitiveness and vitality of foreign-financed enterprises will have profound long term effects on the economic development of Guangdong, before and after WTO accession

Modeling Differential Nonresponse in Sample Surveys

The standard analysis of unit nonresponse in sample surveys is to assume missing at random--- that is, that the probability a person responds is independent of their response to the question of interest, y, conditional on fully-observed covariates x or on sampling weights w. In this paper, we discuss weakening these assumptions without the use of additional covariates in the special case of a binary outcome variable, y = 0 or 1. We note frequentist confidence bounds that do not rely on strong assumptions about the response mechanism. From a Bayesian perspective, we discuss using prior distributions to average over uncertainty in the missing data mechanism. Surprisingly, a natural-looking "noninformative" prior distribution yields unappealing posterior inferences. We discuss methods of constructing informative prior distributions using hierarchical data structures. We also show how to incorporate unequal sampling weights into the model using design-based sampling theory. This is importa..

Heuristics for Cardinality Constrained Portfolio Optimisation

In this paper we consider the problem of finding the efficient frontier associated with the standard mean-variance portfolio optimisation model. We extend the standard model to include cardinality constraints that limit a portfolio to have a specified number of assets, and to impose limits on the proportion of the portfolio held in a given asset (if any of the asset is held). We illustrate the differences that arise in the shape of this efficient frontier when such constraints are present. We present three heuristic algorithms based upon genetic algorithms, tabu search and simulated annealing for finding the cardinality constrained efficient frontier. Computational results are presented for five data sets involving up to 225 assets. Keywords: portfolio optimisation, efficient frontier 1 1. INTRODUCTION Each of the larger fund management companies in the UK/US are responsible for the investment of several billion pounds/dollars. This money is invested on behalf of pension funds, unit ..