Borrowing, resource transfers, and external shocks to developing countries : historical and counterfactual

Since the late 1970's the buildup and servicing of external debt has dominated the economic situation in many developing countries. This paper gathers some statistical evidence on the magnitude of lending and repayment and on the question of whether repayment reduces the resources available for development. The evidence largely confirms commonly held beliefs. Although most debtor countries have made net transfers of resources to creditors, middle-income countries that have not had to reschedule their debts have averaged smaller net transfers than those that did reschedule. Adverse changes in terms of trade since 1978 accounted for most of the debt buildup in many non-oil developing countries. The mostly favorable terms of trade for oil exporters, on the other hand, gave them large gains that could have more than covered the losses of the oil importing developing countries. Heavy borrowing by oil exporters during favorable times seems to have been a major factor in precipitating the debt crisis. Since the debt crisis, the highly indebted countries have greatly increased their official borrowing. Increased official lending might help the resource balance and domestic investment of lower-income countries more than those of middle-income countries with high commercial debts.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Strategic Debt Management,Financial Intermediation

The effect of demographic changes on saving for life cycle motives in developing countries

If developing countries follow the same paths that industrialized countries have followed, saving for retirement will initially become more important as the population growth rate declines. To calculate the potential importance of life-cycle savings (saving for retirement), the paper presents a simulation model that translates demographic projections into savings-rate projections. It simulated aggregate rates for life-cycle savings for Brazil, China, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey. The savings rates increase 5 or 6 percentage points when the last baby boomers enter the work force and begin to save after their children leave home. The effect on life-cycle savings is dramatic; the effect on total savings rates which are often three or four times as high, is not. Simulated life-cycle savings rates peak at an absolute 10 percent or less in all cases. The patterns of these projections seem robust with regard to assumptions about productivity growth, interest rates, and age-specific participation in the labor force.Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Inequality

Convection cells induced by spontaneous symmetry breaking

Ubiquitous in nature, convection cells are a clear signature of systems out-of-equilibrium. Typically, they are driven by external forces, like gravity (in combination with temperature gradients) or shear. In this article, we show the existence of such cells in possibly the simplest system, one that involves only a temperature gradient. In particular, we consider an Ising lattice gas on a square lattice, in contact with two thermal reservoirs, one at infinite temperature and another at $T$. When this system settles into a non-equilibrium stationary state, many interesting phenomena exist. One of these is the emergence of convection cells, driven by spontaneous symmetry breaking when $T$ is set below the critical temperature.Comment: published version, 2 figures, 5 page

Feminists as Cultural ‘Assassinators’ of Pakistan

Pakistan’s annual Aurat March (Women’s March) signifies a milestone in the culture of feminist protest, but a tense impasse follows a series of encounters between sexual and religious politics, and this has serious implica- tions for rights-based activism in the Islamic Republic

Comment on `Renormalization-Group Calculation of the Dependence on Gravity of the Surface Tension and Bending Rigidity of a Fluid Interface'

It is shown that the interface model introduced in Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 2369 (2001) violates fundamental symmetry requirements for vanishing gravitational acceleration $g$, so that its results cannot be applied to critical properties of interfaces for $g\to 0$.Comment: A Comment on a recent Letter by J.G. Segovia-L\'opez and V. Romero-Roch\'{\i}n, Phys. Rev. Lett.86, 2369 (2001). Latex file, 1 page (revtex

Design of Multi-Layered Lenses for Resolusion Enhancement

Lenses are important optical device having numerous applications in our day-to-day life. As the conventional lenses, we use concave or convex lenses. These lenses are made with natural materials and the image quality imperfect. Furthermore, they are bulky, and design is complex. Consequently, mass production is difficult. The shapes of entrance and exit faces of lenses has impact on its imaging capability. The Lens material also play a vital role for reconstructing the image. Flat lenses can be considered as a good alternative of the conventional lenses. One of the advantages of this Flat lenses is that it can restore both the propagating and evanescent waves in the image plane. The conventional lenses only restore the information contained by the propagating waves and the evanescent waves that contains small subwavelength information of the object decays in the image plane. Flat Lenses are preferable in terms of image quality

Roughening transition, surface tension and equilibrium droplet shapes in a two-dimensional Ising system

The exact surface tension for all angles and temperatures is given for the two-dimensional square Ising system with anisotropic nearest-neighbour interactions. Using this in the Wulff construction, droplet shapes are computed and illustrated. Letting temperature approach zero allows explicit study of the roughening transition in this model. Results are compared with those of the solid-on-solid approximation