The effect of demographic changes on saving for life cycle motives in developing countries

If developing countries follow the same paths that industrialized countries have followed, saving for retirement will initially become more important as the population growth rate declines. To calculate the potential importance of life-cycle savings (saving for retirement), the paper presents a simulation model that translates demographic projections into savings-rate projections. It simulated aggregate rates for life-cycle savings for Brazil, China, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey. The savings rates increase 5 or 6 percentage points when the last baby boomers enter the work force and begin to save after their children leave home. The effect on life-cycle savings is dramatic; the effect on total savings rates which are often three or four times as high, is not. Simulated life-cycle savings rates peak at an absolute 10 percent or less in all cases. The patterns of these projections seem robust with regard to assumptions about productivity growth, interest rates, and age-specific participation in the labor force.Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Inequality

Borrowing, resource transfers, and external shocks to developing countries : historical and counterfactual

Since the late 1970's the buildup and servicing of external debt has dominated the economic situation in many developing countries. This paper gathers some statistical evidence on the magnitude of lending and repayment and on the question of whether repayment reduces the resources available for development. The evidence largely confirms commonly held beliefs. Although most debtor countries have made net transfers of resources to creditors, middle-income countries that have not had to reschedule their debts have averaged smaller net transfers than those that did reschedule. Adverse changes in terms of trade since 1978 accounted for most of the debt buildup in many non-oil developing countries. The mostly favorable terms of trade for oil exporters, on the other hand, gave them large gains that could have more than covered the losses of the oil importing developing countries. Heavy borrowing by oil exporters during favorable times seems to have been a major factor in precipitating the debt crisis. Since the debt crisis, the highly indebted countries have greatly increased their official borrowing. Increased official lending might help the resource balance and domestic investment of lower-income countries more than those of middle-income countries with high commercial debts.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Strategic Debt Management,Financial Intermediation

APPLICATION OF A DYNAMIC PANEL DATA ESTIMATOR TO CROSS-COUNTRY COFFEE DEMAND: A TALE OF TWO ERAS

We estimate price and income elasticities of demand for green coffee beans in panels of up to 40 countries, both during and after the operation of export quotas under International Coffee Agreements. The dynamic panel estimator proposed in Han and Phillips (2007) is used because it is a consistent estimator, for any length of panel, regardless of the presence of unit roots. Dynamic panel data models, of any type, do not seem to have been previously applied to coffee demand. We find evidence of a concave relationship between income and coffee consumption for countries which are members of the International Coffee Organization, but no evidence of such a relationship for other countries. A further conclusion is that measures which increase the price of coffee beans can be expected to have little effect on coffee sales.Coffee Demand, Dynamic Panel Data, International Coffee Organization

Perfect countably infinite Steiner triple systems

We use a free construction to prove the existence of perfect Steiner triple systems on a countably infinite point set. We use a specific countably infinite family of partial Steiner triple systems to start the construction, thus yielding 2ℵ0 non-isomorphic perfect systems

Microwave-Induced Dephasing in One-Dimensional Metal Wires

We report on the effect of monochromatic microwave (MW) radiation on the weak localization corrections to the conductivity of quasi-one-dimensional (1D) silver wires. Due to the improved electron cooling in the wires, the MW-induced dephasing was observed without a concomitant overheating of electrons over wide ranges of the MW power $P_{MW}$ and frequency $f$. The observed dependences of the conductivity and MW-induced dephasing rate on $P_{MW}$ and $f$ are in agreement with the theory by Altshuler, Aronov, and Khmelnitsky \cite{Alt81}. Our results suggest that in the low-temperature experiments with 1D wires, saturation of the temperature dependence of the dephasing time can be caused by an MW electromagnetic noise with a sub-pW power.Comment: 4 pages with 4 figures, paper revised, accepted by Phys Rev Let

The connection between metallicity and metal-line kinematics in (sub-)damped Lyman-alpha systems

A correlation between the metallicity, [M/H], and rest-frame MgII equivalent width, EW, is found from 49 DLAs and strong sub-DLAs drawn from the literature over the redshift range 0.2<z_abs<2.6. The correlation is significant at 4.2 sigma and improves to 4.7 sigma when the mild evolution of [M/H] with redshift is taken into account. Even when including only the 26 DLAs (i.e. excluding sub-DLAs) which have Zn metallicities and EW>0.7A, the correlation remains at >3 sigma significance. Since the MgII2796 transition is predominantly saturated in DLAs (which always have EW greater than 0.3A), EW is far more sensitive to the kinematic spread of the metal velocity components across the absorption profile than it is to [M/H]. Thus, the observed [M/H]--EW correlation points to a strong link between the absorber metallicity and the mechanism for producing and dispersing the velocity components. We also note that approximately half of the 13 known molecular hydrogen absorbers have very high EW and very broad velocity structures which show characteristics usually associated with outflows. Follow-up ultraviolet- and blue-sensitive high-resolution spectra of high-EW systems, initially identified in low-resolution spectra, may therefore yield a large number of new H_2 discoveries.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures (3 EPS files). Accepted by MNRA