Browse by: "U"

Uganda’s economy has undergone major fluctuations from a vibrant economy in the 1960s, to suffering severe macroeconomic imbalances in the 1970s and 1980s, to enjoying an economic revival since the late 1980s. A key focus of recent public financial management reforms has been to improve macroeconomic performance and ensure strict budgetary discipline, in particular through the use of a three-year rolling budgetary plan as early as 1992/93. However, problems with the cash budgeting system undermined efforts to improve budget planning, requiring complementary reforms to cash management and commitment control systems. Reforms have also focused on poverty reduction, expenditure efficiency and effectiveness, financial management and accountability, and transparency and openness.

Triggered by sub-prime and Shanghai stock exchange volatility, major stock markets suffered a significant correction at the end of February. Markets have since recovered and European markets have over the past few weeks more than compensated these losses. While another downturn on the Shanghai exchange end of May led to some increases in volatility on major markets, they have so far not altered their course...

National and international rankings of institutional performance are playing a growing role in contemporary higher education. It is critical that researchers develop pragmatic, educationally sensitive and methodologically informed approaches for managing this aspect of higher education. This paper compares three approaches for modelling key indicators which underpin a national evaluation of university education in Australia: rankings of aggregate institutional performance; comparisons of institutional change over time; and performance variations within fields of education. The results show that simple institution-level aggregations are misleading, and that contemporary analytical methods must be used to account for the influence of fields of education. More broadly, the findings expose the need for a more robust methodological development of university rankings.

This paper analyses changes in the governance of universities as a result of growing demands from society as well as of a strong penetration of management ideology into all kinds of institutions. For this purpose the paper uses a theoretical framework focusing on two governance mechanisms in social systems: entry control and performance control. These belong to a larger set of homogenising forces, which the new institutionalists label as (1) coercive, (2) normative and (3) mimetic. Using this theoretical framework to analyse the development of Swedish universities, the author concludes that their governance has undergone a considerable change. Coercive forces that were previously exercised through detailed budgeting have, in recent years, been operating through representation in leading bodies and through the selection of university leaders. This has occurred through a crowding out of normative forces. At the same time there have been strong mimetic forces based on modern management ideas. 

Globalisation is profoundly changing economic development, forcing development officials to adopt a regional approach founded on what a particular region does best or its competitive advantage. Globalisation has also placed a new premium on innovation as the critical fuel to economic success – for firms, regions and countries. Universities lie at the nexus of these two powerful trends: they are rooted in regions, and they are perhaps the most important engines of innovation. Drawing on recent experience in the United States, this paper explores this nexus by addressing three critical questions: (1) Why is regional competitiveness the new paradigm for regional development? (2) What must regions do to compete? (3) What can be done to connect university innovation with regional development? The paper concludes that new mechanisms are needed to connect university innovation with regional development. Public policy can encourage these mechanisms by addressing twin needs in the newly forming “market” for regional innovation: encouraging universities to make innovation available in ways that regions can easily tap, and helping regions understand which innovations are most critical to their economic future.

The Ninth OECD/World Bank/IMF Annual Global Bond Market Forum held on 22-23 May 2007 in Paris, France, highlighted that there has been very sharp growth in the use of derivative instruments in both mature and emerging market countries. The use of derivative instruments is helping public debt managers in their portfolio management operations and in supporting market development. Several institutional and structural impediments, however, remain toward the more active use of derivative products. Most developed market debt managers use derivative instruments for debt management purposes, while this is the case for only a handful of emerging markets. Several emerging markets, though, are taking steps towards developing the legal environment necessary to support derivative markets, and are addressing the challenges posed by illiquidity of the underlying cash market, deficiencies in prudential regulation, and restrictions on market participation.

he “Agreement for Cooperation Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of India Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy”1 (hereinafter referred to as “U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation Agreement” or “123 agreement”) acknowledges a shift in international strategies and relations in both countries. As to India, it marks the end of nuclear isolation resulting from constraints, embargoes and controls and instead opens the path for nuclear commerce. With respect to the United States it entails a major geo-strategic ally in the evolving South- Asia region and promises large commercial benefits to the U.S. nuclear sector. This so called “nuclear deal” constitutes one of the major political, economic and strategic relationships developing between the two countries since 2001. It will lead to the separation of military and civilian nuclear installations in India, the latter to be placed under the safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It thus de facto accepts India in the club of nuclear weapon states within the meaning of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)2 although it is not party to this treaty, refuses adhering to it, officially possesses nuclear weapons and is not subject to a comprehensive system of safeguards.

This paper uses “extreme-bound”-type analysis to revisit the determinants behind widely differing economic growth in Russian regions. Using data of 77 regions for 1993-2004, it separately examines the growth drivers for the phase of economic decline up to 1998, and for the period of strong growth afterwards. Looking at forty variables considered to be potentially related to growth, it determines, for each of the two periods, the ones robustly associated with Russian economic performance. Among the variables considered are proxies of politico-institutional features, indicators of economic reform, and measurements of both economic and non-economic initial conditions. The main findings, based on close to one million regressions, are as follows: during the period of economic decline up to 1998, differences in Russian regional growth were almost entirely driven by initial conditions, with resource and human capital endowments, industrial structure, and geographical location playing the dominant roles. However, since the 1998 crisis, the importance of initial conditions has declined significantly, and is now basically reduced to hydrocarbon wealth and advantageous geographical location. More reform-oriented policies, as well as better regional leadership are found to have come to make a significant difference. These results point to determinants of economic performance in periods of actual economic decline being quite different from those in “normal” times of economic growth.

We pursue a two-fold objective in this paper. First, we try to describe comprehensively the behaviour of sectoral growth cycles in Turkish manufacturing by using several statistical measures and to analyse the co-movement between them via correlation and peak-through analysis. One of the remarkable results of this study is the emergence of the "chemicals" and "paper and paper products"sectors as the leading sectors of total manufacturing. Another important result reveals that export-oriented sectors, which have a high correlation with total manufacturing and with each other, appear as the main drivers of total manufacturing. The second objective of this study is to investigate the response of output in Turkish manufacturing industries to monetary policy shocks within the vector autoregressive framework. The results show that all manufacturing sectors respond to a contractionary monetary policy shock with a reduction in absolute output but that the degree of output reduction is not the same in all sectors. The total manufacturing output declines very quickly after the shock, reaching its minimum value within three quarters.

The OECD Competition Committee debated universal service obligations in October 2003. This document includes an executive summary and the documents from the meeting: an analytical note by the OECD, written submissions from Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, the European Commission, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, Chinese Taipei, the United States, as well as an aide-memoire of the discussion.