Fiscal Scenario of South Asian Countries: Implications for Economic Growth and Poverty Alleviation

Sustainable economic growth and Poverty alleviation is a principal objective of the developing countries. The present study aims to historically review of fiscal policy and its consequences for the economic development of the four South Asian economies i.e. Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Confined revenues and savings coupled with rising expenditures have caused situation of persistent fiscal deficit over the years. Coupled with that countries are also facing current account deficit. Resultantly, ‘Twin Deficit problem’ emerged, and it is filled by public deb. Consequently countries have to spend considerable portion of their GDP on interest payments of the loans. The need to service debt obligation is undermining economic performance and resulting in collapse of development planning. Because debt obligations and expenditure on debt servicing become a resource drain for already limited revenues and is halting economic growth and poverty reduction efforts.Fiscal Policy, Poverty, Economic growth

Short run and long run dynamics of impact of health status on economic growth Evidence from Pakistan

The paper investigates the impacts of different health indicators on Economic growth in Pakistan. The Cointegration and Error Correction techniques were applied on the time series data of Pakistan for the period of 1972-2006. We find that Per capita GDP is positively influenced by health indicators in the long run and health indicators are having significant impact on per capita GDP. However, in the short run the health indicators fails to put significant impact on per capita GDP. It reveals that health indicators have a long run impact on economic growth. . It suggests that impact of health is only a long run phenomenon and in the short run there is no significant relationship exists between health variables and economic growth. The major policy implication of the study is that if we desire a high levels of per capita income, we can achieve it by increasing and improving the stock of health human capital, especially if current stocks are at lower end. Moreover, study also points out a rather diminutive role of public health expenditure in determining the per capita GDP.Health human capital; Economic growth; Per capita GDP; Cointegration; Error Correction

Smart cards: State-of-the-art to future directions

The evolution of smart card technology provides an interesting case study of the relationship and interactions between security and business requirements. This paper maps out the milestones for smart card technology, discussing at each step the opportunities and challenges. The paper reviews recently proposed innovative ownership/management models and the security challenges associated with them. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible future directions for the technology, and the challenges these present

Public debt and pro-poor economic growth evidence from South Asian countries

Over the years, most developing countries have failed to collect enough revenues to finance their budgets. As a result, they face the problem of twin deficits and are relying on public external and domestic debt to finance their developmental activities. NGOs and anti-globalisation movements have propagated the view that instead of reducing poverty public debt has increased the miseries of the poor. The current study examines the consequences of public debt for economic growth and poverty regarding selected South Asian countries, i.e., Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, for the period 1975–2010. It develops an empirical model that incorporates the role of public debt into growth equations and the model is extended to incorporate the effects of debt on poverty. The model is estimated by using standard panel data estimation methodologies. The results shows that although public debt has a negative impact on economic growth, neither public external debt nor external debt servicing has a significant relationship with income inequality, suggesting that public external debt is as good/bad for poor as it is for rich. However, domestic debt has a positive relationship with economic growth and a negative relationship with the GINI coefficient, indicating that domestic debt is pro-poor

Impact of Public Debt on the Economic Growth of Pakistan.

Over the years Pakistan has failed to collect enough revenues for financing of its budget. Consequently, the problem of twin deficits emerged and to finance the developmental activities government has to rely on public external and domestic debt. The positive effects of public debt relate to the fact that in resource-starved economies debt financing if done properly leads to higher growth and adds to their capacity to service and repay public debt. The negative effects work through two main channels—i.e., ―Debt Overhang‖ and ―Crowding Out‖ effects. The present study examines the consequences of public debt for economic growth and investment in Pakistan for the period 1972-2009. It develops a hybrid model that explicitly incorporates the role of public debt in growth equations. As the some variables are I (1) and other are I (0) so Autoregressive Distributed Lag(ARDL) technique has been applied to estimate the model. Study finds that public external debt has negative relationship with per capita GDP and investment confirming the existence of ―Debt Overhang effect‖. However, due to insignificant relationships of debt servicing with investment and per capita GDP, the existence of the crowding out hypothesis could not be confirmed. Similarly, domestic debt has a negative relationship with investment and per capita GDP. In other words, it seems to have crowded out private investment. JEL classification: H63, O43, E22, C22 Keywords: Public Debt, Economic Growth, Investment, ARD

Remote attestation mechanism for embedded devices based on physical unclonable functions

Remote attestation mechanisms are well studied in the high-end computing environments; however, the same is not true for embedded devices-especially for smart cards. With ever changing landscape of smart card technology and advancements towards a true multi-application platform, verifying the current state of the smart card is significant to the overall security of such proposals. The initiatives proposed by GlobalPlatform Consumer Centric Model (GP-CCM) and User Centric Smart Card Ownership Model (UCOM) enables a user to download any application as she desire-depending upon the authorisation of the application provider. Before an application provider issues an application to a smart card, verifying the current state of the smart card is crucial to the security of the respective application. In this paper, we analyse the rationale behind the remote attestation mechanism for smart cards, and the fundamental features that such a mechanism should possess. We also study the applicability of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for the remote attestation mechanism and propose two algorithms to achieve the stated features of remote attestation. The proposed algorithms are implemented in a test environment to evaluate their performance. © 2013 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved

The Long Term Impact of Health on Economic Growth in Pakistan

The paper investigates the impacts of different health indicators on economic growth in Pakistan. Cointegration and Error Correction techniques have been applied on the time series data of Pakistan for the period of 1972-2006. We find that per capita GDP is positively influenced by health indicators in the long run and health indicators cause per capita GDP. However, in short run the health indicators fail to put significant impact on per capita GDP. It reveals that health indicators have a long run impact on economic growth. It also suggests that impact of health is only a long run phenomenon and in the short run there is no significant relationship exists between health variables and economic growth. The major policy implication of the study is that if we desire high levels of per capita income, we can achieve it by increasing and improving stock of health human capital, especially when current stocks are at lower end. Moreover, study also points out a rather diminutive role of public health expenditure in determining the per capita GDP.Health Human Capital; Economic Growth; Cointegration, Error Correction