Innovation, Venture Capital and Globalization: the Role of Public Policies

Creating more innovative and dynamic economies is one of the fundamental challenges facing both advanced and emerging market economies. An important ingredient of this involves the creation of entrepreneurial firms which can quickly translate creative ideas and scientific discoveries into viable products. These firms, however, need financing because it takes time and money to turn ideas into marketable products. However, investing in these types of activities is risky as a lot of new ideas simply don’t work out in practice. Because of these risks, banks tend to avoid lending to these types of firms. There is, however, a small segment of the financial sector referred to as the venture capital market that specializes in finding and developing these entrepreneurial businesses. This paper provides an overview of this important financial sector and concludes that public policies have historically been quite important in nurturing a venture capital industry as it is an area characterized by numerous market imperfections. From these experiences some lessons are drawn as to what actions governments can take to overcome the obstacles in establishing a venture capital market which can adequately finance dynamic new companies. It is also emphasized that although obtaining finance is often a significant constraint it is nevertheless just as important to ensure that the other ingredients for entrepreneurship are also present; these include a proper regulatory and legal framework including protections for intellectual property, low start-up costs with minimum paper work, a favourable tax regime, and a well-educated workforce. More generally, it is pointed out that the policies needed to promote innovation in advanced economies may not be appropriate for catching-up economies.Financing for development, innovation, venture capital, Europe, transition economies, start-ups, savings, investment, public policy

Addressing Climate Change through Innovation: The Challenges Ahead

A key component of climate change mitigation efforts will be the need to develop new technological solutions and to diffuse current state-of-the-art technologies to developing countries. However, due to a number of market failures, the required research and technological transfers are currently not being undertaken. The essay discusses how what has been learned about promoting innovation policies at the general level can be applied to the specific challenges in the environmental area. It stresses the need to establish the proper regulatory and institutional frameworks as a precondition for attracting funding into these activities. More specifically, there is a current need to set a realistic price for carbon emissions that will provide an important financial incentive for firms to invest in mitigation technologies. The issue of finding finance for often long-term and risky environmental projects is likely to become especially difficult due to the 2008 financial crisis.Climate change, global warming, innovation, finance

On the canonical base property

We give an example of a finite rank, in fact aleph-1 categorical theory where the CBP (canonical base property) does not hold. We include a "group-like" example. We also prove, in a finite Morley rank context, if all definable Galois groups are "rigid" then the theory has the CBP (in a strong sense).Comment: 15 page

The Private Housing Market in Eastern Europe and the CIS

This study provides a broad overview of the private housing market in central and eastern Europe and some of the CIS – its history, current conditions and implications for the overall economy. It highlights regional differences, describes the different policy choices that have been made, and evaluates potential problem areas and the policy options for addressing them. The paper begins with a description of housing in these countries before and during their transition phase to market economies. The current state of the housing market in this region is then examined with an emphasis on its institutional development and size. Price trends throughout the region are analysed. A major objective is to ascertain the extent to which these markets are now similar to those observed in more developed western economies. The implications for the housing market resulting from the further integration of these countries into the global financial system are also explored.housing market, East Europe, CIS, housing prices, housing bubble, mortgage market

Remittances in the CIS: Their Economic Implications and a New Estimation Procedure

Migrant remittances are an increasingly important type of international financial flow for providing both additional resources for development as well as consumption expenditures for poverty alleviation. One geographical area where these flows are quite significant is in the CIS economies both in terms of their sheer size as well as their economic importance in providing a source of external finance for the recipient countries. Data on remittances generally, but especially in this region, are often of poor reliability due to the fact that these flows often move through unofficial and unmonitored channels. Data for the CIS are limited in that several countries do not provide this information in their balance of payment statistics and in those that do, it is often only partially reported and poorly collected or estimated. In this paper the characteristics, trends, and importance of remittances in the CIS are discussed and a new approach for estimating remittance flows in the CIS is developed based upon a new set of financial data recently released by the Central Bank of Russia and unpublished data obtained from the central banks of Kazakhstan, Moldova and Ukraine.remittances, migration, CIS, Russia, external finance, financial flows

Ample Pairs

We show that the ample degree of a stable theory with trivial forking is preserved when we consider the corresponding theory of belles paires, if it exists. This result also applies to the theory of $H$-structures of a trivial theory of rank $1$.Comment: Research partially supported by the program MTM2014-59178-P. The second author conducted research with support of the programme ANR-13-BS01-0006 Valcomo. The third author would like to thank the European Research Council grant 33882

Openflow switching: data plane performance

Abstract—OpenFlow is an open standard that can be implemented in Ethernet switches, routers and wireless access points (AP). In the OpenFlow framework, packet forwarding (data plane) and routing decisions (control plane) run on different devices. OpenFlow switches are in charge of packet forwarding, whereas a controller sets up switch forwarding tables on a perflow basis, to enable flow isolation and resource slicing. We focus on the data path and analyze the OpenFlow implementation in Linux based PCs. We compare OpenFlow switching, layer-2 Ethernet switching and layer-3 IP routing performance. Forwarding throughput and packet latency in underloaded and overloaded conditions are analyzed, with different traffic patterns. System scalability is analyzed using different forwarding table size, and fairness in resource distribution is measured. I