The Soviet Union’s attitude

The Soviet Union will not be represented at the North-South Summit in Cancún, even though both the developing countries and the Western industrialised countries would have liked to see it participate in the talks on solving the problem of underdevelopment. What are the USSR’s reasons for its negative attitude? Are there any prospects of involving the Soviet Union and its CMEA partners in joint development cooperation?     

Continuous forecasting methods

The concept of a continuously operating system of expert opinion, a “collective brain” involving the combination of Delphi and network chart procedures, is discussed. The computer-aided process described by the author uses four types of information: the forecast of external actions of the environment, the values of control parameters as function of time, the current values of internal parameters, and estimates obtained from the principal experts.     

The existence of moments of some simple Bayes estimators of coefficients in a simultaneous equation model

In this paper a simple modification of the usual k-class estimators has been suggested so that for 0 ≦ k ≦ 1 the problem of the non-existence of moments disappears. These modified estimators can be interpreted either as Bayes estimators or as constrained estimators subject to the restriction that the squared length of the coefficient vector is less than or equal to a given number.     

Estimation of a dynamic demand function for gasoline with different schemes of parameter variation

In this article we explore the consumer demand for gasoline within the framework of the household production function model. Working with a time series of regional cross-sections, we find the parameters in the gasoline demand model varying across states. Random coefficient model is utilized to analyze temporal cross-section data.     

Relative efficiencies of some simple Bayes estimators of coefficients in a dynamic equation with serially correlated errors - II

Generalized least squares estimators, with estimated variance-covariance matrices, and maximum likelihood estimators have been proposed in the literature to deal with the problem of estimating autoregressive models with autocorrelated disturbances. In this paper we compare the small sample efficiencies of these estimators with those of some approximate Bayes estimators. The comparison is done with the help of a sampling experiment applied to a model specification. Though these Bayes estimators utilize very weak prior information, they out-perform the sampling theory estimators in every case we consider.     

Sex discrimination in advertising — A summary of the situation in Sweden

This report treats the way in which Sweden looks upon the phenomenon of sex discrimination, and how it has been handled by theConsumer Ombudsman and theMarket Court. The possibilities of legal intervention in such discrimination seem small at present, but may be increased as a result of current governmental and parliamentary enquiries. A Working Party appointed by the Consumer Ombudsman has tried to delineate the concept of sex discrimination in advertising, and the Working Party's classification of such discrimination into several distinct categories is presented in the paper, together with a series of examples of advertising regarded as discriminatory by this Party.