The Problem of Growth-Inequality Nexus：An Analysis based on the Case of China since Reform and Opening Up

The dissertation contributes to both development economics and the new institutional economics. It mainly concerns long-run economic analysis. We argued and showed that pure neoclassical models without considering institutional factors cannot correctly analyze the real economic development, esp. for a transitional economy. Meanwhile, we showed that more neoclassical analytical skills can be incorporated into institutional analysis. The marginal analysis, for example, is successfully adopted in this dissertation dealing with the concepts like transaction cost and rent which often appear in the new institutional economics. The combination of both analytical frames can generate more explaining power on the real economy. The dissertation discusses the relationship between economic growth and income/wealth distribution. Several views on the problem of growth-inequality nexus have been established: firstly, we confirmed that institutional arrangements are crucial for economic performance. A good institutional arrangement will benefit both economic growth and income/wealth distribution in the long run; secondly, we enhanced some of the former neoclassical viewpoints on wealth inequality evolution during growth, arguing that the crucial roles of rent distribution and more equal dissemination of education should be noted for achieving “common prosperity”; finally, we pointed out that inequality has a negative relationship with economic growth in the long run. To the opposite, equality takes a positive effect on sustainable growth, especially for a transitional economy experiencing the tertiarisation process. This dissertation is a comprehensive study on the growth-inequality nexus based on the economic performance of P. R. China since reform and opening up in 1979. Thus the dissertation is also a contribution to the understanding of the so-called “China’s Economic Miracle”. The dissertation challenges the prevalent optimistic perspective on China’s sustainable growth and provides counterarguments. The analysis also leads to suggestions for China’s future reform which will help the economy overcome the “middle-income trap” problem. The dissertation’s content is summarized as follows: in Chapter 1 we summarized the basic characteristics of economic growth and income/wealth inequality during this period of China as a background introduction of the study. Then we made an empirical research in Chapter 2 on explaining China’s income inequality since 1990s with institutional analysis, pointing out that the tertiarisation process plays a crucial role for both income/wealth distribution and sustainable economic growth. We argued that there are mainly three institutional arrangements in China blocking the process of tertiarisation: China’s political and cultural institutions which make this country a very high rent-seeking economy, the double-track economic system and the dual-sector economy dividing into rural and urban sectors. In Chapter 3 we built three models to deepen our analysis. In the 1st model we extended the Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans growth model to explain how inequality evolves with two representative agents representing “inside institution” (“tizhinei”) and “outside institution” (“tizhiwai”) economies in China. The 2nd model shows that the double-track economic system should be transferred into a single-track one in order to maximize the output. We finally established a generalized model and proved that in a rent-seeking economy excluding labor wage, when the rent distribution is more equal, the wealth distribution will be also more equal in the long run. We turned to build a new theoretical frame based on a newly defined “transaction cost” in Chapter 4 in order to present another angle to look at both the short-run and long-run economic size changes. We put forward the concept of “unit transaction cost” and explored its relationship with economic growth. The analysis in this chapter confirms and deepens the arguments of the new institutional economics on economic growth. In Chapter 5, we extended our analysis on rent-seeking space and discussed the effect of inequality on economic growth from the perspective of rent. Combining the arguments of Chapter 2, the negative long-run relationship between income/wealth inequality and economic growth is established. Finally, we discussed the conclusions and implications of the dissertation in Chapter 6. We argued that one doctrine of Marxism that the economic base determines the superstructure is strongly doubtful in the short run if we treat 30 years’ development as a short-run historical view

Leakage-Abuse Attacks Against Forward and Backward Private Searchable Symmetric Encryption

Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) enables a server to efficiently search and update over encrypted files. To minimize the leakage during updates, a security notion named forward and backward privacy is expected for newly proposed DSSE schemes. Those schemes are generally constructed in a way to break the linkability across search and update queries to a given keyword. However, it remains underexplored whether forward and backward private DSSE is resilient against practical leakage-abuse attacks (LAAs), where an attacker attempts to recover query keywords from the leakage passively collected during queries. In this paper, we aim to be the first to answer this question firmly through two non-trivial efforts. First, we revisit the spectrum of forward and backward private DSSE schemes over the past few years, and unveil some inherent constructional limitations in most schemes. Those limitations allow attackers to exploit query equality and establish a guaranteed linkage among different (refreshed) query tokens surjective to a candidate keyword. Second, we refine volumetric leakage profiles of updates and queries by associating each with a specific operation. By further exploiting update volume and query response volume, we demonstrate that all forward and backward private DSSE schemes can leak the same volumetric information (e.g., insertion volume, deletion volume) as those without such security guarantees. To testify our findings, we realize two generic LAAs, i.e., frequency matching attack and volumetric inference attack, and we evaluate them over various experimental settings in the dynamic context. Finally, we call for new efficient schemes to protect query equality and volumetric information across search and update queries.Comment: A short version of this paper has been accepted to the 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'23

Alternative Telescopic Displacement: An Efficient Multimodal Alignment Method

Feature alignment is the primary means of fusing multimodal data. We propose a feature alignment method that fully fuses multimodal information, which alternately shifts and expands feature information from different modalities to have a consistent representation in a feature space. The proposed method can robustly capture high-level interactions between features of different modalities, thus significantly improving the performance of multimodal learning. We also show that the proposed method outperforms other popular multimodal schemes on multiple tasks. Experimental evaluation of ETT and MIT-BIH-Arrhythmia, datasets shows that the proposed method achieves state of the art performance.Comment: 8 pages,7 figure

Soil microbiome manipulation triggers direct and possible indirect suppression against <i>Ralstonia solanacearum</i> and <i>Fusarium oxysporum</i>

Soil microbiome manipulation can potentially reduce the use of pesticides by improving the ability of soils to resist or recover from pathogen infestation, thus generating natural suppressiveness. We simulated disturbance through soil fumigation and investigated how the subsequent application of bio-organic and organic amendments reshapes the taxonomic and functional potential of the soil microbiome to suppress the pathogens Ralstonia solanacearum and Fusarium oxysporum in tomato monocultures. The use of organic amendment alone generated smaller shifts in bacterial and fungal community composition and no suppressiveness. Fumigation directly decreased F. oxysporum and induced drastic changes in the soil microbiome. This was further converted from a disease conducive to a suppressive soil microbiome due to the application of organic amendment, which affected the way the bacterial and fungal communities were reassembled. These direct and possibly indirect effects resulted in a highly efficient disease control rate, providing a promising strategy for the control of the diseases caused by multiple pathogens

Does Pressure Reduction Test have Significant Effect on Evaluating Pressure Management to Reduce Physical Leakage Amount

Physical leakage flow is positively correlated with water head in water supply network (WSN). Index model is applied to engineering of pressure management in which physical leakage flow is expressed as index of average head in WSN. The paper analyzed three aspects involving flow meter measurement error, water head impact, water flow instability. The result shows that the error of this model is unacceptable from the data of pressure reduction measurement with water flow. Pressure reduction test have meaningless effect on evaluating physical losses reduction unless when it was conducted, users stop consuming water

A flexible and accurate total variation and cascaded denoisers-based image reconstruction algorithm for hyperspectrally compressed ultrafast photography

Hyperspectrally compressed ultrafast photography (HCUP) based on compressed sensing and the time- and spectrum-to-space mappings can simultaneously realize the temporal and spectral imaging of non-repeatable or difficult-to-repeat transient events passively in a single exposure. It possesses an incredibly high frame rate of tens of trillions of frames per second and a sequence depth of several hundred, and plays a revolutionary role in single-shot ultrafast optical imaging. However, due to the ultra-high data compression ratio induced by the extremely large sequence depth as well as the limited fidelities of traditional reconstruction algorithms over the reconstruction process, HCUP suffers from a poor image reconstruction quality and fails to capture fine structures in complex transient scenes. To overcome these restrictions, we propose a flexible image reconstruction algorithm based on the total variation (TV) and cascaded denoisers (CD) for HCUP, named the TV-CD algorithm. It applies the TV denoising model cascaded with several advanced deep learning-based denoising models in the iterative plug-and-play alternating direction method of multipliers framework, which can preserve the image smoothness while utilizing the deep denoising networks to obtain more priori, and thus solving the common sparsity representation problem in local similarity and motion compensation. Both simulation and experimental results show that the proposed TV-CD algorithm can effectively improve the image reconstruction accuracy and quality of HCUP, and further promote the practical applications of HCUP in capturing high-dimensional complex physical, chemical and biological ultrafast optical scenes.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figures and 1 tabl

Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Tarim Basin, located on the ancient Silk Road, played a very important role in the history of human migration and cultural communications between the West and the East. However, both the exact period at which the relevant events occurred and the origins of the people in the area remain very obscure. In this paper, we present data from the analyses of both Y chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) derived from human remains excavated from the Xiaohe cemetery, the oldest archeological site with human remains discovered in the Tarim Basin thus far.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Mitochondrial DNA analysis showed that the Xiaohe people carried both the East Eurasian haplogroup (C) and the West Eurasian haplogroups (H and K), whereas Y chromosomal DNA analysis revealed only the West Eurasian haplogroup R1a1a in the male individuals.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results demonstrated that the Xiaohe people were an admixture from populations originating from both the West and the East, implying that the Tarim Basin had been occupied by an admixed population since the early Bronze Age. To our knowledge, this is the earliest genetic evidence of an admixed population settled in the Tarim Basin.</p