On the engineering of systems of systems: key challenges for the requirements engineering community!

Software intensive systems of the future will be ultra large-scale systems of systems. Systems of Systems Engineering focuses on the interoperation of many independent, self-contained constituent systems to achieve a global need. The scale and complexity of systems of systems possess unique challenges for the Requirements Engineering community. Current requirements engineering techniques are inadequate in addressing these challenges and new concepts, methods, techniques, tools and processes are required. This paper identifies some immediate key challenges for the Requirements Engineering community that need to be scoped and describes some road-mapping activities that aim to address these challenges

Economic Growth, Entrepreneurship and the Business Environment in Africa

Research on causes of underdevelopment traps and economic growth can be traced back to the work of Young (1928), Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) and Nurkse (1953). The seminal work of Kormendi and Meguire (1985), Grier and Tullock (1998), Barro (1991), Abramovitz (1986) and Baumol (1986), revived the debate on causes of economic growth. Later work by Quah (1997), Salai-I-Martin (1987,2004) has sought to identify the factors driving economic growth across various regions around the world in a manner that would explain why various regions are growing at such different rates. A stark example is the vast di¤erences in growth rates between Africa and Asia. Asia, on one hand, was at the same level of development withmost African countries in the early sixties, but has since overtaken Africa in the pace of economic growth. Explanations and solutions for Africa’s poor growth are found in the research work by Collier (2004), Berthelemy and Varoudakis (1996), Berthelemy and Soderling (2001), and Sacks, et al (2004). The “big-push†initiative, which argues for financial transfers in developing countries especially, Africa has been pushed heavily by Sacks, et al (2004) and is also linked to the African Commission Report driven by the British government, and accompanied by proposals for debt forgiveness for poorer countries.

An Econometric Model of Employment in Zimbabwe's Manufacturing Industries

This paper is concerned with the estimation of an employment relationship and employment efficiency under production risk using a panel of Zimbabwe's manufacturing industries. A flexible labour demand functions are used and consist of two parts: the traditional labour demand function and labour demand variance function. Labour demand is a function of wages, output, quasi-fixed inputs and time variables. The variance function is a function of the determinants of labour demand and a number of production and policy characteristic variables. It appears in a multiplicative form with the demand function and it accommodates both positive and negative marginal effects with respect to the determinants of the variance. A multi-step procedure is used to estimate the parameters of the model. Estimation of industry and time-varying employment efficiency is also considered. Employment efficiency is defined in terms of the distance from the employment frontier defined as minimum employment required to produce a given level of output. The empirical results show that the average employment efficiency is 92%.Labour demand; variance; efficiency; manufacturing industries; Zimbabwe;

Governance, Incentives and Elections as Determinants of Economic Performance, Aid and Investment Flows

Scholars have focused their efforts to explain poor growth and development in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, using arguments based on quality of institutions and geography and the structure and process of resource allocation and endowment. This paper presents a different argument based on an incentive compatibility and asymmetric information framework. We characterize the decision-making problem in government and public sector as being fraught with mis-information about the true state of economic performance. Misinformation can also result in a legal liability which may depend on probability of losing elections, income, and attitude to risk. The agency conflicts between the elected politicians and career-bureaucrats contribute to the mis-information problem, resulting in poor policy choices that may lead to poor economic performance. The role of international financial aid flows is examined and the paper argues that such aid flows may only serve to subsidize the inefficiencies of political leaders and reduce the economic gap created by poor policy choices. More financial aid flows may not be a panacea for poor economic growth and its insurance characteristics may cause recipient governments to choose even riskier policies. We also examine why Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows to poor regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, are low. We show that the risky policy choices create conditions that increase the value of the option-to-wait on investment decisions, thus reducing the flow of FDI. We undertake empirical analysis on some African Countries and show that the quality of governance influences GDP growth, Employment Creation, and Poverty Reduction in Africa.Governance, Incentives, Asymmetric Information, Elections, Economic Performance, Aid Flows, Insurance, Moral Hazard, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Option-to-Wait, Real Options

Amalgamation of South Africa’s rural municipalities: is it a good idea?

The majority of South African municipalities facing the challenges of unemployment, poverty and weak infrastructure are in rural areas. To fulfil their mandate, they depend significantly on financial transfers.  This is something that the government is focused on minimising as evidenced by the recent Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs proposal of amalgamating many municipalities to make them self-reliant and functional.  This paper asks the question: ‘will amalgamations of rural municipalities correct for financial viability and functionality’? Using case studies of amalgamated municipalities, the paper observes that amalgamations will not make all rural municipalities self-sufficient and functional

Working Paper 134 - Inflation Targeting, Exchange Rate Shocks and Output: Evidence from South Africa

This paper derives the inflation equation to search for a possible transmission channel between the real interest rate, inflation rate, exchange rates, real output growth rate using a Bayesian VAR sign restriction approach. Our findings show that the real interest rate reacts negatively to inflation rate shocks and the Fisher effect holds in the long run. We show that strict inflation targeting approach is not compatible with significant real output growth. However a flexible inflation-targeting framework which attaches a large weight to the role of real effective exchange rates results in a significant real output growth given the Central Bank desire to accumulate more foreign exchange reserves and high oil price inflation. Thus real effective exchange rate measuring competitiveness against trading partners matters more than domestic currency and nominal effective exchange rate depreciations.

AN ECONOMETRIC MODEL OF EMPLOYMENT IN ZIMBABWE¡¯S MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES

This paper is concerned with the estimation of employment relationship and employment efficiency under production risk using a panel of Zimbabwe¡¯s manufacturing industries. A flexible labour demand function is used consisting of two parts: the traditional labour demand function and labour demand variance function. Labour demand is a function of wages, output, quasi-fixed inputs and time variables. The variance function is a function of the determinants of labour demand and a number of production and policy characteristic variables. Estimation of industry and time-varying employment efficiency is also considered. The empirical results show that the average employment efficiency is 92%.Labour demand, Variance, Efficiency, Manufacturing, Industries, Zimbabwe