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SPECIAL ISSUE INDEXÍNDIC

Human-resource development and demographic change in China

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/China’s economic success in recent decades can be traced in large part to the mobilization of the country’s enormous human-resource base. Improvements in the health and education of China’s huge working-age population have made a strong contribution to economic growth. Looking ahead, as today’s large cohorts of workers grow older and transit into retirement, much smaller cohorts of children—born in an era of very low fertility—will be growing up and joining the workforce. Given a smaller number of workers, human-resource development that maximizes the potential of each individual will be even more central to China’s efforts to achieve broad social and economic development goals. At this point, China is poised to address many of its human-resource challenges successfully. Public spending on education, and to a lesser extent on healthcare, appears to be commensurate with the current level of development. There is one important exception to this generalization, however—the disparity in spending on higher education. Although university enrollment tripled in the 10 years between 2000 and 2010, rural and lower-income young people still face clear disadvantages. Improving economic security for the elderly is another challenge. Under China’s current, highly fragmented public pension scheme, pension programs for urban and formally employed citizens are relatively well established and generous, but rural residents and those employed in the informal sector do not have adequate access to public pension programs and, thus, remain highly vulnerable in their old age. Extending public pension programs to these groups will be challenging in the face of a slowly growing workforce and a swelling elderly population. One policy change that would help address this challenge would be to raise the retirement age. As its population ages, China should be prepared to make better use of the productive potential of older people. Overall, successful human-capital investment is essential for achieving sustainable economic growth and improving the wellbeing of all age groups.Support for this issue of the NTA Bulletin was provided by IDR

Population change and economic growth in Asia : new findings from the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Population age structures are changing everywhere in the world, but nowhere has the change been more rapid or dramatic than in Asia. And changing age structures can have a profound effect on wellbeing and economic growth. How many consumers and producers are there in a population? How much do they earn and how much do they consume at every stage of life? To what extent do the elderly support themselves from assets acquired during their working years? And how do families and governments meet the needs of children and the elderly who consume more than they produce? The National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project is bringing together data and developing analytical tools to help answer these important questions. By providing estimates of income, public and private transfers, and consumption and saving by age, NTA adds an important dimension to measures of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other widely used economic indicators. In 2014, the Asia Pacific Regional Office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA APRO) and the East-West Center launched a project to expand and update NTA analysis in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Bangladesh and Malaysia joined the group later. The project includes national-level training, south-south exchange visits, NTA research-based policy briefs, and regional meetings showcasing best practices and progress in the NTA project, including comparisons with findings from other NTA member countries. This issue of the NTA Bulletin highlights early findings from this expansion of NTA analysis in the region.Support for this issue of the NTA Bulletin was provided by UNPF

Sharing the demographic dividend : findings from low- and middle-income countries in Asia

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Recent work by NTA teams in Asia has shed light on how both the contributions and benefits associated with population change are shared-—among age groups, between genders, among income groups, and between urban and rural residents. Better insights into these distributional issues can potentially help policymakers maximize the potential of demographic change to stimulate economic growth and reduce the disparities among population groups

Automatic detection of change in address blocks for reply forms processing

In this paper, an automatic method to detect the presence of on-line erasures/scribbles/corrections/over-writing in the address block of various types of subscription and utility payment forms is presented. The proposed approach employs bottom-up segmentation of the address block. Heuristic rules based on structural features are used to automate the detection process. The algorithm is applied on a large dataset of 5,780 real world document forms of 200 dots per inch resolution. The proposed algorithm performs well with an average processing time of 108 milliseconds per document with a detection accuracy of 98.96%

Three-dimensional Navier-Stokes heat transfer predictions for turbine blade rows

Results are shown for a three-dimensional Navier-Stokes analysis of both the flow and the surface heat transfer for turbine applications. Heat transfer comparisons are made with the experimental shock-tunnel data of Dunn and Kim, and with the data of Blair for the rotor of the large scale rotating turbine. The analysis was done using the steady-state, three-dimensional, thin-layer Navier-Stokes code developed by Chima, which uses a multistage Runge-Kutta scheme with implicit residual smoothing. An algebraic mixing length turbulence model is used to calculate turbulent eddy viscosity. The variation in heat transfer due to variations in grid parameters is examined. The effects of rotation, tip clearance, and inlet boundary layer thickness variation on the predicted blade and endwall heat transfer are examined

Applications of Multi-Valued Quantum Algorithms

This paper generalizes both the binary Deutsch-Jozsa and Grover algorithms to $n$-valued logic using the quantum Fourier transform. Our extended Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm is not only able to distinguish between constant and balanced Boolean functions in a single query, but can also find closed expressions for classes of affine logical functions in quantum oracles, accurate to a constant term. Furthermore, our multi-valued extension of the Grover algorithm for quantum database search requires fewer qudits and hence a substantially smaller memory register, as well as fewer wasted information states, to implement. We note several applications of these algorithms and their advantages over the binary cases.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures; updated version of paper for ISMVL 2007; contains new proof of multi-valued Grover algorithm time complexity, with typos correcte