7,709 research outputs found
What is in it for the poor? Evidence from fiscal decentralization in Vietnam
Like other developing countries, Vietnam has attempted to push for greater fiscal decentralization in the hope of a more efficient delivery of social services to targeted citizens. The fiscal decentralization initiative is encouraging and merits pursuit, but the present study however, shows that a misstep in the decentralization process can discriminate disproportionately against the poor. Specifically, an increase in the sub-provincial share of the total provincial expenditures is predicted to bring about an appreciable decrease in the lowest-quintile average monthly income. We suggest that the Vietnamese government require provinces to adopt pro-poor allocation norms rather than reclaiming its control over the provincial expenditure assignment. This paper’s empirical findings sound a note of considerable caution that other developing countries should exercise in their fiscal decentralization efforts to avoid creating unintended consequences for the poor.Fiscal decentralization; Vietnam; poverty reduction
Researchers who lead the trends
Xuan-Hung Doan, Phuong-Tram T. Nguyen, Viet-Phuong La, Hong-Kong T. Nguyen (2019). Chapter 5. Researchers who lead the trends. In Quan-Hoang Vuong, Trung Tran (Eds.), The Vietnamese Social Sciences at a Fork in the Road (pp. 98–120). Warsaw, Poland: De Gruyter. DOI:10.2478/9783110686081-010
Online ISBN: 9783110686081
© 2019 Sciend
Local structure in nematic and isotropic liquid crystals
By computer simulations of systems of ellipsoids, we study the influence of
the isotropic/nematic phase transition on the direct correlation functions
(DCF) in anisotropic fluids. The DCF is determined from the pair distribution
function by solving the full Ornstein-Zernike equation, without any
approximations. Using a suitable molecular-fixed reference frame, we can
distinguish between two qualitatively different contributions to the DCF: One
which preserves rotational invariance, and one which breaks it and vanishes in
the isotropic phase. We find that the symmetry preserving contribution is
barely affected by the phase transition. However, symmetry breaking
contributions emerge in the nematic phase and may become quite substantial.
Thus the DCF in a nematic fluid is not rotationally invariant. In the isotropic
fluid, the DCF is in good agreement with the prediction of the Percus-Yevick
theory.Comment: to appear in J. Chem. Phy
Ensemble clustering for result diversification
This paper describes the participation of the University of Twente in the Web track of TREC 2012. Our baseline approach uses the Mirex toolkit, an open source tool that sequantially scans all the documents. For result diversification, we experimented with improving the quality of clusters through ensemble clustering. We combined clusters obtained by different clustering methods (such as LDA and K-means) and clusters obtained by using different types of data (such as document text and anchor text). Our two-layer ensemble run performed better than the LDA based diversification and also better than a non-diversification run
- …