Mobilising Tax Revenue to Finance Development: The Case for Property Taxation in Francophone Africa

In the context of a widespread focus on decentralisation in Africa, there has been an imperative to find suitable ways to maximise potential own revenue sources at all sub-national government levels. This need in particular and the need for greater domestic resource mobilisation by African states in general have been exacerbated by the current global financial crisis that has led many countries into recession and left developed and developing countries alike scrambling to find solutions at home. Indeed, greater domestic resource mobilisation will go a long way toward providing African countries with the means to finance their development agenda without relying excessively on external assistance.

QGP collective effects and jet transport

We present numerical simulations of the SU(2) Boltzmann-Vlasov equation including both hard elastic particle collisions and soft interactions mediated by classical Yang-Mills fields. We provide an estimate of the coupling of jets to a hot isotropic plasma, which is independent of infrared cutoffs. In addition, we investigate jet propagation in anisotropic plasmas, as created in heavy-ion collisions. The broadening of jets is found to be stronger along the beam line than in azimuth due to the creation of field configurations with B_t>E_t and E_z>B_z via plasma instabilities.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Presented at the 20th International Conference on Ultra-Relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions: Quark Matter 2008 (QM2008), Jaipur, India, 4-10 Feb 200

Jet broadening in unstable non-Abelian plasmas

We perform numerical simulations of the QCD Boltzmann-Vlasov equation including both hard elastic particle collisions and soft interactions mediated by classical Yang-Mills fields. We provide an estimate of the coupling of jets to a hot plasma which is independent of infrared cutoffs. For weakly-coupled anisotropic plasmas the local rotational symmetry in momentum space is broken. The fields develop unstable modes, forming configurations where B_t>E_t and E_z>B_z. This provides a possible explanation for the experimental observation that high-energy jets traversing the plasma perpendicular to the beam axis experience much stronger broadening in rapidity than in azimuth.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, version accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.C, typos fixed, more detailed discussion of q-ha

Elliptic flow in Pb+Pb collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76 TeV: hybrid model assessment of the first data

We analyze the elliptic flow parameter v_2 in Pb+Pb collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76 TeV and in Au+Au collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}} =200 GeV using a hybrid model in which the evolution of the quark gluon plasma is described by ideal hydrodynamics with a state-of-the-art lattice QCD equation of state, and the subsequent hadronic stage by a hadron cascade model. For initial conditions, we employ Monte-Carlo versions of the Glauber and the Kharzeev-Levin-Nardi models and compare results with each other. We demonstrate that the differential elliptic flow v_2(p_T) hardly changes when the collision energy increases, whereas the integrated v_2 increases due to the enhancement of mean transverse momentum. The amount of increase of both v_2 and mean p_T depends significantly on the model of initialization.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

The Effects of Simulated Jet-lag and Running-Wheel Access on the Symptoms of Type-2 Diabetes in TallyHo/JngJ Mice

Type 2 Diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is the most common form of human diabetes, accounting for about 90% of all cases and affecting about 27.85 million Americans. It is often accompanied by hyperglycemia and obesity. Diabetes has been linked to circadian rhythms (a 24-hour long daily biological clock) as it can affect critical clock genes and disruptions in the rhythm can lead to increased possibility of developing the disorder. Despite the connections between T2DM and the biological clock, there is still a gap of knowledge concerning how biological clock disruptions specifically affect body weight, blood glucose, and insulin levels in T2DM individuals or if there are ways to alleviate the clock stress that can lead to symptoms of T2DM. This study looked at the effects of voluntary exercise on common symptoms of diabetes, such as hyperglycemia and hyperinsulinemia, during jet lag. Two groups of five-week old C57BL/6J (B6; control) and TallyHo/JngJ (TH; diabetic) mice were kept in either a 12:12 LD cycle or a 6-hour advance simulated jet lag, and given standard chow and water ad libitum. Half of each strain received access to a running wheel while the other half were placed into a cage, which can monitor home cage locomotor activity, but without a running wheel. Weekly measurements of body weight, food and water consumption were recorded. In addition, a 12-hour fasting glucose tolerance test with 30, 60, and 120 min time-points was conducted every four weeks starting at age-week eight. Although diabetic animals seemed to benefit from access to a running wheel with increased insulin sensitivity, they did not show reduced severity of diabetic symptoms due to the exercise during the shifting conditions. Further research should explore other assets to alleviate circadian stressors

International donor agencies’ incentive structures and foreign aid effectiveness

This paper examines in depth one of the potential causes of the low performance of foreign aid; in particular, the role incentive structures within international donor agencies could play in leading to ‘a push’ to disburse money. This pressure to disburse money is termed as the ‘Money-Moving Syndrome’ (MMS). The theoretical analysis in this paper relies on the principal–agent theory to explore how donor agencies’ institutional incentive systems may affect the characteristics of an optimal and efficient incentive contract and thus give rise to the MMS. The basic framework of the principal–agent theory was innovatively adapted to fit the organizational settings of donor agencies. The model concludes that the extent to which a performance measure based on the amount of aid allocated within a specific period of time would lead to the MMS and affect aid effectiveness depends on the level of ‘institutional imperatives’, the degree of aid agency’s accountability for effectiveness, the level of corruption in recipient countries and the degree of difficulty to evaluate development activities.http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JOIam201

Local municipality productive efficiency and its determinants in South Africa

This paper assesses the technical efficiency of 231 local municipalities in South Africa for 2007 and investigates the potential determinants of efficiency gaps using the non-parametric data envelopment analysis technique. Efficiency scores are explained in a second-stage regression model using a Tobit regression model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt, using such a technique, to assess technical efficiency at the local government level in the African context. The results show that, on average, B1 and B3 municipalities could have theoretically achieved the same level of basic services with about 16% and 80% fewer resources respectively. Furthermore, fiscal autonomy and the number and skill levels of the top management of a municipality’s administration were found to influence the productive efficiency of municipalities in South Africa. Perhaps most importantly, the results depict a bleak picture of the democratic behaviour at the local level in South Africa. It appears that higher income and highly educated households do not feel the incentive to be active participants in public decision-making processes. The paper findings raise concerns over the future of local municipalities in the country, especially about their capability to efficiently deliver expected outcomes on a sustainable basis.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cdsa202015-07-31hb201

The tripartite capsid gene of Salmonella phage Gifsy-2 yields a capsid assembly pathway engaging features from HK97 and λ

AbstractPhage Gifsy-2, a lambdoid phage infecting Salmonella, has an unusually large composite gene coding for its major capsid protein (mcp) at the C-terminal end, a ClpP-like protease at the N-terminus, and a ∼200 residue central domain of unknown function but which may have a scaffolding role. This combination of functions on a single coding region is more extensive than those observed in other phages such as HK97 (scaffold–capsid fusion) and λ (protease–scaffold fusion). To study the structural phenotype of the unique Gifsy-2 capsid gene, we have purified Gifsy-2 particles and visualized capsids and procapsids by cryoelectron microscopy, determining structures to resolutions up to 12Å. The capsids have lambdoid T=7 geometry and are well modeled with the atomic structures of HK97 mcp and phage λ gpD decoration protein. Thus, the unique Gifsy-2 capsid protein gene yields a capsid maturation pathway engaging features from both phages HK97 and λ

Re-Hardening of Hadron Transverse Mass Spectra in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

We analyze the spectra of pions and protons in heavy-ion collisions at relativistic energies from 2 A GeV to 65+65 A GeV by using a jet-implemented hadron-string cascade model. In this energy region, hadron transverse mass spectra first show softening until SPS energies, and re-hardening may emerge at RHIC energies. Since hadronic matter is expected to show only softening at higher energy densities, this re-hardening of spectra can be interpreted as a good signature of the quark-gluon plasma formation.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, Poster presentation at QM2001, Revised to correct latex error in citation on April 6, 200

Branching ratio change in K- absorption at rest and the nature of the Lambda(1405)

We investigate in-medium corrections to the branching ratio in K- absorption at rest and their effect on the (positively and negatively) charged pion spectrum. The in-medium corrections are due to Pauli blocking, which arises if the Lambda(1405) is assumed to be a $\bar{K}$-nucleon bound state and leads to a density and momentum dependent mass shift of the Lambda(1405). Requiring that the optical potential as well as the branching ratio are derived from the same elementary T-matrix, we find that the in-medium corrected, density dependent T-matrix gives a better description of the K- absorption reaction than the free, density-independent one. This result suggests that the dominant component of the Lambda(1405) wave function is the $\bar{K}N$ bound state.Comment: 8 Pages, Revtex with epsf, and embedded 8 ps figure