The Institutional Environment for Telecommunications Investment

This paper demonstrates that a structurally derived, internationally comparable index of checks and balances on executive discretion created by variation in political structures and party systems affects relative rates of basic telecommunications infrastructure deployment in 147 countries during the period 1960–1994. Models of infrastructure investment that omit the political characteristics of a prospective host country confound countries whose economic and demographic characteristics point to rapid demand growth for infrastructure services with those that create a potential trap for investors due to a higher probability of arbitrary change in the policy environment. The econometric analysis exploits both cross-sectional and temporal variation in the panel. A robust covariance-matrix estimator based on that developed by Newey and West is used to compute valid standard errors in the presence of heteroskedasticity and within unit-serial correlation, two common characteristics in the error-term structure of panel datasets.     

Dynamics of the economic transition in Poland: An attempt at interpretation

The objective of this analysis is to describe, interpret, and assess the socioeconomic changes that took place in Poland during 1989 to 1997. This is a dynamic approach that considers the relationships that exist between successive phases of transformation and is characterized by both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The study is in three sections. The first section sets forth analytical tools and methods to study systemic transformation at large. It searches for the promising manner of a transition appraisal. The second section discusses division of the economy into sphere of regulation and real sphere. In turn, the third section includes a dynamic analysis of interrelationships between those spheres that are subject to changes in the course of transformation and, in various ways, shape the economic performance in Poland. Finally, this paper draws conclusions concerning the failures and successes of the economic transition.     

The Inforum Model of the Polish Economy

A demand-oriented model for Poland is developed. A number of special features are incorporated to reflect the realities of the Polish economy and to take advantage of some of the statistics which are available in Poland but not in Western Europe. These special features include disequilibrium indicators in the consumer demand equations, direct measurement of capital stocks and technological progress, allowance for hoarding of obsolete equipment, strong connections between input coeffcients and new investment, and the treatment of liquidity overhang. Results of simulations showed correctly in advance the effects of the 1990 austerity policy. Experiments indicate the best way to use foreign investment funds.     

ESG,Material Credit Events,and Credit Risk

A growing body of research has extended the analysis of the materiality of ESG criteria from the perspective of equity investors to creditors. Past research and analysis have demonstrated the link between better management of ESG criteria and better management of risk overall. Despite this growing consensus and consistent evidence that ESG performance is correlated with credit risk, no empirical evidence has yet linked ESG performance to cost or expense variances or revenue shortfalls that could explain these correlations. The authors attempt to address this lack of mechanism‐based empirical evidence by citing and then building on a number of well‐publicized cases with analysis of two major ESG issues—indigenous land claims and biodiversity—as they affect the global project finance and agriculture sectors. Broadening these single‐sector results, the authors use a novel dataset providing systematic coding of material events reported in the media across a variety of empirical settings to produce the first large‐sample empirical evidence of the mechanisms linking ESG performance to credit risk.     

‘The Institutions and Governance of Economic Reform'1

This articls uses the reform of New Zealand's state-owned enterprises from 1984–1995 to highlight two lessons for public sector reform from New Institutional Economics. First, failure to apply agency, property rights and transaction cost theory in tandem can lead to time-consuming pauses and policy shifts in a reform programme. Second, a discriminating alignment between the institutional environment and the regulatory governance structure chosen is crucial for successful privatization in industries characterized by economies of scale, large non-redeployable investments and extremely political output such as telecommunications and electricity.     

Clustering and visualization of earthquake data in a grid environment

We present a web client-server service WEB-IS, which we have developed for remote analysis and visualization of seismic data consisting of both small magnitude events and large earthquakes. We show that the problem-solving environment (PSE) intended for prediction of large magnitude earthquakes can be based on this WEB-IS idea. The clustering schemes, feature generation, feature extraction techniques and rendering algorithms form a computational framework of this environment. On the other hand, easy and fast access both to the seismic data distributed among distant computing resources and to computational and visualization resources can be realized in a GRID framework. We discuss the usefulness of NaradaBrokering (iNtegrated Asynchronous Real-time Adaptive Distributed Architecture) as a middleware, allowing for flexibility and high throughput for remote visualization of geophysical data. The WEB-IS functionality was tested both on synthetic and the actual earthquake catalogs. We consider the application of similar methodology for tsunami alerts.