Cointegration Analysis-Causality Testing and Wagner's Law The Case of Turkey, 1950-1990

This paper investigates statistically the existence of a long-run relationship between public expenditure and GNP (Wagner’s Law) using data for Turkey over the period 1950-1990. Recent advances in time series analysis have permitted the investigation of the long-run relationship between public expenditure and GNP in terms of cointegration analysis. In the case of Wagner’s Law, evidence of cointegration is sufficient to establish a long-run relationship between public expenditure and income. However, to support Wagner’s Law would require unidirectional causality from income to public expenditure. Therefore cointegration should be seen as a necessary condition for Wagner’s Law, but not sufficient. Hence, conditional on cointegration results, it is necessary to look at the causality properties of the model(s). Using the Engle and Granger cointegration test, the Granger Causality test and Turkish time series aggregate data for the period 1950-1990, we find no empirical support for Wagner’s Law.Wagner's Law; Public Expenditure Growth; Unit Root Test; Cointegration Analysis; Causality

Input and Weight Space Smoothing for Semi-supervised Learning

We propose regularizing the empirical loss for semi-supervised learning by acting on both the input (data) space, and the weight (parameter) space. We show that the two are not equivalent, and in fact are complementary, one affecting the minimality of the resulting representation, the other insensitivity to nuisance variability. We propose a method to perform such smoothing, which combines known input-space smoothing with a novel weight-space smoothing, based on a min-max (adversarial) optimization. The resulting Adversarial Block Coordinate Descent (ABCD) algorithm performs gradient ascent with a small learning rate for a random subset of the weights, and standard gradient descent on the remaining weights in the same mini-batch. It achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art without resorting to heavy data augmentation, using a relatively simple architecture

Ethics and decision making in publishing journal: Issues to be taken into account

One of the most prioritized questions of publishing a new journal in the almost similar fields covered by many other journals warrants certainly some clarification which needs to be addressed in the inaugural issue. A very straight response to this query is promoting business and management science in the country as well as in the region. The unique aim of IJBMR is to focus on quantitative aspects of business and management research. IJBMR has envisioned a future for IJBMR to surrogate the research works that centre around business and management problems of this century with a quantitative view. In this editorial ethical issues in publishing journal articles has been discussed from the perspective of editor, author and reviewer. For decision making in journal publication a new method has been proposed which is known as the SAFA system. the SAFA stands for the "Standardized Acceptance Factor Average". The SAFA of the articles included in this issue are also analyzed.Standardized Acceptance Factor Average, the SAFA system, IJBMR, ethics, PR-PR dilemma, Texoplagiarism

Potential fishery industry activities and financial aspects of east Malaysian marine fisheries

The South China Sea separates East Malaysia from Peninsular Malaysia that is consisted of two big states; Sarawak and Sabah. The marine resources of peninsular Malaysia have been adequately explored in last few decades whereas East Malaysian marine fisheries resources are still potential to be explored. The fisheries sector of Malaysia plays an important role by generating income and employment with foreign exchange. The contribution of marine captured fisheries was up to 89.8% of the total fish production with a value of RM3.81 billion in 1998 (Annual Fisheries Statistics, 1998). The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of Malaysia in the South China Sea is approximately 198,173 km2 (Earth trend, 2004). Mainly the bulk of the unexploited resources come from offshore demersal fish, small pelagic fish, coastal tuna and oceanic tuna. Trash and low value fishes are usually dumped into the sea considering it has no market value. These unwanted fishes are potential as raw material for making fishmeal that could generate good profit. Despite having good resource base due to lack of ready and skillful labor with infrastructure, port facilities and expert advices, East Malaysian fisheries sector is not adequately contributive to the economy of the country. The study attempted to find out the potential fishing industry activities in East Malaysia. It also focuses on the financial aspects of various fisheries related activities such as fishmeal plant and ice plant by carrying out a simplified benefit-cost analysis. Fishery business makes much profit not from the capture side rather from the fish processing, marketing, ice plant and fish storage services. The study recommends that establishing and facilitating fishery industries is potential to contribute to the sector as well as to the economy significantly.East Malaysian marine fishery, Fishing industry, financial aspects, Benefit-cost ratio

Faunal diversity of Paederus Fabricius, 1775 (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae) in Iran

Beetles of the genus Paederus sensu stricto Fabricius, 1775 (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae) are often noticed because of their potency in inducing a dermal lesion, so-called linear dermatitis. This genus, which is placed in the tribe Paederini and subfamily Paederinae of Staphylinidae, currently comprises 490 species worldwide. Our study presents a short review of the former records of Paederus spp. in Iran plus some unpublished data. Field collections were done during March-October yearly (1997-2007) in northern and southern Iran and April-June from central, eastern, western and north-western Iran (2008-2009). The present study adds four species to the Iranian fauna of the genus Paederus, which are P. brevipennis Lacordaire, 1835, P. basalis Bernhauer, 1914, P. pubescens Cameron, 1914 and P. schoenherri Czwalina, 1899. Paederus brevipennis and P. schoenherri are the first members of the subgenus Harpopaederus Scheerpeltz, 1957, ever reported from Iran. Considering previous reports, museum-deposited materials and our findings, 14 species and subspecies of the genus Paederus, which are grouped in five subgenera, occur in Iran. These subgenera are Eopaederus Scheerpeltz, Harpopaederus Scheerpeltz, Heteropaederus Scheerpeltz, Paederus Fabricius and Poederomorphus des Cottes; however P. duplex spectabilis Bernhauer, 1913 is not yet attributed to any of the 13 so-far defined subgenera