Cointegration Analysis-Causality Testing and Wagner's Law The Case of Turkey, 1950-1990

This paper investigates statistically the existence of a long-run relationship between public expenditure and GNP (Wagner’s Law) using data for Turkey over the period 1950-1990. Recent advances in time series analysis have permitted the investigation of the long-run relationship between public expenditure and GNP in terms of cointegration analysis. In the case of Wagner’s Law, evidence of cointegration is sufficient to establish a long-run relationship between public expenditure and income. However, to support Wagner’s Law would require unidirectional causality from income to public expenditure. Therefore cointegration should be seen as a necessary condition for Wagner’s Law, but not sufficient. Hence, conditional on cointegration results, it is necessary to look at the causality properties of the model(s). Using the Engle and Granger cointegration test, the Granger Causality test and Turkish time series aggregate data for the period 1950-1990, we find no empirical support for Wagner’s Law.Wagner's Law; Public Expenditure Growth; Unit Root Test; Cointegration Analysis; Causality

Input and Weight Space Smoothing for Semi-supervised Learning

We propose regularizing the empirical loss for semi-supervised learning by acting on both the input (data) space, and the weight (parameter) space. We show that the two are not equivalent, and in fact are complementary, one affecting the minimality of the resulting representation, the other insensitivity to nuisance variability. We propose a method to perform such smoothing, which combines known input-space smoothing with a novel weight-space smoothing, based on a min-max (adversarial) optimization. The resulting Adversarial Block Coordinate Descent (ABCD) algorithm performs gradient ascent with a small learning rate for a random subset of the weights, and standard gradient descent on the remaining weights in the same mini-batch. It achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art without resorting to heavy data augmentation, using a relatively simple architecture

NGOs’ role in improving social forestry practice:does it help to increase livelihood, sustainability and optimum land use in Bangladesh?

At present, encroachment rate is too high and increasing alarmingly that causes environmental degradation as well as low forest cover and productivity in Bangladesh. Rural poverty accelerates the encroachment in meeting the demand of dwelling place and forest products. The natural encroached and degraded forest is under public management regime while a substantial amount of marginal land belongs to other semi-public agencies such as Roads and Highways, Water Development board and so on. Due to lack of initiatives and proper management these lands have been left unused and under utilized. In contrast, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are with appropriate management structure and technologies to utilize these lands in reducing poverty and enhance rural livelihood. In order to rehabilitate these encroached forests non-governmental organizations have been found to be very active and successful. They have added a new dimension in the forest management, which has ensured participation of the community people and protection of the forest, no matter artificial planting or natural. The study attempted to evaluate the social forestry activities of Four large NGOs namely BRAC, PROSHIKA, CARITAS, CARE. The study also discussed the public social forestry activities to find out the nature of the program and the involvement of the local people. By following a framework of common partnership between public and private management systems, the issue ‘property right conflicts’ has been resolved and enhanced rural life as well as created scope of utilizing the marginal lands. As an outcome of this common partnership 33,472 km roadside plantation, 53,430 ha reforestation activities and so on have been carried out in last two decades. The achievement of NGOs’ partnership in managing forest resource seems to be effective towards poverty irradiation and better livelihood.NGO, socio-economics of social forestry, positive and negative sign of NGO

Ethics and decision making in publishing journal: Issues to be taken into account

One of the most prioritized questions of publishing a new journal in the almost similar fields covered by many other journals warrants certainly some clarification which needs to be addressed in the inaugural issue. A very straight response to this query is promoting business and management science in the country as well as in the region. The unique aim of IJBMR is to focus on quantitative aspects of business and management research. IJBMR has envisioned a future for IJBMR to surrogate the research works that centre around business and management problems of this century with a quantitative view. In this editorial ethical issues in publishing journal articles has been discussed from the perspective of editor, author and reviewer. For decision making in journal publication a new method has been proposed which is known as the SAFA system. the SAFA stands for the "Standardized Acceptance Factor Average". The SAFA of the articles included in this issue are also analyzed.Standardized Acceptance Factor Average, the SAFA system, IJBMR, ethics, PR-PR dilemma, Texoplagiarism

Potential fishery industry activities and financial aspects of east Malaysian marine fisheries

The South China Sea separates East Malaysia from Peninsular Malaysia that is consisted of two big states; Sarawak and Sabah. The marine resources of peninsular Malaysia have been adequately explored in last few decades whereas East Malaysian marine fisheries resources are still potential to be explored. The fisheries sector of Malaysia plays an important role by generating income and employment with foreign exchange. The contribution of marine captured fisheries was up to 89.8% of the total fish production with a value of RM3.81 billion in 1998 (Annual Fisheries Statistics, 1998). The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of Malaysia in the South China Sea is approximately 198,173 km2 (Earth trend, 2004). Mainly the bulk of the unexploited resources come from offshore demersal fish, small pelagic fish, coastal tuna and oceanic tuna. Trash and low value fishes are usually dumped into the sea considering it has no market value. These unwanted fishes are potential as raw material for making fishmeal that could generate good profit. Despite having good resource base due to lack of ready and skillful labor with infrastructure, port facilities and expert advices, East Malaysian fisheries sector is not adequately contributive to the economy of the country. The study attempted to find out the potential fishing industry activities in East Malaysia. It also focuses on the financial aspects of various fisheries related activities such as fishmeal plant and ice plant by carrying out a simplified benefit-cost analysis. Fishery business makes much profit not from the capture side rather from the fish processing, marketing, ice plant and fish storage services. The study recommends that establishing and facilitating fishery industries is potential to contribute to the sector as well as to the economy significantly.East Malaysian marine fishery, Fishing industry, financial aspects, Benefit-cost ratio

Poverty-environment interaction through participatory forest management in Bangladesh: an evidence of poverty reduction

Poverty is an obstacle in the process of socio-economic development of Bangladesh. Majority people of the country live in the rural area where subsistence income generating activities are mainly related to exploring natural resources. A high population and its basic needs, thus, cause overexploitation of resources. Forest resources are one of the most overexploited resources in the country. Presently the forest cover is 13.36% of the total land that is alarming for the environmental sustainability. In order to protect forest resources from such overexploitation, participatory forest management approach was followed by the Forest Department involving rural poor. They were provided 1ha of degraded land for plantation and in a few cases 0.5 ha for homestead area. The objective of such initiative was to develop a strong interaction between the over-exploiters and their involvement in protecting forest. The study was conducted in the sal (Shorea robusta) forest of Bangladesh with a sample size of 120. Using non-parametric statistics, the standard of living was examined. A list of opinions was sought for assuming the change in environment due to the participatory management. BCA approach was applied to estimate the distribution impact and poverty reduction impact. The findings of the study reported that there was a significant change in livelihood as well as conservation measurement. The distribution impact analysis showed that the poor people were benefited substantially. The PIR (0.95) gave the positive indication of poverty reduction impact. It was found that the involvement of rural poor could be a process of poverty-environment interaction. The approach of participatory management is useful to increase the interaction between rural poor and resource management towards environmental sustainability.participatory forest management; distribution impact Analysis; poverty reduction impact; poverty impact ratio; agroforestry program