Search results

The threat to the international financial system resulting from the developing‐country debt problem has diminished since the initial 1982 crisis, despite halting adjustment and impaired creditworthiness in heavily indebted developing countries. The threat to the financial system has eased as commercial banks have reduced sharply the share of their assets and capital exposed to the troubled debtor countries. The countries themselves, however, are no better off. A sizable balance‐of‐payments adjustment has occurred in the heavily indebted developing countries, but that adjustment was concentrated–at least in quantitative terms–during the years immediately following the onset of the crisis and might have been more efficient had it been executed more gradually. Despite the adjustment that has occurred, the creditworthiness of the heavily indebted countries–as evaluated by conventional indices–has not improved. And, for reasons that this article explores, economic growth per capita has not resumed either.

We analyze the microscopic origin and the physical properties of the superconducting phase recently observed in MoS2. We show how the combination of the valley structure of the conduction band, the density dependence of the screening of the long-range Coulomb interactions, the short-range electronic repulsion, and the relative weakness of the electron-phonon interactions makes possible the existence of a phase where the superconducting order parameter has opposite signs in different valleys, resembling the superconductivity found in the pnictides and cuprates. © 2013 American Physical Society. ; F.G. acknowledges financial support fromMINECO, Spain, through Grant No. FIS2011-23713, and the European Union, through Grant No. 290846. R.R. acknowledges financial support from the Juan de la Cierva Program (MINECO, Spain). E.C. acknowledges the Marie CurieGrant No. PIEF-GA-2009-251904. ; Peer Reviewed

Short-term therapy by professional staff is combined successfully with debt counseling and handling of creditors by nonprofessional volunteers

Includes abstract. ; This mini dissertation analyses the claims that Uganda is the success story of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. Uganda was the first country to qualify for debt relief under this debt management programme, and has a reputation for being able to address its economic and social problems simultaneously. Furthermore, the manner in which Uganda has engaged with civil society has also received praise. Thus, some scholars believe that the country offers a model example for indicating the effectiveness of debt management programmes in general, and the HIPC Initiative in particular. However, other scholars are more critical, claiming that the successes that Uganda has experienced under the HIPC Initiative have been short lived, and have also compounded the country's indebtedness. There is therefore a robust debate in the literature regarding this topic as some scholars take a more optimistic view of the impact of the HIPC Initiative in Uganda, and other scholars take a more pessimistic stance. This mini dissertation surveys these contrasting views in the literature, and argues that because the HIPC Initiative failed to deliver the promises that it made Uganda was unable to sustain its achievements under the programme. The dissertation concludes that Uganda is not an HIPC Initiative success story.

AbstractMotivated by applications to service systems, we develop simple engineering approximation formulas for the steady‐state performance of heavily loaded G/GI/n+GI multiserver queues, which can have non‐Poisson and nonrenewal arrivals and non‐exponential service‐time and patience‐time distributions. The formulas are based on recently established Gaussian many‐server heavy‐traffic limits in the efficiency‐driven (ED) regime, where the traffic intensity is fixed at ρ > 1, but the approximations also apply to systems in the quality‐and‐ED regime, where ρ > 1 but ρ is close to 1. Good performance across a wide range of parameters is obtained by making heuristic refinements, the main one being truncation of the queue length and waiting time approximations to nonnegative values. Simulation experiments show that the proposed approximations are effective for large‐scale queuing systems for a significant range of the traffic intensity ρ and the abandonment rate θ, roughly for ρ > 1.02 and θ > 2.0. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 187–217, 2016

Abstract
In 2021, 293,000 dwellings were completed in Germany. This is at least 130,000 more than were completed at the low point in 2010, but less than the government had planned in order to limit the housing shortage. It is very likely, that residential construction is going to decline following the strong increase in interest rates and already falling residential prices. This decline in residential construction can only be expected in the short term; in the medium term there are good reasons to believe that Germany has not finished building. It is therefore important to ensure that the elasticity of construction supply is not reduced during this adjustment phase.