China’s Economic Growth, Global Economic Crisis and China’s Policy Responses (The Quaid-i-Azam Lecture)

As a result of opening and reform, China has maintained an annual average growth rate of 9.8 percent for nearly three decades. China’s growth is based on high savings and high investment. Its export promotion policy has also played a very important role in promoting economic growth. However, as a result of China’s growth pattern characterised by investmentdriven and export promotion, the Chinese economy also has been suffering from serious structural imbalances. Its high and ever-rising investment rate has created overheat and overcapacity in tandem. Its high dependency on external market makes its economy vulnerable to external shocks. The global financial crisis has hit the economy seriously and exposed the structural weakness of the economy. The dramatic fall of external demand led to dramatic slowdown of the economy. The Chinese government responded to the slowdown of the economy swiftly and forcefully. A four trillion Renmibi stimulus package and expansionary monetary policy have successfully stabilised the economy. However, the stimulate policy has worsened structural problems. China’s structure problems include high external dependency, high investment rate, deterioration of environment, widening income gap between different social group and between rural and urban areas, insufficiency in the provision of social goods and so on. Due to its strong fiscal position, there should be no problem with China to achieve a growth rate of 8 percent. At the same time, the Chinese government should be able to tackle its structural problems successfully so as to ensure the sustainability of China’s economic growth.Growth, Global Financial Crisis, Stimulus Package, Structural Adjustment

Reform of the international monetary system: Some concrete steps

Reform of the international monetary system is under discussion after three decades of apathy. Tectonic shifts in the balance of international power have made reform more urgent. However, in the short term, there is little chance of a grand redesign of the international monetary system. Nevertheless, concrete steps should be taken. First, consensus is needed on exchange rates, capital flows and reserves. Second, financial safety nets must be improved so that countries do not have to self-insure by accumulating  reserves or rely on possible bilateral swap lines to access liquidity. Third, a change in the composition of the Special Drawing Right should be planned for, to strengthen the multilateral framework. The most workable short-term deliverables seem to be (i) guidelines on and surveillance of capital controls; (ii) a new regime for deciding on SDR allocations that would facilitate more frequent use of this instrument; and (iii) the inclusion of the renmimbi in the SDR basket. These reforms would be a partial move, preparing the ground for further developments.

Capital account liberalization in China: a cautionary tale

This repository item contains a policy brief from the Boston University Global Economic Governance Initiative. The Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) is a research program of the Center for Finance, Law & Policy, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. It was founded in 2008 to advance policy-relevant knowledge about governance for financial stability, human development, and the environment.This policy brief synthesizes some of the main themes and policy recommendations discussed at a February 2014 workshop of the Pardee Task Force for Regulating Capital Flows at Boston University, and presented in this report, though the specific recommendations discussed in this brief are our own. The main message is that China would do well to draw lessons from both the economics literature and country experiences with capital account liberalization. Such an approach would guide China to adopt a carefully sequenced and cautionary approach to capital account liberalization

Geometric Spanner of Segments (Algorithms and Computation)

Algorithms and computation : 18th International Symposium, ISAAC 2007, Sendai, Japan, December 17-19, 2007 : proceedings ; ISAAC 2007 : (Lecture notes in computer science ; 4835)Proc. of ISACCGeometric spanner is a fundamental structure in computational geometry and plays an important role in many geometric networks design applications. In this paper, we consider a generalization of the classical geometric spanner problem (called segment spanner): Given a set S of disjoint 2-D segments, find a spanning network G with minimum size so that for any pair of points in S, there exists a path in G with length no more than t times their Euclidean distance. Based on a number of interesting techniques (such as weakly dominating set, strongly dominating set, and interval cover), we present an efficient algorithm to construct the segment spanner. Our approach first identifies a set of Steiner points in S, then construct a point spanner for them. Our algorithm runs in O(|Q| + n 2 logn) time, where Q is the set of Steiner points. We show that Q is an O(1)-approximation in terms of its size when S is relatively “well” separated by a constant. For arbitrary rectilinear segments under L 1 distance, the approximation ratio improves to 2

Bio-inspired approach for long-range underwater navigation using model predictive control

Lots of evidence has indicated that many kinds of animals can achieve goal-oriented navigation by spatial cognition and dead reckoning. The geomagnetic field (GF) is a ubiquitous cue for navigation by these animals. Inspired by the goal-oriented navigation of animals, a novel long-distance underwater geomagnetic navigation (LDUGN) method is presented in this article, which only utilizes the declination component (D) and inclination component (I) of GF for underwater navigation without any prior knowledge of the geographical location or geomagnetic map. The D and I measured by high-precision geomagnetic sensors are compared periodically with that of the destination to determine the velocity and direction in the next step. A model predictive control (MPC) algorithm with control and state constraints is proposed to achieve the control and optimization of navigation trajectory. Because the optimal control is recalculated at each sampling instant, the MPC algorithm can overcome interferences of geomagnetic daily fluctuation, geomagnetic storms, ocean current, and geomagnetic local anomaly. The simulation results validate the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed algorithm

DFL: High-Performance Blockchain-Based Federated Learning

Many researchers are trying to replace the aggregation server in federated learning with a blockchain system to achieve better privacy, robustness and scalability. In this case, clients will upload their updated models to the blockchain ledger, and use a smart contract on the blockchain system to perform model averaging. However, running machine learning applications on the blockchain is almost impossible because a blockchain system, which usually takes over half minute to generate a block, is extremely slow and unable to support machine learning applications. This paper proposes a completely new public blockchain architecture called DFL, which is specially optimized for distributed federated machine learning. This architecture inherits most traditional blockchain merits and achieves extremely high performance with low resource consumption by waiving global consensus. To characterize the performance and robustness of our architecture, we implement the architecture as a prototype and test it on a physical four-node network. To test more nodes and more complex situations, we build a simulator to simulate the network. The LeNet results indicate our system can reach over 90% accuracy for non-I.I.D. datasets even while facing model poisoning attacks, with the blockchain consuming less than 5% of hardware resources.Comment: 11 pages, 17 figure

Capital account liberalization in China: the need for a balanced approach

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.This is the third report stemming from the Pardee Center Task Force on Regulating Capital Flows for Long-Run Development, a project of the Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) at Boston University. This report is the collective work of experts examining the benefits and risks of accelerated capital account liberalization in China. The contributing authors – all leading scholars and practitioners from around the world (listed below) – met at Boston University in February 2014 to discuss the experiences of other emerging market countries that liberalized the capital account to glean lessons for China as it considers this delicate task. This volume is an outcome from that meeting, presenting the authors’ perspectives on important aspects of capital account liberalization that China should pay special attention to, not only for its own sake, but also in consideration of the potential impacts that China’s actions may have on other emerging markets and the global economy overall