Obstacles To Optimal Policy

This book from the Centre for Economic Policy Research deals with the implications of the exchange rate regimes and capital flows of the 1990s for government macroeconomic policy-making and EC policy co-ordination.

The annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is the flagship conference on neural computation. These proceedings contain all of the papers that were presented.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece, Israel, and Spain. Between 1978 and 2001, however, Venezuela’s economy went sharply in reverse, with non-oil GDP declining by almost 19 percent and oil GDP by an astonishing 65 percent. What accounts for this drastic turnabout? The editors of Venezuela Before Chávez, who each played a policymaking role in the country’s economy during the past two decades, have brought together a group of economists and political scientists to examine systematically the impact of a wide range of factors affecting the economy’s collapse, from the cost of labor regulation and the development of financial markets to the weakening of democratic governance and the politics of decisions about industrial policy. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Omar Bello, Adriana Bermúdez, Matías Braun, Javier Corrales, Jonathan Di John, Rafael Di Tella, Javier Donna, Samuel Freije, Dan Levy, Robert MacCulloch, Osmel Manzano, Francisco Monaldi, María Antonia Moreno, Daniel Ortega, Michael Penfold, José Pineda, Lant Pritchett, Cameron A. Shelton, and Dean Yang.

The launch of European Monetary Union (EMU) marked the beginning of a new era, and its establishment has proved an impressive success at the technical, legal, and procedural level. After all, EMU has accelerated economic and political integration in the European Union and tied the economies of the Member States closer together. However, the performance of the euro, high unemployment rates, uneven output and investment growth, and the issue of structural reforms that have yet to be tackled have raised questions about the performance of EMU in practice. There is a general consensus on the justification for economic policy coordination. The existing literature on economic policy coordination, however, seems far from able to provide robust conclusions about how to organize the necessary interaction of institutions and policies. Therefore, there seems to be a case for re-examining the subject under the new framework set by EMU. The objective of such a reassessment is to enhance the understanding of what type of coordination and what institutional setting for policy coordination can be expected to be most favorable. Challenges for Economic Policy Coordination within European Monetary Union provides an intellectually stimulating contribution to the ongoing debate.

This textbook addresses the main economic principles required by agricultural economists involved in rural development. The principles of 'micro-economics' or 'price-theory' are of relevance to economists everywhere, but this book reinforces the message of their relevance for rural development by explaining the theory in the specific context of the agricultural and food sectors of developing countries. Hypothetical and actual empirical illustrations drawn almost exclusively from such countries distinguish this book from other economic principles texts that draw their examples almost invariably from industrialised countries, and also from books more oriented to the issue of rural development. The first half of the book deals with the underlying principles of production, supply and demand. These are essential tools for the study and management of the agricultural sector and food markets. In the second half, supply and demand are bought together into a chapter of equilibrium and exchange. This is followed by chapters on trade and the theory of economic welfare. In the final chapter it is shown that much of the material in the earlier chapters can be combined by agricultural economists into a system for analysing and comparing the effects of alternative agricultural policies. The ability of agricultural economics to provide a consistent framework for the analysis of policy problems thus enables it to make a key contribution to rural development.

This book provides a unified approach for the study of constrained Markov decision processes with a finite state space and unbounded costs. Unlike the single controller case considered in many other books, the author considers a single controller with several objectives, such as minimizing delays and loss, probabilities, and maximization of throughputs. It is desirable to design a controller that minimizes one cost objective, subject to inequality constraints on other cost objectives. This framework describes dynamic decision problems arising frequently in many engineering fields. A thorough overview of these applications is presented in the introduction. The book is then divided into three sections that build upon each other.

Packet delay and energy consumption are important considerations in wireless and sensor networks as these metrics directly affect the quality of service of the application and the resource consumption of the network; especially, for a rapidly growing class of real-time applications that impose strict restrictions on packet delays. Dynamic rate control is a novel technique for adapting the transmission rate of wireless devices, almost in real-time, to opportunistically exploit time-varying channel conditions as well as changing traffic patterns. Since power consumption is not a linear function of the rate and varies significantly with the channel conditions, adapting the rate has significant benefits in minimizing energy consumption. These benefits have prompted significant research in developing algorithms for achieving optimal rate adaptation while satisfying quality of service requirements. In this book, we provide a comprehensive study of dynamic rate control for energy minimization under packet delay constraints. We present several formulations and approaches adopted in the literature ranging from discrete-time formulations and dynamic programming based solutions to continuous-time approaches utilizing ideas from network calculus and stochastic optimal control theory. The goal of this book is to expose the reader to the important problem of wireless data transmission with delay constraints and to the rich set of tools developed in recent years to address it. Table of Contents: Introduction / Transmission Rate Adaptation under Deadline Constraints / Average Delay Constraints

Recent Advances in Reinforcement Learning addresses current research in an exciting area that is gaining a great deal of popularity in the Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network communities. Reinforcement learning has become a primary paradigm of machine learning. It applies to problems in which an agent (such as a robot, a process controller, or an information-retrieval engine) has to learn how to behave given only information about the success of its current actions. This book is a collection of important papers that address topics including the theoretical foundations of dynamic programming approaches, the role of prior knowledge, and methods for improving performance of reinforcement-learning techniques. These papers build on previous work and will form an important resource for students and researchers in the area. Recent Advances in Reinforcement Learning is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising twelve invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Machine Learning (Volume 22, Numbers 1, 2 and 3).