Inter-region Competition for FDI

This paper models inter-regional competition for FDI and optimal government policy intervention to protect the national interest. Two regional authorities bargain with a single multinational over where it will locate. This potentially leads to excessive competition between the regions, favouring the multinational. The federal government obviously wants to limit such competition but lacks information on comparative advantage. This paper examines its optimal policy. Among the main results we have the following two: First, the federal government would use tax policy to create asymmetries even when the underlying structure is symmetrical. Second, there are situations where, even though one MNC is more productive in one region, it is optimal for the country to make it go to the other one.Subsidy competition, FDI, bargaining

Dynamics of neighborhood formation and segregation by income

This paper analyzes some determinant conditions under which neighborhood formation gives rise to segregation by income. In contrast to the literature, we explore the sequential arrival of poor and rich individuals to neighborhoods exploited by oligopolistic land developers. These developers try to maximize a discounted flow of lot prices during neighborhood formation, taking advantage of the local externalities generated by the rich and the poor. Under a speedy arrival of new potential inhabitants and/or low discount rates, competing developers are more likely to concentrate rich people in the same neighborhood. This happens because the benefits from early agglomeration are outweighed by a more profitable matching of rich neighbors within nearby lots.land developers; segregation; income distribution; arrival rates

Optimal country’s policy towards multinationals when local regions can choose between firm-specific and non-firm-specific policies

This paper looks at a county’s central government optimal policy in a setting where its two identical local regions compete for the attraction of footloose multinationals to their sites, and where the considered multinationals strictly prefer this country to the rest of the world. For the sake of reality the model allows the local regions to choose between the implementation of firm-specific and non-firm-specific policies. We find that, even though the two local regions are identical, some degree of regional tax competition is good for country’s welfare. Moreover, we show that the implementation of the regional firmspecific policies weakly welfare dominates the implementation of the regional non-firmspecific ones. Hence the not infrequent calls for the central government to ban the former type of policies go against the advice of this paper

Globalization Of Knowledge Discovery And Information Retrieval In Teaching And Learning

Developments in communication and information technologies in the last decade have had a significant impact on instructional and learning activities. For many students and educators, the Internet became the significant medium for sharing instruction, learning and communication. Access to knowledge beyond boundaries and cultures has an impact on methods of teaching and learning, affecting professional education in corporations worldwide. The blending of science with commercial applications, new methods of conducting business, and access to published and preliminary research is not longer limited to leading educational institutions and the northern hemisphere. This paper discusses educational opportunities, reviewing the latest trends in information retrieval, along with new teaching methodologies related to availability and globalization of information. The good news is that the multicultural melding of various intelligences and the global linking of intelligent knowledge systems promises to lend a multicultural wisdom to the selection and provision of information. We hope that this may ultimately contribute to a lessening of the gap between educationally rich and poor nations. In this paper the “digital divide” is seen to be a less vexing problem for the future of globalized intelligent information systems. This system, called the “Global Brain,” ameliorates existing differences in national access to educational content repositories used for teaching and learning

Income inequality and the oil resource curse

Surprisingly, there has been little research conducted about the cross-country relationship between oil dependence/abundance and income inequality. At the same time, there is some tentative evidence suggesting that oil rich nations tend to under-report data on income inequality, which can potentially influence the estimated empirical relationships between oil richness and income inequality. In this paper we contribute to the literature in a twofold manner. First, we explore in depth the empirical relationship between oil and income inequality by making use of the Standardized World Income Inequality Database – the most comprehensive dataset on income inequality providing comparable data for the broadest set of country-year observations. Second, this is the first study to our knowledge that adopts an empirical framework to examine whether oil rich nations tend to under-report data on income inequality and the possible implications thereof. We make use of Heckman selection models to validate the tendency of oil rich countries to under-report and correct for the bias that might arise as a result of this – we find that oil is associated with lower income inequality with the exception of the very oil-rich economies

Developing a Crystal Viewer Tool for nanoHUB

Most materials found in nature have their atoms arranged in a regular and repeated pattern known as crystalline structure; this is particularly true for metals. It is very important to understand the crystal structure of materials in order to predict their properties such as the electric conductivity, heat transfer, and more. Particularly, students and scholars in the field of material science need a way to visualize the different crystal structures. Atomic structures of elements are not visible to the naked eye. In that context, a computer based tool can be used to simulate and to visualize the crystal structures of different elements. Nanohub is a web-based workspace that offers multiple simulation tools for nanotechnology scientists all around the world. This project intends to develop a tool to view crystal structures, similar to the tools already available on nanohub, where users can select the material they want and output its 3D structure. Fortunately, Nanohub has a built-in workspace “rappture” to develop user-interfaces for new tools. As for now, an intuitive user-interface has been developed and the code used to run the simulations is currently under progress. Ultimately, a decent Crystal Viewer will be available to use on Nanohub allowing users, ranging from high school students to undergraduate students and faculty members, to view a wide range of structures for most of the useful materials using Crystal Viewer. However, this tool has limited features for advanced usage which leaves room for future improvement

The Psychology of Mineral Wealth: Empirical Evidence from Kazakhstan

Despite rapidly-expanding academic and policy interest in the links between natural resource wealth and development failures (commonly referred to as the resource curse) little attention has been devoted to the psychology behind the phenomenon. Rent-seeking and excessive reliance on mineral revenues can be attributed largely to social psychology. Mineral booms (whether due to the discovery of mineral reserves or to the drastic rise in commodity prices) start as positive income shocks that can subsequently evolve into influential and expectation-changing public and media narratives; these lead consecutively to unrealistic demands that favor immediate consumption of accrued mineral revenues and to the postponement of productive investment. To our knowledge, this paper is the first empirical analysis that tests hypotheses regarding the psychological underpinnings of resource mismanagement in mineral-rich states. Our study relies on an extensive personal survey (of 1977 respondents) carried out in Almaty, Kazakhstan, between May and August 2018. We find empirical support for a positive link between exposure to news and inflated expectations regarding mineral availability, as well as evidence that the latter can generate preferences for excessive consumption, and hence, rent-seeking.Comment: 39 pages, 1 figure, 7 table

CAPACIDAD DE INHIBICIÓN BACTERIANA in vitro DEL EXTRACTO ACUOSO DE AJO (Allium sativum) SOBRE LA MICROBIOTA BUCAL, CECAL Y RECTAL DEL CONEJO

La producción de conejo en México, mantiene una posición marginal, situación influenciada por los hábitos de consumo de la población, así como por los precios (OIEDRUSBC, 2009). Sin embargo, el Estado de México es el principal productor y consumidor de carne de conejo dentro del cual Texcoco, reporta el mayor consumo nacional 250 g/habitante/año (SAGARPA, 2012), razón por la que esta especie está tomando importancia en el ámbito de la investigació

A PSO Application in Skull Prosthesis Modelling by Superellipse

This paper presents a method to create the geometric model of skull defects to be applied in anatomic prosthesis modelling. The approach is to generate an image that represents the missing information in the skull when bone's defect is non-symmetric. We are proposing the use of superellipse concept to recover the parameters that represents the geometric shape of a skull bone curvature in tomography. If the superellipse is properly adjusted in each computed tomography slice, the arcs that represent the piece of missing bone can be modelled in 3D. The problem is that many similar ellipses can be created, and the best solution must be found. This research applies the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm in order to find the best solution for each tomographic slice. Once the solution found for each slice, the whole 3D missing information can be virtually rebuilt as an adjusted prosthesis model image