4,695 research outputs found
The Effect of Foreign Remittances on Schooling: Evidence from Pakistan
The underlying study intends to show the impact of foreign remittances on the educational performance of children in the households receiving these remittances. Much of the literature in this area covers the effects of remittances on poverty, consumption, and investment behaviour of the receiving households. The literature on the impact of remittances on educational performance, however, is rare, especially in Pakistan. To investigate the impact of remittances on educational performance, primary data at the household level is collected from four main cities of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan. The OLS results illustrate that, without considering parental education, remittances have significant adverse effects on educational performance. However, the effect becomes insignificant once parental education is included, as a control variable, in the regression. The results also reveal that the low level of parental education, current income, assets, family type, and family size play an important role in the educational performance of children.Remittances , Education, Parental Absence
The commercialisation of BDS through an NGO: case study of AKRSP-Pakistan
Book ChapterBased on the theme of how donors can play a more effective role to stimulate effective and
sustainable provision of BDS by or through private sector intermediaries, this case study
looks at how the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) has sought to encourage
the development of markets for Business Development Services (BDS) in the remote areas
of northern Pakistan.
This paper explores that the isolation of the region, poor infrastructure, small scale of
landholdings, and lack of economic development leads to problems when attempting to
promote markets for business development services. In the short term, the priority is the
development of more basic markets, rather than markets for business development
services. Without active markets there are a few opportunities for BDS provision let alone
the development of vibrant private sector markets for BDS.
It specifies the geographic, economic, political, and institutional context in which the
AKRSP’s interventions have been implemented. Grassroots village based initiatives have
been discussed, where groups of farmers are facilitated by AKRSP to provide BDS to
neighboring farmers (farmers interest groups in Chitral), along with more structured
formal approaches such as the more direct provision of BDS through commercial entity
associated with AKRSP (North South Seeds).
It is argued that both models have a positive impact on MSME performance and lead to
market development in the long run. Both are methods through which donors can promote
BDS markets but which model is most appropriate depends on the market being served.
Where the service offered is relatively simple and the business of the BDS provider is
relatively straight-forward, facilitating private sector intermediaries may be the most
effective way of creating markets for BDS. However, where the service is complex and
there is a need to establish a sophisticated organisation to provide the service, it may be
necessary to set up an organisation within the NGO, on commercially sustainable basis if
possible, with a view to fully commercialising and ideally privatising the organisation over
time
Distributed Beamforming with Wirelessly Powered Relay Nodes
This paper studies a system where a set of relay nodes harvest energy
from the signal received from a source to later utilize it when forwarding the
source's data to a destination node via distributed beamforming. To this end,
we derive (approximate) analytical expressions for the mean SNR at destination
node when relays employ: i) time-switching based energy harvesting policy, ii)
power-splitting based energy harvesting policy. The obtained results facilitate
the study of the interplay between the energy harvesting parameters and the
synchronization error, and their combined impact on mean SNR. Simulation
results indicate that i) the derived approximate expressions are very accurate
even for small (e.g., ), ii) time-switching policy by the relays
outperforms power-splitting policy by at least dB.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted for presentation at IEEE VTC 2017 Spring
conferenc
Power Imbalance Detection in Smart Grid via Grid Frequency Deviations: A Hidden Markov Model based Approach
We detect the deviation of the grid frequency from the nominal value (i.e.,
50 Hz), which itself is an indicator of the power imbalance (i.e., mismatch
between power generation and load demand). We first pass the noisy estimates of
grid frequency through a hypothesis test which decides whether there is no
deviation, positive deviation, or negative deviation from the nominal value.
The hypothesis testing incurs miss-classification errors---false alarms (i.e.,
there is no deviation but we declare a positive/negative deviation), and missed
detections (i.e., there is a positive/negative deviation but we declare no
deviation). Therefore, to improve further upon the performance of the
hypothesis test, we represent the grid frequency's fluctuations over time as a
discrete-time hidden Markov model (HMM). We note that the outcomes of the
hypothesis test are actually the emitted symbols, which are related to the true
states via emission probability matrix. We then estimate the hidden Markov
sequence (the true values of the grid frequency) via maximum likelihood method
by passing the observed/emitted symbols through the Viterbi decoder.
Simulations results show that the mean accuracy of Viterbi algorithm is at
least \% greater than that of hypothesis test.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, accepted by IEEE VTC conference, Fall 2018
editio
Moderating effect of social support on personal financial constraints and job stress relationship
The aim of this paper is to examine the moderating effect of social support (which may be supervisory, friends, family and relatives) on the relationship of personal financial constraints and job stress relationship. Sample consists of 294 respondents from randomly selected 28 branches of 22 banks located across all major cities of Pakistan. Moderated regression analysis has been used to test the hypothesized relationships. Personal financial constraints enhance job stress and social support moderates this relationship. Job stress increases when an employee faces financial constraints but decreases in the presence of social support. Practical and theoretical implications are drawn. This research is conducted in banking industry, so its results can’t be generalized to other industries. This paper is the first which examines the impact of a non-work related variable, personal financial constraint on job stress along with buffering role of social support. Its findings have great implications for employers for increasing productivity of employees.Job stress, personal financial constraints, social support, moderating, banking, Pakistan
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