The Effectiveness of Monetary and Fiscal Policy with Different Degrees of Goods and Financial Market Integration

Given the importance of economic integration and the concern for macroeconomic stabilisation, it is important to understand how increasing integration alters the effectiveness of government policy tools. This paper aims to determine how increasing goods and financial market integration changes the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy. Expansionary monetary and fiscal policies are analysed under different degrees of goods and financial market integration in a dynamic general equilibrium framework. Imperfect goods market integration is represented by the presence of pricing-to-market behaviour by firms and imperfect financial market integration is represented by agents facing adjustment costs to foreign asset stock changes. Simulations show that the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy change significantly depending on the presence of incompletely integrated goods and/or financial markets. While financial market integration increases the effectiveness of monetary policy, it diminishes the effectiveness of fiscal policy. Goods market integration increases the effectiveness of both monetary and fiscal policy.Policy effectiveness, pricing-to-market, goods market integration, financial market integration

WHY FUZZY ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS APPROACH FOR TRANSPORT PROBLEMS?

The evaluation of transport projects has become increasingly complex. Different aspects have to be taken into account and the consequences of the problems are usually far reaching and the different policy alternatives are numerous and difficult to predict. Several pressure or action groups have also emerged causing an even more complex decision making process. The use of multi criteria analysis for the evaluation of transport projects has increased due to this increasing complexity of the problem situation. At the same time, the importance of stakeholders within this evaluation process should have been recognized. Researches on transport projects are generally carried out to provide information to policymakers that have to operate within restrictive parameters (political, economical, social, etc…). Researchers should therefore take greater account of the different priorities of stakeholders such as policymakers, private enterprises and households. These stakeholders should be incorporated explicitly in the evaluation process. The Analytic Hierarchy Process is one of the Fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision Making methods. It can be applied in a very broad range of applications of decision problems. Logistics, urban planning, public politics, marketing, finance, education, economics are a part of this wide application area. In transport subjects it can be used for the evaluation of transport policy measures or decision making problems. Due to its wide range application area, it has been an exciting research subject for many different field researchers. The aim of this paper is to introduce AHP method and to offer how to benefit it for the preference of urban planners in transport problems. This paper is composed of two main parts. First part consists of the literature survey regarding with the AHP and its application areas. The advantage of methods had been mentioned. Second part focuses on a sample application of AHP technique. The study uses AHP technique to determine the selection criteria in the transhipment port selection decision-making process. Keywords: Analytic Hierarchy Process, Multi criteria analysis, Transshipment port selection.

The timing of asset trade and optimal policy in dynamic open economies

Using a standard open economy DSGE model, it is shown that the timing of asset trade relative to policy decisions has a potentially important impact on the welfare evaluation of monetary policy at the individual country level. If asset trade in the initial period takes place before the announcement of policy, a national policymaker can choose a policy rule which reduces the work effort of households in the policymaker’s country in the knowledge that consumption is fully insured by optimally chosen international portfolio positions. But if asset trade takes place after the policy announcement, this insurance is absent and households in the policymaker’s country bear the full consumption consequences of the chosen policy rule. The welfare incentives faced by national policymakers are very different between the two cases. Numerical examples confirm that asset market timing has a significant impact on the optimal policy rule.PostprintPeer reviewe

Arboreal twig-nesting ants form dominance hierarchies over nesting resources.

Interspecific dominance hierarchies have been widely reported across animal systems. High-ranking species are expected to monopolize more resources than low-ranking species via resource monopolization. In some ant species, dominance hierarchies have been used to explain species coexistence and community structure. However, it remains unclear whether or in what contexts dominance hierarchies occur in tropical ant communities. This study seeks to examine whether arboreal twig-nesting ants competing for nesting resources in a Mexican coffee agricultural ecosystem are arranged in a linear dominance hierarchy. We described the dominance relationships among 10 species of ants and measured the uncertainty and steepness of the inferred dominance hierarchy. We also assessed the orderliness of the hierarchy by considering species interactions at the network level. Based on the randomized Elo-rating method, we found that the twig-nesting ant species Myrmelachista mexicana ranked highest in the ranking, while Pseudomyrmex ejectus was ranked as the lowest in the hierarchy. Our results show that the hierarchy was intermediate in its steepness, suggesting that the probability of higher ranked species winning contests against lower ranked species was fairly high. Motif analysis and significant excess of triads further revealed that the species networks were largely transitive. This study highlights that some tropical arboreal ant communities organize into dominance hierarchies