Fiscal Illusion at the Local Sphere: An Empirical Test of the Flypaper Effect using South African Municipal Data

Despite South Africa’s relatively decentralized governance and administrative structure, an important feature of the country’s intergovernmental fiscal relations system is the gap that exists between the expenditure responsibilities of sub-national authorities and their assigned revenue bases. The resulting vertical fiscal imbalance is mainly addressed via significant intergovernmental transfers to provinces and local governments. This factor presents strong a priori grounds in assuming that in the South African context, the heavy dependence of many local governments on intergovernmental transfers may generate fiscal illusion. Despite this, no significant effort has been geared towards an empirical investigation of the issue of fiscal illusion. This paper extends existing literature on the empirical analysis of fiscal illusion by using the fiscal year 2005/06 financial and expenditure data from 237 local government authorities in South Africa to evaluate the flypaper variant of the fiscal illusion hypothesis. Empirical results indicate that the marginal effects of municipal own-source revenues on local expenditure exceed those of intergovernmental transfers. This outcome yields no statistical evidence in support of the flypaper hypothesis within the context of municipal expenditures in South Africa.Intergovernmental Transfers; Fiscal Illusion; Flypaper E¤ect; South Africa

Distinguishing technicolor models via tt-bar productions at polarized photon colliders

We study top quark pair productions at a polarized photon collider from an e(+)e(-) linear collider (LC) in various improved technicolor model, namely, the one-family walking technicolor model, the top-color-assisted technicolor model, and the top-color-assisted multiscale technicolor model. Recent constraint on the top-pion mass from the precision data of R(b) is considered. It is shown that, considering only the statistical errors, a polarized photon collider from a 500 GeV LC with an integrated luminosity of 500 inverse fb is sufficient for distinguishing the three improved technicolor models experimentally.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Physical Review

Application of a Multi-Criteria Integrated Portfolio Model for Quantifying South Africa’s Crude Oil Import Risk

e availability of secure energy resources at sustainable quantities and affordable prices is fundamental to South Africa’s current objective of enhancing and sustaining its current growth trajectory. Economic reforms, since the early 1990s, have led to the economy growing at an average rate of almost 5% per annum. A major consequence of this strong growth is the rapid increase in domestic demand for oil energy. With small amounts of proven oil reserves, the rise in oil demand as an essential energy source has prompted an increasing reliance on external sources for domestic crude oil supplies. High oil prices, the extent of proven oil reserves, instability in major oil producing regions and the rise in ‘oil-nationalism’ have raised serious concerns about the security of South Africa’s oil supplies. In this context, a comprehensive understanding of oil import security risks is critical as it will guide in the formulation of energy policy framework aimed at alleviating the impact of oil import risks. This study utilises portfolio theory to provide quantitative measures of systematic and specific risks of South Africa’s crude oil imports over the period 1994 to 2007. It explains the relationship between supply sources diversification and oil energy security risks, and highlights the impact of different crude oil import policy adjustment strategies on the total crude oil import risk for South Africa. The results for the adjustment strategies show that: (a) a policy of having the same quantity of oil imported every month or a constant quantity of oil imported from the supply regions reduces both systematic and specific risks of oil import portfolio, and (b) a reduction in specific risks of South Africa’s oil imports can be achieved if some of the Middle Eastern supplies can be diversified to less risk regions of Europe, North America and Russia.Oil Import Risks, Portfolio Theory, Analytical Hierarchy Process

Exchange rate volatility and non-oil exports in Nigeria : An empirical investigation / Sa’ad Babatunde Akanbi...[et al.]

The adoption of a flexible exchange rate system since 1986 in Nigeria has made the country witnessed varying rate of the naira vis-à-vis the U.S dollar. This paper examines exchange rate volatility with ARCH model and its various extensions (GARCH, TGARCH, and EGARCH) using quarterly exchange rate series from 1986-Q1 to 2014-Q4.The impact of exchange rate volatility on non-oil exports was also examined using Error Correction Model (ECM) with two different measures of volatility. The results obtained confirm the existence of exchange rate volatility and also found a significant negative effect on non-oil export performance in Nigeria. Therefore, the Nigerian government should ensure an appropriate policy mix that not only ensures a stable and realistic exchange rate but also conducive atmosphere for production and exportation

Effect of Synchronisation Error on Optical Spatial Modulation

This paper examines the effect of synchronization error on the performance of spatial modulation (SM) technique in optical wireless communication (OWC) systems. SM exploits the deployment of multiple transmitters by encoding user information on their spatial domain. In most works related to SM, a perfect synchronization among these multiple transmitters is assumed. However, synchronization error can result from multipath propagation in OWC channel, and clock jitter and variation in propagation delay of each transmitter. Synchronization error degrades system performance and hence the need to investigate its effect. Using union bound technique, and defining synchronization errors as timing offsets in the received signals, we derive the symbol error rate for space shift keying (SSK), generalized SSK (GSSK), SM, and generalized SM (GSM) schemes, and we validate our analysis with tightly matched simulation results. Results show that degradation in performance increases with synchronization error. While SSK is tolerant for a small range of synchronization error, GSSK, SM, and GSM are significantly impaired. Our results also demonstrate the dependence of SM on channel gain values. We observe that the lower the channel gain of the transmitter in which synchronization error occurs, the lesser the impact of the synchronization error on the system performance

Comparative Study of the Mechanical Properties of (FS) and MIG Welded Joint in (AA7020-T6) Aluminum Alloy

A comprehensive practical study of typical mechanical properties of welded Aluminum alloy AA7020-T6 (Al-Mg-Zn), adopting friction stir welding (FSW) technique and conventional metal inert gas (MIG) technique, is well achieved in this work for real comparison purposes. The essences of present output findings were concentrated upon the FSW samples in respect to that MIG ones which can be summarized in the increase of the ultimate tensile strength for FSW was 340 MPa while it was 232 MPa for MIG welding, where it was for base metal 400 MPa. The minimum microhardness value for FSW was recorded at HAZ and it was 133 HV0.05 while it was 70 HV0.05 for MIG weld at the welding metal. The FSW produce 2470 N higher than MIG welding in the bending test and a decrease in the localized grain size for FSW in the stirred zone 12 µm and it was 37 µm for MIG while it was 32 µm for the base meta

Lipid profile and blood by-products of deformed and healthy African mud catfish

Study was conducted to investigate lipid profile and metabolites in deformed (lost one or both pectoral fins) and healthy (both pectoral fins intact) African mud catfish C. gariepinus using three groups of adults male and female with a mean weight and standard length of 822.17~c 48.75g and 42.55~c.26cm respectively. The fish were allotted in replicates to 5000m capacity tanks based on the presence or absence of pectoral fins. 1mL blood was drawn from caudal peduncle of each fish by means of disposable sterile syringe and centrifuged at 1000rpm for 20min at 40C. Cholesterol and total protein were determined using the cholesterol FL (CT F400CH) and total protein (TP 0500CH) kits. Serum albumin and globulin concentrations were determined following methods described by Tietz (1995) and Buckley et al., (1976) while total serum bilirubin concentration was measured as outlined by AACC (American Association of Clinical Chemistry). Results indicate that male fish had relatively higher amount of triglyceride while female fish had higher amounts of cholesterol, reduction in globulin of the deformed fish, reduction in the concentrations of albumin in healthy fish, increase in total protein and globulin levels and high urea concentrations. No total bilurubin was detected in any of the fish sampled thus an indication of good liver function which means there was no liver dysfunction or liver damage in the fishes. It is evident therefore that abnormal fish can still perform better if they are given intense management because of the variability in their blood constituents with the normal fishes which is used to assess their health is minimal. Keywords: Blood, Cholesterol, Deformed, Healthy, C. gariepinus

Assistive Robotic Technology: A Review

Older people with chronic conditions even lead to some disabilities face many challenges in performing daily life. Assistive robot is considered as a tool to provide companionship and assist daily life of older people and disabled people. This paper presents a review of assistive robotic technology, particularly for older people and disabled people. The result of this review constitutes a step towards the development of assistive robots capable of helping some problems of older people and disabled people. Hence, they may remain in at home and live independently