The macroeconomics of public sector deficits : the case of Pakistan

For almost twenty years, Pakistan's fiscal deficit, at about 7 percent of GNP, averaged nearly twice the level for Asian countries as a whole. This paper examines the causes of Pakistan's fiscal deficits. The authors examine why, despite these deficits, the country's macroeconomic performance has been surprisingly good. The equilibrium deficit is estimated to have been quite high in recent years (about 5.5 percent of GNP), despite a low inflation rate, because of a very high underlying rate of growth of real output (about 6 percent a year). This allowed a fairly rapid expansion of debt without recourse to inflationary finance. To gain additional insight into the role of fiscal deficit in Pakistan, the authors analyze how alternative fiscal policies would have affected the country's economic performance during the 1980s. They find that : i) reducing the deficit by cutting public expenditure could have had a favorable effect on the trade balance, but at a cost to economic growth and with few price payoffs; ii) increasing tax revenues could achieve a similar external adjustment while reducing the output cost; and iii) altering the composition of deficit financing would have predictable results - shifting to more money financing would mean higher prices, lower interest rates, and higher growth.Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Economic Stabilization,Banks&Banking Reform

Biohydrolysis of Saccharum spontaneum for cellulase production by Aspergillus terreus

Saccharum spontaneum, a wasteland weed, is utilized for cellulase production by Aspergillus terreus in solid state fermentation. S. spontaneum served as good carbon source and solid support. Various process parameters including optimal nitrogen source, initial moisture level, incubation time, initial pH, incubation temperature and inoculum size were evaluated. The maximum cellulase production was attained at 70% of initial moisture with incubation of 96 h at 30±2°C, and pH 4.5. Ammonium sulphate in concentration of 0.2% (w/w) was the most preferable nitrogen source among all tested nitrogen sources. The results indicate that S. spontaneum could be utilized as a substrate in solid state fermentation (SSF) for economic production of cellulase.Key words: Cellulase, solid state fermentation, Saccharum spontaneum, Aspergillus terreus

Targeted Delivery of Insulin by Psyllium Plant (Plantago ispaghula) based hydrogels/membranes

Developments in therapeutics are the need of hour for the benefit of mankind and to increase the quality of life. Diabetes mellitus is a non-curable disease affecting a great amount of world’s population. This genetic disorder gets worse with time and ultimately leads to various complications like renal failure, lower limb amputation, heart diseases and blindness. Hydrogels for quite recent time are being used for the drug delivery. The present article is related to the fabrication of psyllium based dermal patches insulin drug delivery system that could release insulin in a sustained and controlled manner. Psyllium, a natural polysaccharide, is a medicinally important dietary fiber and drug delivery system has developed a novel insulin loaded psyllium based hydrogels for glucose lowering. They can be used for the transdermal delivery of insulin as hypodermic administration of insulin is painful, complicated, can also results in allergic reactions and infections. For the sustained and steady release of insulin from fabricated hydrogels were also modified with the addition of graphene oxide nanoparticles. To study the structural aspects of these various polymeric networks thus formed were characterized with FTIR (Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy) and SEM (Scanning electron microscopy) which identifies the interaction/bonding among different functional groups and also indicating the layer of graphene oxide nanoparticles on the surface of hydrogels stage and release related experiments such as degradability, swelling kinetics, swelling ratio and drug kinetics were also performed. Because of its functionalization these unique 3D drug loaded polymeric hydrogels will have the double prospective of diabetes. Different types of psyllium based hydrogels were prepared, and the effect of ph on the release dynamics of insulin from drug loaded hydrogels has been studied to evaluate the drug release mechanism in-vitro and in-vivo. For in-vivo study avian skin was used a model. Fickian diffusion mechanism has been observed for the release of insulin at different ph both in and in-vivo and therefore these drug loaded hydrogels can be potentially used to develop pH-sensitive systems. Keeping in view the results of different analysis it can be concluded that these hydrogels can prove to be very useful for the treatment of diabetes mellitus

Effect of Growth Media, pH and Temperature on Yeast to Hyphal Transition in Candida albicans

The transition of C. albicans from unicellular yeast form to filamentous form i.e., pseudohyphae and hyphae is referred to as morphogenesis. C. albicans has the ability to respond to environmental conditions and accordingly changing its cell morphology. Three main morphological forms of C. albicans are unicellular yeast, pseudohyphae and hyphae. The effect of different growth media (Horse serum medium, RPMI-1640, MSGB), incubation temperatures (34˚C, 37˚C, 40˚C) and pH values (5.4, 6.4, 7.4) on germ tube production by C. albicans was evaluated. Horse serum medium noticeably promotes filamentation while RPMI-1640 medium shows moderate filamentation and MSGB media shows moderately low filamentation. The germ tube of C. albicans developed early in 1.5 hr at high temperature i.e., 40˚C. Incubation temperature of 37˚C was associated with highest germ tube formation while 34˚C shows low filamentation. A pH of 5.4 also induces low filamentation, pH 6.4 gives moderately lower than pH 7.4. A pH of 7.4 was best suited for germ tube induction. The peak of mycelium production appears between 1.5 and 6 hr after inoculation of C. albicans culture. These results suggested that environmental factors are important in selectively favoring yeast or hyphal form, most important being the growth medium, incubation temperature and external pH value

Disordered and Frustrated Magnetization in Coated MnFe₂O₄ Nanoparticles Prepared by Microwave Plasma Synthesis

Disordered and frustrated magnetization of different surface coated (Cr2O3, Co3O4, ZrO2, and SiO2) MnFe2O4 nanoparticles have been studied using SQUID-magnetometry. Magnetic measurements, such as ZFC/FC and ac-susceptibility evidence surface spin-glass behavior. ZFC/FC curves were also compared with numerical simulation to get information about effective anisotropy constants. Frequency dependent ac susceptibility results were analyzed by using Arrhenius, Vogel Fulcher and dynamic scaling laws to further confirm the spin-glass behavior. It is observed that the strength of surface spins disorder and frustration strongly depends upon the type of the coating material. All these analyses signify that disordered and frustrated surface magnetization in MnFe2O4 nanoparticles greatly depend on the type of the surface coating materials and are useful for controlling the nanoparticle’s magnetism for different practical applications

Impact of data center placement on the power consumption of flexible-grid optical networks

The increasing trend of global IP traffic is mainly driven by high-definition video services and cloud computing and storage. Moreover, to maintain a high quality of service in content delivery networking, data are geographically replicated in data centers distributed within network topologies. Thus, data centers are an emerging scenario for research and development aimed at energy-efficient transmission and networking solutions. Previous research work has focused on intradata center energy efficiency while interdata center energy issues have not been extensively analyzed yet. We propose heuristics and meta-heuristics for optimal placement of data centers with minimum power consumption over a network topology relying on flex-grid spectral use. In order to minimize the network's power consumption, we have performed a detailed comparison of heuristic and meta-heuristic designs for different network scenarios based on real topologies. Moreover, our results show that meta-heuristic provides an optimum data center placement in a reasonable amount of time for a small- to medium-sized network

Neglected Heterogeneity and Dynamics in Cross-country Savings Regressions

This paper examines the extent to which the conclusions of cross-country studies of private savings are robust to allowing for the possible heterogeneity of savings behaviour across countries and for the inclusion of dynamics. It reviews the econometric implications of neglected slope heterogeneity and dynamics for the fixed effects estimators routinely used in such studies, and illustrates the nature and extent of the biases involved by a re-examination of time series data from 21 OECD countries. The paper shows that neglecting heterogeneity and dynamics in cross-country savings regressions can lead to misleading inferences about the key determinants of savings behaviour. The results indicate that among the many variables considered in the literature only the fiscal variables - the general government surplus as a proportion of GDP and the ratio of government consumption to GDP - seem to be the key determinants of private savings rates in the industrial countries in the post-World War II perio

Real Time Surveillance for Low Resolution and Limited-Data Scenarios: An Image Set Classification Approach

This paper proposes a novel image set classification technique based on the concept of linear regression. Unlike most other approaches, the proposed technique does not involve any training or feature extraction. The gallery image sets are represented as subspaces in a high dimensional space. Class specific gallery subspaces are used to estimate regression models for each image of the test image set. Images of the test set are then projected on the gallery subspaces. Residuals, calculated using the Euclidean distance between the original and the projected test images, are used as the distance metric. Three different strategies are devised to decide on the final class of the test image set. We performed extensive evaluations of the proposed technique under the challenges of low resolution, noise and less gallery data for the tasks of surveillance, video-based face recognition and object recognition. Experiments show that the proposed technique achieves a better classification accuracy and a faster execution time compared to existing techniques especially under the challenging conditions of low resolution and small gallery and test data

The competent sentinel node: an association with an axillary presentation and an occult or a small primary invasive breast carcinoma

The concept of the sentinel node describes a primary or sentinel lymph node (SLN), which exists and through which tumour cells from a primary tumour in a particular location must first travel to spread to a particular regional lymph node group. In this series we present three patients presenting with a pathological axillary node associated with either an occult or very small primary breast cancer. In each case the primary tumour was found to have metastasised to the palpable node, however despite the significant enlargement of this node, no other axillary nodes were found to be affected on axillary node clearance. This has led us to postulate that the SLN in some cases contains unique characteristics that enable it to prevent further spread of the tumour up the lymphatic chain. Hence the term the competent sentinel node