Towards Consistency Management for a Business-Driven Development of SOA

The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven) system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the business process models drive the supporting service component architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment during the initial development activities, and the IT developers can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the difference between the design principles of the emerging domainspecific languages imposes serious challenges in the following re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying software architecture models is of high relevance to the key elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a business process update, this paper introduces an incremental model transformation approach that propagates this update to the related service component configurations. It, therefore, supports the change propagation among heterogenous domainspecific languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major contribution, our approach makes model transformation more tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the conditional graph rewriting

Surviving the Crisis: Foreign Multinationals vs Domestic Firms in Ireland

Starting from the observation that all firms in Ireland (foreign and domestic in manufacturing and services industries) were hit by the crisis, the paper asks whether there is a difference in the behaviour of foreign and domestic firms. One hypothesis is that foreign multinationals are less linked into the Irish economy, so more likely to leave once the economy is hit by a negative shock. The paper discusses background hypotheses before giving empirical evidence from firstly aggregate data, and secondly firm-level observations. The analysis of the latter suggests that foreign firms are not more likely to leave during the crisis than Irish firms. Some policy conclusions are offered in the paper.firm survival, financial crisis, Ireland

Back to normal? The future of global production networks.

It is neither likely nor desirable for central banks to exit from unconventional monetary policies in the near future. However, it is important that central banks develop an exit strategy, evaluate the merits of new and old monetary policy tools and communicate with the public so as to maintain financial stability, support economic growth and minimize future inflationary risks. Central bank communication policy will turn out to be crucial and more challenging than it was before the crisis.Wertschöpfung; Outsourcing; Business Network; Offshoring; Globalisierung; Wirtschaftskrise;

The impact of commodity price changes on rural households : the case of coffee in Uganda

Policies and external shocks affecting agriculture, the main source of income for rural households, can be expected to have a significant impact on poverty. The authors study the case of Uganda. Throughout the 1990s, more than 90 percent of its poor lived in rural areas and, during the same period, large international price fluctuations as well as an extensive domestic deregulation affected the coffee sector, its main source of export revenues. Using data from three household surveys covering the 1990s, the authors confirm a strong correlation between changes in coffee prices (in a liberalized market) and poverty reduction. This is highlighted by comparing the performance of different households grouped according to their dependence on coffee farming. Regression analysis (based on pooled data from the three surveys) of consumption expenditure on coffee-related variables, other controls, and time-fixed effects corroborates that the mentioned correlation is not spurious. The authors also find that while both poor and rich farmers enter the coffee sector, the price boom benefits the poorer households relatively more, whereas the liberalization seems to create more opportunities for richer farmers. Finally, notwithstanding the importance of the coffee price boom, the agricultural policy framework and the thorough structural reforms in which the coffee market liberalization was embedded have certainly played a role in triggering overall agricultural growth. These factors appear to matter especially in the second half of the 1990s when prices went down but poverty reduction continued.Crops&Crop Management Systems,Markets and Market Access,Rural Poverty Reduction,Access to Markets

The Impact of Coffee Price Changes on Rural Households in Uganda

Based on household survey data, this paper investigates the impact on coffee and non-coffee households of the pronounced coffee price fluctuations in Uganda during the 1990s. As expected, the price boom of the early 1990s was associated with substantial poverty reduction for coffee farmers. More strikingly, their poverty incidence continued to go down when prices fell again. This may be explained by a combination of factors: first, coffee production increased after 1995, probably as a delayed response to improved price incentives; second, there is evidence of consumption smoothing among specialized coffee farmers; and third, coffee farmers diversified into alternative crops. Non-coffee farmers seem to have benefited from the income generated through the coffee price boom. For the second halve of the 1990s, by contrast, it is impossible to discern any indirect effect of the fall in coffee prices from the data, which does, however, not necessarily indicate that there was none but may as well be due to the fact that other factors dominated the price change.Coffee Price Changes, Price Transmission, Rural Households, Poverty Analysis, Uganda, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis,

Phase diagram of the Kondo necklace: a mean-field renormalization group approach

In this paper we investigate the magnetic properties of heavy fermions in the antiferromagnetic and dense Kondo phases in the framework of the Kondo necklace model. We use a mean field renormalization group approach to obtain a temperature versus Kondo coupling $(T-J)$ phase diagram for this model in qualitative agreement with Doniach's diagram, proposed on physical grounds. We further analyze the magnetically disordered phase using a two-sites approach. We calculate the correlation functions and the magnetic susceptibility that allow to identify the crossover between the spin-liquid and the local moment regimes, which occurs at a {\em coherence} temperature.Comment: 5 figure