The impact of the stimulus package on the agricultural sector in Vietnam

The global financial crisis in 2008-2009 has affected almost all countries. Vietnam was hit by a large fall in export demand and foreign direct investment. Many governments quickly prescribed stimulus packages and Vietnam was no exception. It reduced taxes and increased government spending, mainly by subsidizing loans to state-owned enterprises. The question is what the stimulated impact is, if any, and whether a better outcome could have been achieved by a different mix of policies. In this paper, we use a simple general equilibrium model to quantify the impact of the various components of the stimulus package on the whole economy as well as agricultural sector. The results suggest that, in the short run at least, the stimulus package marginally stabilised national production and income. The package led to a reduction in total welfare because it favoured the non-agricultural sector. The poor in the agricultural sector could be better off if the investment policy were to boost demand for agricultural products. Furthermore, the risk of inflation and real exchange rate appreciation could undermine national competitiveness.Vietnam, fiscal stimulus, agriculture, International Development, Public Economics, E62, D58, Q17,

Congestion Charging and the Optimal Provision of Public Infrastructure: Theory and Evidence

The paper provides a theoretical framework for analysing the effects of public infrastructure provision on private sector productivity using the example of a transport network. Public infrastructure such as a transport network is assumed to be a (congested) public good. When the provision of this good is at the long run equilibrium level, consumers pay a price which reflects the (individually-determined) marginal productivity of the good and the supplier is also recovering all its opportunity costs. In the traditional literature on transport congestion (Walters, 1961; Mohring and Harwitz, 1962), the concept of infrastructure capacity is often defined in term of the maximum level of traffic flow, which is more of a usage concept rather than a ‘capacity’ concept. Congestion is then defined in terms of the difference between the marginal social cost of this traffic flow and the marginal private costs. There has been some debate in the literature on the way travel demand in general, and traffic congestion in particular, has been defined in terms of traffic flow because this will tend to give an ambiguous definition of the concept of ‘congestion’ in some cases. An alternative measure for the concept of traffic demand (and supply), and of ‘congestion’, is in terms of traffic density or volume rather than in terms of traffic flow. In this paper, we explore this alternative definition of ‘capacity utilisation’ and of ‘congestion’ in terms of traffic density. We arrive at an alternative definition for the concept of optimal congestion tax that turns out to be more robust. This is because it can be applied, not only to the situation of ‘low congestion’ but also to the case of bottleneck or ‘hyper-congestion’ which is not well analysed in the traditional literature. The paper also illustrates this new concept with some numerical calculations based on empirical observations on an actual road network

Linking discrete choice to continuous demand within the framework of a computable general equilibrium model for the analysis of wider economic impacts of transport investment projects

Discrete choice (DC) models are commonly used as basic building blocks in ‘bottom-up’ models which seek to describe consumer and producer behaviour at a disaggregate level, in contrast to continuous demand (CD) models which are used to describe behaviour at a more aggregate level. At a disaggregate level, choice behaviour is defined in terms of commodities differentiated by qualities or attributes. In contrast, aggregate demand behaviour is defined in terms of broadly defined and generically different commodities. In a DC model, the main focus of analysis is not the total quantity of demand, but rather the relative shares or substitution between the choice alternatives, in contrast to a continuous demand model where the focus is on the aggregate substitution between groups of commodities as well as on the income effects. Seen in this way, there is scope for complementary usage of DC and CD models within the framework of a CGE model where DC models are used to describe the preferences for a narrowly defined set of commodities belonging to a particular sector of an economy whereas CD models are used to describe the interactions between these sectors. In this paper, we describe how DC and CD models can be used in such an integrated fashion in a spatial computable general equilibrium model to inquire into the wider economic impacts of a transport investment project in the Sydney Metropolitan Area

Linking Discrete Choice to Continuous Demand in a Spatial Computable General Equilibrium Model

Discrete choice (DC) models are often used to describe consumer behaviour at a disaggregate level where the choice decision is defined in terms of a set of alternatives (commodities) differentiated mainly by their quality attributes rather than just prices, and individuals making the choice decisions are differentiated by their socio-economic characteristics rather than just income level. DC models therefore are rich in details which are important for policies analysis at a micro or intra-sectoral level (e.g., transport sector, housing sector). In contrast, continuous demand (CD) models are specialized in describing behaviour at an aggregate (inter-sectoral) level (e.g. trade-off between transport and land-use activities). DC and CD models are therefore complements rather than substitutes and increasingly, there is a need to integrate the use of both types of models especially in an economy-wide model to look at the impacts of policies which are implemented at a microeconomic level (e.g. investment in a particular transport network) and yet having impacts which are measured adequately only at an economy-wide level. This paper presents a methodology for integrating the use of DC and CD models in the framework of a computable general equilibrium (economy-wide) model. The paper also illustrates the application of this methodology suggested in an empirical example, taken from a study of the investment in the Northwest Rail network in the Sydney Metropolitan Area (Australia)

Torque vectoring based drive assistance system for turning an electric narrow tilting vehicle

The increasing number of cars leads to traffic congestion and limits parking issue in urban area. The narrow tilting vehicles therefore can potentially become the next generation of city cars due to its narrow width. However, due to the difficulty in leaning a narrow tilting vehicle, a drive assistance strategy is required to maintain its roll stability during a turn. This article presents an effective approach using torque vectoring method to assist the rider in balancing the narrow tilting vehicles, thus reducing the counter-steering requirements. The proposed approach is designed as the combination of two torque controllers: steer angle–based torque vectoring controller and tilting compensator–based torque vectoring controller. The steer angle–based torque vectoring controller reduces the counter-steering process via adjusting the vectoring torque based on the steering angle from the rider. Meanwhile, the tilting compensator–based torque vectoring controller develops the steer angle–based torque vectoring with an additional tilting compensator to help balancing the leaning behaviour of narrow tilting vehicles. Numerical simulations with a number of case studies have been carried out to verify the performance of designed controllers. The results imply that the counter-steering process can be eliminated and the roll stability performance can be improved with the usage of the presented approach

Speech-based recognition of self-reported and observed emotion in a dimensional space

The differences between self-reported and observed emotion have only marginally been investigated in the context of speech-based automatic emotion recognition. We address this issue by comparing self-reported emotion ratings to observed emotion ratings and look at how differences between these two types of ratings affect the development and performance of automatic emotion recognizers developed with these ratings. A dimensional approach to emotion modeling is adopted: the ratings are based on continuous arousal and valence scales. We describe the TNO-Gaming Corpus that contains spontaneous vocal and facial expressions elicited via a multiplayer videogame and that includes emotion annotations obtained via self-report and observation by outside observers. Comparisons show that there are discrepancies between self-reported and observed emotion ratings which are also reflected in the performance of the emotion recognizers developed. Using Support Vector Regression in combination with acoustic and textual features, recognizers of arousal and valence are developed that can predict points in a 2-dimensional arousal-valence space. The results of these recognizers show that the self-reported emotion is much harder to recognize than the observed emotion, and that averaging ratings from multiple observers improves performance

Assessing the wider economy impacts of transport infrastructure investment with an illustrative application to the north-west rail link project in Sydney, Australia

This paper identifies the employment agglomeration impact of transport investments through a measure of change in effective employment density, using new empirical estimates of the elasticity of productivity with respect to effective density in order to calculate the uplift in benefits (or impact) from this key wider economy impact. The approach combines the behavioural richness of an integrated transport and location choice modelling system (TRESIS) and its outputs to a spatial computable general equilibrium model (SGEM), which uses data at a more aggregate level to compute the additional impacts of transport infrastructure change on the wider economy. This has allowed the development of an integrated transport-location-economywide model system known as TRESIS-SGEM. The model system is applied to the introduction of the North-West Rail Link project in Sydney, Australia to illustrate the capability of TRESIS-SGEM, identifying a 17.6% markup over the conventional transport user benefit

Implementation of a Real-Time Beamforming System on Field Programmable Gate Array

Beamforming is an important technique in array signal processing and wireless communication systems. In this project, we investigate the Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) beamforming technique and its implementation. The QR-RLS algorithm is chosen because of its advantages of numerical stability and systolic array architecture. The team successfully implemented the real-time beamforming of a linear array with 3 receiving antennas on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA platform. Both the simulation and hardware implementation results are presented in this report

Arousal and Valence Prediction in Spontaneous Emotional Speech: Felt versus Perceived Emotion

In this paper, we describe emotion recognition experiments carried out for spontaneous affective speech with the aim to compare the added value of annotation of felt emotion versus annotation of perceived emotion. Using speech material available in the TNO-GAMING corpus (a corpus containing audiovisual recordings of people playing videogames), speech-based affect recognizers were developed that can predict Arousal and Valence scalar values. Two types of recognizers were developed in parallel: one trained with felt emotion annotations (generated by the gamers themselves) and one trained with perceived/observed emotion annotations (generated by a group of observers). The experiments showed that, in speech, with the methods and features currently used, observed emotions are easier to predict than felt emotions. The results suggest that recognition performance strongly depends on how and by whom the emotion annotations are carried out. \u