Fiscal challenges of population aging : the Asian experience

Population - Asia

Emerging Contours of Financial Regulation: Challenges and Dynamics

In 2008–09 the world experienced the most severe financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. The global financial crisis is attributed to a variety of factors, such as developments in the subprime mortgage sector, excessive leverage, lax financial regulation and supervision, and global macroeconomic imbalances. At a fundamental level, however, the crisis also reflects the effects of a long period of excessively loose monetary policy in the major advanced economies during the early part of this past decade. The global financial crisis has led to a new wave of thinking on all issues related to both monetary policy and financial regulation. The practice of both monetary policy and financial regulation had tended to become too formula bound and hence predictable. While these new principles are being debated, it is important to realize that in the face of unexpected developments that always arise in the financial sector, there is an important role for the exercise of judgment by both monetary authorities and financial regulators. Whereas considerable progress has been achieved on the principles governing this regulatory overhaul, very significant challenges remain on the implementation issues that will arise as a new regime takes hold globally.global financial crisis; monetary policy; financial regulation; regulation financial institutions; regulatory reform

Reforms, Productivity, and Efficiency in Banking: The Indian Experience

India embarked on a strategy of economic reforms in the wake of a serious balance-ofpayments crisis in 1991. A central plank of the reforms was reform in the financial sector and, with banks being the mainstay of financial intermediation, the banking sector. The objective of the banking sector reforms was to promote a diversified, efficient and competitive financial system with the ultimate objective of improving the allocative efficiency of resources through operational flexibility, improved financial viability and institutional strengthening. Beginning from 1992, Indian banks were gradually exposed to greater domestic and international competition. India’s approach to banking reforms has been somewhat different from many other countries. Whereas there has not been privatisation of public sector banks, through a process of partial disinvestment a number of public sector banks have been listed in Stock Exchanges and have become subject to market discipline and greater transparency in this manner. Besides, newly opened banks from the private sector and entry and expansion of several foreign banks resulted in greater competition. Consequent to these developments, there has been a consistent decline in the share of public sector banks in total assets of commercial banks and a declining trend of Herfindahl’s concentration index. Improvements in efficiency of the banking system were reflected in a number of indicators, such as, a gradual reduction in cost of intermediation (defined as the ratio of operating expense to total assets) in the post reform period across various bank groups (barring foreign banks), and decline in the non-performing loans. As a result of these changes, there has been an all-around productivity improvement in the Indian banking sector. While the cost income-ratio (i.e., the ratio of operating expenses to total income less interest expense) as well as net interest margin (i.e., the excess of interest income over interest expense, scaled by total bank assets) of Indian banks showed a declining trend during the post-reform period, the business per employee of Indian banks increased over three-fold in real terms exhibiting an annual compound growth rate of nearly 9 percent. At the same time, the profit per employee increased more than five-fold, implying a compound growth of around 17 percent. Branch productivity also recorded concomitant improvements. Such productivity improvements in the banking sector could be driven by two factors: technological improvements, which expands the range of production possibilities and a catching up effect, as peer pressure amongst banks compels them to raise productivity levels. As far as the future of Indian banking is concerned, a number of issues, such as the credit to small and medium enterprises, customers’ interests and financial inclusion, reducing procedural formalities, listing of the public sector banks in the stock exchange and related market discipline are of paramount importance.

Emerging contours of financial regulation: Challenges and dynamics

In 2008 - 09 the world experienced the most severe financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. The global financial crisis is attributed to a variety of factors, such as developments in the subprime mortgage sector, excessive leverage, lax financial regulation and supervision, and global macroeconomic imbalances. At a fundamental level, however, the crisis also reflects the effects of a long period of excessively loose monetary policy in the major advanced economies during the early part of this past decade. The global financial crisis has led to a new wave of thinking on all issues related to both monetary policy and financial regulation. The practice of both monetary policy and financial regulation had tended to become too formula bound and hence predictable. While these new principles are being debated, it is important to realize that in the face of unexpected developments that always arise in the financial sector, there is an important role for the exercise of judgment by both monetary authorities and financial regulators. Whereas considerable progress has been achieved on the principles governing this regulatory overhaul, very significant challenges remain on the implementation issues that will arise as a new regime takes hold globally

Probabilistic Personalized Recommendation Models For Heterogeneous Social Data

Content recommendation has risen to a new dimension with the advent of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Dailybooth, and Instagram. Although this uproar of data has provided us with a goldmine of real-world information, the problem of information overload has become a major barrier in developing predictive models. Therefore, the objective of this The- sis is to propose various recommendation, prediction and information retrieval models that are capable of leveraging such vast heterogeneous content. More specifically, this Thesis focuses on proposing models based on probabilistic generative frameworks for the following tasks: (a) recommending backers and projects in Kickstarter crowdfunding domain and (b) point of interest recommendation in Foursquare. Through comprehensive set of experiments over a variety of datasets, we show that our models are capable of providing practically useful results for recommendation and information retrieval tasks

ミュオンを構成粒子とするエキゾチック原子のレーザー誘起スピン偏極

京都大学0048新制・課程博士博士(エネルギー科学)甲第21891号エネ博第392号新制||エネ||76(附属図書館)京都大学大学院エネルギー科学研究科エネルギー応用科学専攻(主査)准教授 中嶋 隆, 教授 大垣 英明, 教授 作花 哲夫学位規則第4条第1項該当Doctor of Energy ScienceKyoto UniversityDGA