State, Education, and the Market

The tail of the tail-end of the 2nd millennium has taught the humankind two valuable lessons: democracy and the market, although imperfect, have succeeded where other systems have failed. What is clear is that the most successful systems are aligned to humankind’s predispositions rather than being inimical to them. Insofar as it aligns itself with the predisposition to greed, consistently regulated capitalism terms out to be the most efficient economic system hitherto observed in human society. Likewise, democracy works by aligning many people’s desire for power with a governance system which on balance is helpful to the general population, unlike various forms of totalitarianism. But recent movements for both capitalism and democracy in many developing countries largely do not subscribe to humankind’s predispositions, rather they appear to be a part of the headlong global trend towards these paradigms. The reason being that the most important ingredient, common to both recipes, is lacking in many developing countries: that is the popular pressure and mobilisation which is sufficiently informed of its duties and rights. This ingredient is most important as it forces out the authoritarian rule whether, totalitarian or ‘democratic’, and makes democratic governance drive the market to the maximum benefit of society. The central thesis of this work is that this most important ingredient is the result of an effective and efficient system of public institutions for free and compulsory universal primary schooling which, if the resource constraint could be overcome, ought to be supplemented by free and compulsory secondary schooling. The argument is structured in five parts.

Instinctive Behaviour, Producer Surplus, and Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper addresses a phenomenon that cuts across many disciplines of the formal tradition of learning. Out of numerous multifaceted academic disciplines involved in the argument, psychology, economics and business management stand out, as reflected in the title of the study. The research on the topic is carried out by adopting an inductive approach involving intangible aspects of psychology and tangible parameters of sociology centred around the disciplines of economics and business. The author maintains that the phenomenon of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) represents a challenge of finding the resolution to the paradox of selfish and altruistic human motives. It is argued that quality of that resolution will be determined by the quality of positive laws of socio logy and the quality of intrapersonal regulation to help appreciate social responsibility in the presence of opportunities for maximising self-interest. The review of the literature on CSR underpins factors of international political economy responsible for promotion of the phenomenon in North and South during the last century and in the new millennium respectively. The findings lead to the conclusion that rhetoric of CSR in countries like Pakistan merits the analysis of both its motives and fall out within a North-South divide.Social Responsibility, Instinctive Behaviour, Positive Law, Ethical Behaviour, Stockholders, Technical Barriers to Trade

Densities of states for disordered Hamiltonian

Imperial Users onl

External Determinants of Growth and Growth Projections: SAARC and Pakistan

In the global trading arena, the regional integration perhaps represents the most important legacy of the 20th century. This paper focuses on the scope and promise of economic cooperation between the SAARC region countries. Descriptive statistics is used to provide the evidence for the argument that very high share of trade in the GDP of the region’s economies exposes them to external shocks in a potentially harmful manner, and these countries ought to be paying greater attention to increasing the size of their economies. In order to determine the importance of the external sector in the economies of the region, a simultaneous equations model is formulated and estimated, utilising the pooled data for the period from 1972–2001, by applying the 2SLS technique. The coefficients of two of the three external sector variables included in the model, namely, export earnings and trade balance, turn out to be significant, providing the evidence on the importance of the external sector in the economic growth of the SAARC region countries. Keeping in view that Pakistan needs to adopt sustainable growth strategies, the authors maintain that extended economic cooperation within the SAARC region is the most viable alternative for the country. The argument is substantiated with the help of inferential statistics, providing the evidence that exports to SAARC countries are positively related with the economic growth of Pakistan. The simulation output also shows that increasing and diverting the country’s exports to the SAARC region have positive impact in terms of growth projections. By estimating and simulating another model, it is inferred that in the short run, diverting exports to both the SAARC and ASEAN region countries appears to be a viable strategy to help Pakistan move towards greater integration within the SAARC region, and that the SAARC forums must make meaningful progress in terms of delivering concrete results.Trade, Economic Growth, Pakistan

A Fault Tolerant, Dynamic and Low Latency BDII Architecture for Grids

The current BDII model relies on information gathering from agents that run on each core node of a Grid. This information is then published into a Grid wide information resource known as Top BDII. The Top level BDIIs are updated typically in cycles of a few minutes each. A new BDDI architecture is proposed and described in this paper based on the hypothesis that only a few attribute values change in each BDDI information cycle and consequently it may not be necessary to update each parameter in a cycle. It has been demonstrated that significant performance gains can be achieved by exchanging only the information about records that changed during a cycle. Our investigations have led us to implement a low latency and fault tolerant BDII system that involves only minimal data transfer and facilitates secure transactions in a Grid environment.Comment: 18 pages; 10 figures; 4 table

The Influence of English Language on Developing Gendered Perception

The present dissertation The influence of English Language on Developing Gendered Perception investigates the possible bias of gender in English language and proposes that English language is not a neutral and transparent means of reflecting the reality Research in this field has not been undertaken with respect to the non-native English speaker The present quantitative study aimed to explore if the same argument applies in the case of non-native speakers of English The study was conducted in SBK Women s University Quetta Baluchistan Researcher selected 20 participants through convenience sampling The results were statistically significant and provided support for the hypothesis that generic he and man elicit inappropriate number of male images and validated Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which served as a theoretical foundation for the present study Results also suggested that he she and human function as generic pronouns Future research should modify the research design taking into account the limitation of the stud