Can the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation Be Restored to Financial Health?

In 2003, the Bush administration made a proposal for reform to strengthen pension plan funding and the financial condition of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). Various bills with the goal of reforming the PBGC were proposed in the 108th Congress but none were enacted into law. The doubling of the PBGC deficit from fiscal 2003 to fiscal 2004, has heightened awareness about the PBGC deficit situation. Congressional leaders from both parties have announced their intention to move aggressively on legislative solutions in the 109th Congress

Factor Price Equalization : Geometrical Conditions

This paper presents a geometrical approach to the univalence problem for a system of cost functions. We present a natural (almost tautological) extension of a geometrical theorem due to McKenzie: our sufficient condition is related to the non-separability of two cones formed by convex combinations of the rows of the Jacobian matrix. This means that the cones spanned by the rows of Jacobian matrix (i.e., production coefficients) do not move wildly so that the two cones corresponding to the two end points (i.e., factor price vectors) cannot be separated by the hyperplane orthogonal to the vector of changes in factor prices. Unlike most ofthe previous propositions, our condition can naturally include as a special case such linear systems as having a non-singular matrix. We also give an alternative condition employing the concept of monotone functions. Dual to the above result is one more condition, which is shown to be closely connected with Kuhn's WARP-like requirement when the given functions are concave as well as homogeneous of degree one

Mussel production and economics at Ratnagiri

Mussels as a world food resource have been indicated by Davies (1970), because of their great potential for culture and world wide distribution. In countries like India with high population and protein malnutrition anything that could be produced in large quantities at a cheaper cost giving annual protein is welcomed