Central Bank Transparency and Bank Lending rates: Australian Evidence

In the past fifteen years central banks have been taking steps towards greater monetary policy transparency. This paper uses a vector error correction model (VECM) to investigate the role transparency has had on changing the dynamics of the credit channel of the Australian monetary policy transmission mechanism. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) lifted all interest rate restrictions in 1986, and then started to announce changes in the cash rate in January 1990 giving the financial system a clearly defined indication of its monetary policy stance. Furthermore, the RBA formalised its inflation targeting operating objective in 1996. This paper gives a clear indication of how a more transparent framework has affected the setting of bank lending rates over three distinct periods. Our results show that responsiveness of bank lending rates to monetary policy changes improved in each period corresponding to an innovation in monetary policy transparency. Moreover, Anticipation effects in banking lending rates are evident only in the period after the RBA formalised its inflation targeting operating objective in 1996. This suggests that Banks only changed lending rates once they had learnt that the RBA was communicating a credible commitment to change the path of future short-term interest rates. However, other results show that price discrimination has been evident between the business and household sectors. To our knowledge, this analysis is the first study that looks at the issue of central bank transparency on bank lending rates.Interest rates; monetary policy; central bank transparency; vector error correction model; variance decomposition

Effects Of Alternative Foreign Exchange Allocation On The Zambian Economy With Specific Reference To The Agricultural Sector: 1985 - 1988

An AEE Working Paper on the: Effects Of Alternative Foreign Exchange Allocation On The Zambian Economy With Specific Reference To The Agricultural Sector: 1985 - 1988In October 1985, the Government of the Republic of Zambia (GRZ) established a system of foreign exchange auctioning. This replaced quarterly rationing by an inter-ministerial committee which by many accounts had become inefficient and corrupt (Sanderson, 1987). The auction, and the host of accompanying reforms, had enormous short-run consequences for Zambian political and economic stability and had long-run potential .for pro-found structural transformation until its cancellation by President Kaunda in May 1987. Because the auction was terminated only recently and the new Foreign Exchange Management Committee (FEMAC) which rations foreign exchange has only been operating for one year, little has been written comparing economic performance and the business climate under the alternative systems. This paper examines the effects of these different foreign exchange allocation systems on agriculture. We will first address three questions at the level of the general economy

Agricultural pricing policy and trade in several SADCC countries: preliminary results

A research paper on the effects of pricing policies on trade within the SADCC region.This paper focuses on the incentive effects of agricultural pricing and exchange rate policies on intra-SADCC trade in staple food commodities. In the following section, recent intra-SADCC trade patterns in staple food commodities are briefly reviewed. Then, the transportation cost argument for intraregional trade is assessed by examining differences between import and export parity prices for a number of SADCC markets. Import parity prices from various official and parallel market sources are then compared to illustrate the potential incentive effects of agricultural pricing and exchange rate policies on intraregional trade. The paper concludes by advocating the need for more systematic collection of parallel market data as an important input into agricultural policy analysis in SADCC countries.The Food Security Research Project is financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bureau of Science and Technology; Bureau for Africa; and the Southern Africa Regional Programme; under a Food Security in Africa cooperative agreement (DAN-1190-A-00-4092-00) with the Department of Agricultural Economics, Michigan State University and Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension, University of Zimbabwe. We are particularly appreciative of the support we have received from USAID officials, including Allison Herrick, Eric Witt, Joshua Mushuari, Doug Pickett, and Brad Wallach of USAID/Zimbabwe; and our Washington-based project managers, Michael Yates (Science and Technology) and Patricia O’brien (Africa Bureau)

Mitigating the effects of atmospheric distortion using DT-CWT fusion

This paper describes a new method for mitigating the effects of atmospheric distortion on observed images, particularly airborne turbulence which degrades a region of interest (ROI). In order to provide accurate detail from objects behind the dis-torting layer, a simple and efficient frame selection method is proposed to pick informative ROIs from only good-quality frames. We solve the space-variant distortion problem using region-based fusion based on the Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT). We also propose an object alignment method for pre-processing the ROI since this can exhibit sig-nificant offsets and distortions between frames. Simple haze removal is used as the final step. The proposed method per-forms very well with atmospherically distorted videos and outperforms other existing methods. Index Terms — Image restoration, fusion, DT-CWT 1

Identifying agricultural marketing and trade policies with the potential to promote food security in countries of the SADCC region: a research discussion paper

A conference paper on food security in Southern Africa. Paper presented at the Third annual University of Zimbabwe conference on food security in Southern Africa, November 2-5, UZ, Mt. Pleasant, Harare

Cereals Trade Patterns In The Sadcc Region

An AEE Working Paper on : CEREALS TRADE PATTERNS IN THE SADCC REGIONThe general objectives of the research project are as follows: 1. To describe current and historical .patterns of agricultural trade: within the SADCC region; between SADCC countries and South Africa; and between SADCC countries and the rest of the world, with particular emphasis on food grains, and farm inputs such as fertilizer, seed, and machinery; 2. To determine the extent to which an economic basis for trade exists within the SADCC region, given current prices and transportation costs; 3. To evaluate alternative domestic agricultural and macro-economic policies which have impacts on trade and food security; 4. To identify present constraints to expanded trade in commodities relevant to food security (both intra-regionally and internationally), focusing on transactions costs and risk; 5. To analyze the potential for a number of policies and programs to expand trade in agricultural commodities and-inputs, thereby improving food security in the SADCC region

Cereals Trade Patterns in the SADCC Region

An on-going food security research program conducted by the University of Zimbabwe and Michigan State University under a Food Security in Africa Cooperative Agreement.In recent years, the nine member states of SADCC have increasingly voiced an interest in expanded intra-regional trade as one strategy towards increased food security within the region. The fact that six of the nine countries are landlocked, transport costs are high, and dependence on trade with external countries (including South Africa) is viewed as precarious, have contributed to a sense of urgency which resulted in the funding of pre-feasibility and feasibility studies for the establishment of a regional food security scheme based on local reserves. However, levels of intra-regional trade have historically been low. The proportion of intra-SADCC trade in overall trade is only 4-5% (Chr.. Michelsen, 1985). For food grains such as maize, much intra-regional trade has been in the form of donor-supported food aid (although percentages of commercial versus aid imports have never been comprehensively quantified). In an effort to contribute to the knowledge base on SADCC agricultural marketing and trade, the Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension of the University of Zimbabwe, in collaboration with Michigan State University, initiated a research project, in mid-1987 -to explore constraints to and potentials for expanded trade in the SADCC region 1.The United States Agency for International Development, with contributions from the Regional Office’for Southern Africa, the Africa Bureau, and the Science and Technology Bureau

Compact optical transmitters for CubeSat free-space optical communications

We present the results of an architectural trade study and prototype implementation of an optical transmitter suitable for resource-constrained CubeSats. Recent advances in CubeSat attitude determination and control systems have made it possible to achieve three-axis stabilization. This is essential for laser communications systems, which have challenging pointing and stability requirements. Our downlink terminal design fits in a 10 cm x 10 cm x 5 cm volume, uses < 10W of power, weighs < 1 kg, and supports data rates up to 50 Mbps. The terminal incorporates pointing, tracking and acquisition optics, an optical fine-steering mechanism, and a compact transmitter. This work focuses on the development of the transmitter for the Nanosatellite Optical Downlink Experiment (NODE). Two transmitter architectures were considered initially: direct modulation of a high-power laser diode and a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA). The MOPA-based approach was selected and a prototype 'breadboard' was built from commercially available components. The prototype transmitter produces high fidelity (extinction ratio, ER < 33 dB) pulse position modulation (PPM) waveforms at 1550nm with 200mW average output power while consuming 6:5W of electrical power. Keywords: free-space optical communications, CubeSat, small satellites, optical transmitters, lasercomUnited States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Space Technology Research Fellowship Program)JPL Strategic University Research Partnership

VQ-T: RNN Transducers using Vector-Quantized Prediction Network States

Beam search, which is the dominant ASR decoding algorithm for end-to-end models, generates tree-structured hypotheses. However, recent studies have shown that decoding with hypothesis merging can achieve a more efficient search with comparable or better performance. But, the full context in recurrent networks is not compatible with hypothesis merging. We propose to use vector-quantized long short-term memory units (VQ-LSTM) in the prediction network of RNN transducers. By training the discrete representation jointly with the ASR network, hypotheses can be actively merged for lattice generation. Our experiments on the Switchboard corpus show that the proposed VQ RNN transducers improve ASR performance over transducers with regular prediction networks while also producing denser lattices with a very low oracle word error rate (WER) for the same beam size. Additional language model rescoring experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed lattice generation scheme.Comment: Interspeech 2022 accepted pape