Good news first: the international journal Computer Standards and Interfaces has a new editor-inchief, Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also a director of the bCyber Security Research Center Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer ScienceQ. Dr. Thuraisingham was a member of the CS&I Editorial Board for long years and helped much to improve the journal’s reputation. She knows well the idea behind this unique journal, and she has the capacity and resources to lead and develop it. This is more than I expected when I decided to resign as editor-in-chief. The journal will be in good hands. At this occasion it should be allowed to have a look back. It was 1975 when I visited in the United States the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), later renamed in National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). With some interest could I see there lots of flyers and posters stating bGo metricQ. It was not that I didn’t know the bUS inchesQ. But I knew the bUnits ActQ of 1960 which was issued by the 11th General Conference of Weights and Measurement (CGPM) to introduce worldwide a unique International System of Units (SI) on a metrical basis. It was developed to put an end to more than a hundred years of disarray, with a great number of units and unit systems — and the metre was defined to be the unit of length representing 100 cm or 1000 mm. . . I was at that time a young scientist at the German national institute of metrology (PTB, Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt) involved in the development of a calibration system for magnetic storage media like tapes, cassettes, flexible disks, disk packs etc. We did this in cooperation with the magnetic media lab of the

Next generation

https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/0f39d8b3-8720-4e50-a1ff-0b06082bdb16/1/asongu2017enhancing(2).pdf

Enhancing ICT for Inclusive Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/aedd352d-0446-4f56-a7e4-7ae10c858dc6/1/fulltext.pdf

Environmental Degradation, ICT and Inclusive Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

The role of governance in mobile phones for inclusive human development in Sub-Saharan Africa

The design of budget rules and institutions, long a neglected area in public finance and macroeconomics, has recently been thrust to center stage by the debate over a balanced budget amendment and other deficit-reduction measures in the United States. This paper describes the existing evidence on how budget rules affect fiscal policy outcomes. It contrasts the `institutional irrelevance view,' which holds that budget rules can be circumvented by modifying accounting practices and changing the nominal timing or other classification of taxes and expenditures, with the `public choice view' in which fiscal institutions represent important constraints on the behavior of political actors. Several distinct strands of empirical evidence, from the U.S. federal experience with anti-deficit rules, from U.S. state experience with balanced budget rules, and from international comparisons of budget outcomes in nations with different fiscal institutions, suggest that fiscal institutions do matter. These results reject the institutional irrelevance view. The existing evidence is not refined enough, however, to provide detailed advice on how narrowly-defined changes in budget rules might affect policy outcomes.

Do Budget Rules Work

This paper proposes a new quality of growth index for developing countries. The index encompasses both the intrinsic nature and social dimensions of growth, and is computed for over 90 countries for the period 1990–2011. The approach is premised on the fact that not all growth is created equal in terms of social outcomes, and that it does matter how one reaches from one level of income to another for various theoretical and empirical reasons. The paper finds that the quality of growth has been improving in the vast majority of developing countries over the past two decades, although the rate of convergence is relatively slow. At the same time, there are considerable cross-country variations across income levels and regions. Finally, empirical investigations point to the fact that main factors of the quality of growth are political stability, public pro-poor spending, macroeconomic stability, financial development, institutional quality and external factors such as FDI.

/pdf/a-quality-of-growth-index-for-developing-countries-a-1vqz8e1uja.pdf

A Quality of Growth Index for Developing Countries: A Proposal

Does inflation targeting improve fiscal discipline

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00667201/document

Do National Numerical Fiscal Rules really shape fiscal behaviours in developing countries? A treatment effect evaluation

This paper assesses the impact of different types of flexible fiscal rules on the procyclicality of fiscal policy with propensity scores-matching techniques, thus mitigating traditional self-selection problems. It finds that not all fiscal rules have the same impact: the design matters. Specifically, investment-friendly rules reduce the procyclicality of both overall and investment spending. The effect appears stronger in bad times and when the rule is enacted at the national level. The introduction of escape clauses in fiscal rules does not seem to affect the cyclical stance of public spending. The inclusion of cyclical adjustment features in spending rules yields broadly similar results. The results are mixed for cyclically-adjusted budget balance rules: enacting the latter is associated with countercyclical movements in overall spending, but with procyclical changes in investment spending. Structural factors, such as past debt, the level of development, the volatility of terms of trade, natural resources endowment, government stability, and the legal enforcement and monitoring arrangements backing the rule also influence the link between fiscal rules and countercyclicality. The results are robust to a wide set of alternative specifications.

Flexible Fiscal Rules and Countercyclical Fiscal Policy

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2016/wp1608.pdf

René Tapsoba

Papers

A Quality of Growth Index for Developing Countries: A Proposal

Does inflation targeting improve fiscal discipline

Do National Numerical Fiscal Rules really shape fiscal behaviours in developing countries? A treatment effect evaluation

Flexible Fiscal Rules and Countercyclical Fiscal Policy

Flexible Fiscal Rules and Countercyclical Fiscal Policy