14,625 research outputs found
New Industries in Southeast Asia’s Late Industrialization: Evolution versus Creation - The Automation Industry in Penang (Malaysia) considered
Discourse on industry development and policy practice in late industrialization countries in East and Southeast Asia has predominantly tended to relate the emergence of new industries to ‘creation’ by the state and thereby to the role of state intervention or involvement in industrial growth and restructuring. On the other hand the role and position of (local) entrepreneurship in the genesis of new industries has been rather neglected, as little room was perceived for ‘autonomous’ development. Southeast Asian late industrialization is currently being confronted with the limits of development and expansion of specific (FDI-driven) export industries and thus with the necessity to devise new growth paths in industry (on the basis of high tech industries). This compels a reconsideration of policy practice and perceptions of modes of industry development on which it is based. In this paper we argue that a state-orchestrated ‘creation’ of priority industries is not the only possible route to new high tech industries in Southeast Asian late industrialization. This emanates from an analysis - based on field research - of the emergence and development of a recent growth industry in Malaysia, i.e. the manufacturing of automated equipment (or, automation industry) and its constituent firms in the Penang region. The analysis demonstrates that the mode of development of this industry conforms rather well to a number of notions from evolutionary economics on firm genesis and development in new industries. This suggests that successful industrial policies can be based on supporting an evolutionary ‘birth and development’ path, i.e. industry genesis and evolution as a more or less autonomous incremental process of the development of firms and their capabilities.industrial policy, late industrialization, automation industry, Malaysia, co-evolution, spin-out, diversification
Central Banks and Payment Instruments: a Serious Case of Schizophrenia
This article analyses the competition between cash and payment cards against the backdrop of the dual role of central banks - as issuers of cash and as institutions with a mandate to foster the efficiency of payment systems in general. It is argued that this dual role results in a number of policy dilemmas, namely concerning pricing, traceability of banknotes and the choice of denominations of coins and banknotes. On a general level, the article argues that central banks should place greater emphasis on improving the efficiency of retail payments and less on protecting their self-interest. More concretely, the article repeats the suggestion - originally put forward in VAN HOVE & VUCHELEN (1996) - that the ECB should place the upper limit of its banknote series at EUR 50 instead of EUR 500. It is also argued that policy makers should explicitly foster the use of cost-based pricing and in particular create a legal environment that makes it possible for commercial banks to start using it.payment instruments; central banks; cash; banknotes; payment cards; public policy; efficiency
When two trees go to war
Rooted phylogenetic networks are often constructed by combining trees,
clusters, triplets or characters into a single network that in some
well-defined sense simultaneously represents them all. We review these four
models and investigate how they are related. In general, the model chosen
influences the minimum number of reticulation events required. However, when
one obtains the input data from two binary trees, we show that the minimum
number of reticulations is independent of the model. The number of
reticulations necessary to represent the trees, triplets, clusters (in the
softwired sense) and characters (with unrestricted multiple crossover
recombination) are all equal. Furthermore, we show that these results also hold
when not the number of reticulations but the level of the constructed network
is minimised. We use these unification results to settle several complexity
questions that have been open in the field for some time. We also give explicit
examples to show that already for data obtained from three binary trees the
models begin to diverge
Trinets encode tree-child and level-2 phylogenetic networks
Phylogenetic networks generalize evolutionary trees, and are commonly used to
represent evolutionary histories of species that undergo reticulate
evolutionary processes such as hybridization, recombination and lateral gene
transfer. Recently, there has been great interest in trying to develop methods
to construct rooted phylogenetic networks from triplets, that is rooted trees
on three species. However, although triplets determine or encode rooted
phylogenetic trees, they do not in general encode rooted phylogenetic networks,
which is a potential issue for any such method. Motivated by this fact, Huber
and Moulton recently introduced trinets as a natural extension of rooted
triplets to networks. In particular, they showed that level-1 phylogenetic
networks are encoded by their trinets, and also conjectured that all
"recoverable" rooted phylogenetic networks are encoded by their trinets. Here
we prove that recoverable binary level-2 networks and binary tree-child
networks are also encoded by their trinets. To do this we prove two
decomposition theorems based on trinets which hold for all recoverable binary
rooted phylogenetic networks. Our results provide some additional evidence in
support of the conjecture that trinets encode all recoverable rooted
phylogenetic networks, and could also lead to new approaches to construct
phylogenetic networks from trinets
A quadratic kernel for computing the hybridization number of multiple trees
It has recently been shown that the NP-hard problem of calculating the
minimum number of hybridization events that is needed to explain a set of
rooted binary phylogenetic trees by means of a hybridization network is
fixed-parameter tractable if an instance of the problem consists of precisely
two such trees. In this paper, we show that this problem remains
fixed-parameter tractable for an arbitrarily large set of rooted binary
phylogenetic trees. In particular, we present a quadratic kernel
The demography of entrepreneurs and enterprises
Industrial dynamics is increasingly studied from a demographic perspective. Demography of firms is one of the research methods to describe and analyse the evolution of industries. Although this is a very useful and promising interdisciplinary field of study, there are a number of conceptual problems when dealing with the formal demography of firms, and especially in the demographic component of firm start-ups. Fertility or parenthood is not clearly defined here, and occurrence-exposure rates or probabilities of giving birth to a firm are difficult to define. An alternative way of looking at the process of firm start-ups is to view the process as essentially driven by decisions of entrepreneurs within a labour market setting. A worker may decide to be an employee, to be self-employed or an entrepreneur. Although there is not a one-to-one correspondence between entrepreneurs and enterprises, the behaviour of more than 90 percent of firms can be studied from an individual entrepreneurial point of view. There is a large methodological advantage when taking the labour market point of view. Standard demographic tools may be used for describing, analysing and even conditional forecasting of the process. This paper shows how multidimensional demographic models may be used in describing and analysing the process of firm start-ups from an entrepreneurial perspective.
Does Corticothalamic Feedback Control Cortical Velocity Tuning?
The thalamus is the major gate to the cortex and its contribution to cortical
receptive field properties is well established. Cortical feedback to the
thalamus is, in turn, the anatomically dominant input to relay cells, yet its
influence on thalamic processing has been difficult to interpret. For an
understanding of complex sensory processing, detailed concepts of the
corticothalamic interplay need yet to be established. To study
corticogeniculate processing in a model, we draw on various physiological and
anatomical data concerning the intrinsic dynamics of geniculate relay neurons,
the cortical influence on relay modes, lagged and nonlagged neurons, and the
structure of visual cortical receptive fields. In extensive computer
simulations we elaborate the novel hypothesis that the visual cortex controls
via feedback the temporal response properties of geniculate relay cells in a
way that alters the tuning of cortical cells for speed.Comment: 31 pages, 7 figure
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