Causal relationship between domestic credit and international reserves: The experience of developing countries

Three causality tests, Haugh, Granger and Sims are used to determine the nature of causal relationship between the components of monetary base of India, Malaysia, Mexico and Taiwan. The conclusion derived is that bidirectional causality exists between the changes in domestic credit and changes in international reserves for all four countries.

A test of the efficiency of futures markets in commodities

The role of the futures markets in stabilising spot prices has been widely discussed. However, the success of these markets in performing the stabilising function critically depends on whether they are efficient (Fama 181, page 383) in the sense that the futures prices fully reflect the available information. The question of futures market efficiency has assumed greater relevance in view of the recent UNCTAD proposals to stabilise the prices of primary commodities exported mainly by the developing countries. The Integrated Programme for Commodities put forward by the Group of 77 at UNCTAD IV in 1976 calls for the establishment of buffer stocks for 18 such commodities. The recent developments show, however, that the political as well as the economic success of the UNCTAD schemes is rather doubtful. Under these circumstances, the feasibility of other efficient market oriented alternatives for stabilising commodity prices needs to be examined. Further, it could be argued that theoretically the case for buffer stocks for stabilising prices rests in part on the lack of sufficient and rational speculators in these markets. For, if futures markets reflect the available information and provide efficient forecasts of the future spot prices, the rationale for UNCTAD schemes is somewhat weakened. In this paper, we test the efficiency of futures markets for five of the commodities in the UNCTAD list. At the outset, we discuss various approaches for testing the efficiency of futures markets. A semi-strong' test is then performed. The data, the models and the results are presented in sections III through V. The concluding comments and the economic implications are discussed in the last section.

Estimates of the unreported economy in India

This paper presents estimates of India's unofficial economy on a yearly basis for the period 1967 to 1978. These estimates implicitly revise the GNP, per capita and other related statistics for this period. The technique employed has been recently used to determine the size of the unreported economies in U.S.A. and Canada. The results indicate that the unreported activity as a proportion of official GNP has grown from 9.5 per cent in 1967 to nearly 49 per cent by 1978. High taxes have contributed significantly to the growth of the unofficial economy. A 1 per cent increase in overall taxes leads to more than 3 per cent increase in the unofficial economy relative to the official economy.

Enhancing effective utilization of aid in fragile states

This paper explores the macroeconomic implications of aid flows in countries with weak institutions. It argues that these countries should take into account their overall macroeconomic position, their capacity to absorb aid at the sectoral and subnational levels, and the strength of their fiscal institutions in deciding how much and how fast to spend aid. These considerations may warrant a gradual use of aid, except when aid is provided for humanitarian purposes. There is some basis for frontloading spending for countries emerging from a conflict, otherwise fragile states should seek to smoothen their spending against the background of aid volatility and uncertainty

Causal relationship between domestic credit and international reserves: The experience of developing countries

Three causality tests, Haugh, Granger and Sims are used to determine the nature of causal relationship between the components of monetary base of India, Malaysia, Mexico and Taiwan. The conclusion derived is that bidirectional causality exists between the changes in domestic credit and changes in international reserves for all four countries

Estimates of the unreported economy in India

This paper presents estimates of India's unofficial economy on a yearly basis for the period 1967 to 1978. These estimates implicitly revise the GNP, per capita and other related statistics for this period. The technique employed has been recently used to determine the size of the unreported economies in U.S.A. and Canada. The results indicate that the unreported activity as a proportion of official GNP has grown from 9.5 per cent in 1967 to nearly 49 per cent by 1978. High taxes have contributed significantly to the growth of the unofficial economy. A 1 per cent increase in overall taxes leads to more than 3 per cent increase in the unofficial economy relative to the official economy

Computational Investigation of Microstrip Antennas in Plasma Environment

Microstrip antennas are extensively used in spacecraft systems and other applications where they encounter a plasma environment. A detailed computational investigation of change in antenna radiation properties in the presence of plasma has been presented in this paper. The study shows antenna properties such as the resonant frequency, return loss, radiation properties and the different characteristics of the antenna changes when it is surrounded by plasma. Particular focus of the work is to understand the causes behind these changes by correlating the complex propagation constant in the plasma medium, field distribution on the patch and effective dielectric of the antenna substrate with antenna parameter variations. The study also provides important insights to explore the possibilities of designing tunable microstrip antenna where the substrate can be replaced with plasma and important antenna characteristics can be controlled by varying the plasma density.Comment: IEEE AEM

A unified approach to χ2\chi^2 discriminators for searches of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences

We describe a general mathematical framework for $\chi^2$ discriminators in the context of the compact binary coalescence search. We show that with any $\chi^2$ is associated a vector bundle over the signal manifold, that is, the manifold traced out by the signal waveforms in the function space of data segments. The $\chi^2$ is then defined as the square of the $L_2$ norm of the data vector projected onto a finite dimensional subspace (the fibre) of the Hilbert space of data trains and orthogonal to the signal waveform - any such fibre leads to a $\chi^2$ discriminator and the full vector bundle comprising the subspaces and the base manifold constitute the $\chi^2$ discriminator. We show that the $\chi^2$ discriminators used so far in the CBC searches correspond to different fiber structures constituting different vector bundles on the same base manifold, namely, the parameter space. The general formulation indicates procedures to formulate new $\chi^2$s which could be more effective in discriminating against commonly occurring glitches in the data. It also shows that no $\chi^2$ with a reasonable degree of freedom is foolproof. It could also shed light on understanding why the traditional $\chi^2$ works so well. As an example, we propose a family of ambiguity $\chi^2$ discriminators that is an alternative to the traditional one. Any such ambiguity $\chi^2$ makes use of the filtered output of the template bank, thus adding negligible cost to the overall search. We test the performance of ambiguity $\chi^2$ on simulated data using spinless TaylorF2 waveforms. We show that the ambiguity $\chi^2$ essentially gives a clean separation between glitches and signals. Finally, we investigate the effects of mismatch between signal and templates on the $\chi^2$ and also further indicate how the ambiguity $\chi^2$ can be generalized to detector networks for coherent observations.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure, abstract is shortened to comply with the arXiv's 1920 characters limitation, v2: accepted for publication in PR