Public procurements, i.e., purchase of goods and services by various public departments, accounts for a significant proportion of both public expenditure and total demand for goods and services in the economy. Various studies, audit findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, and vigilance reports by India's Central Vigilance Commission have invariably highlighted the incidence of anti-competitive practices in Indian public procurements. Public sector procurements are highly regulated, given the transparency concerns and principal–agent problem.These regulations outlining the rules and procedures in public procurement directly or indirectly influence the short- and long-run market dynamics (with respect to entry, market concentration, prices, innovation, etc.). This paper aims to analyse the impact of existing regulation on competition in public procurement in India through a case study of procurements in the Indian Railways. Based on the key anti-competitive concerns identified in Indian Railways’ procurements, the study outlines an important set of recommendations to enhance the degree of competition in public procurement in India.
Climate action is a challenging task and uncertainties in climate science make decision making extremely difficult. In this paper we evaluate the role that Real Options can play in helping decision making towards climate action. It also looks into whether evaluation via Real Options — keeping uncertainties in mind — will be a sensible choice from a broader macroeconomic viewpoint. While no single measure may alone be sufficient for climate change mitigation, Carbon Capture and Sequestration/Storage (CCS), along with energy efficiency improvements, renewable energy, enhancement of biological sinks, and other measures, may be able to achieve the emissions reductions needed to achieve climate stabilization. In addition, there will be important decisions in climate adaptation areas too, further adding to the complexities of decision making for climate action. In this paper, a normative case study is incorporated to determine the cost of CCS action in India. While arriving at the costs, a provision for the financial risk of storage has also been added. Given the costs, Real Options analysis is undertaken to arrive at a decision. The Real Options valuation is done using the Black-Scholes method. Ultimately, the Real Options framework is scrutinized from a broader macroeconomic perspective to understand its suitability for a more dynamic global economy as well as the effects of large climate funds on the framework, including how important a decision-making framework like Real Options is for a sustainable world.
Trade liberalization of environmental services under the pursuant of the World Trade Organization (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), has been widely advocated as a means of increasing the participation of the private sector for ensuring sustainable development in developing countries. Recognizing that effective regulation is needed towards ensuring that the potential gains from private sector involvement are fully realized, this paper considers the autonomy of national regulatory system on environmental services and submission on domestic regulation in GATS. The empirical evidence of liberalization and involvement of the private sector in the provision of solid waste management (SWM) services (CPC 9402) in India is reviewed. In addition, the paper also looks into a number of reasons why harmonizing the regulations of environmental services has been problematic in the country; these have been identified and include poor governance and regulatory weaknesses. The study concludes that India may need to adopt a suitable policy with limited regulatory resources and also follow a cautious approach to environmental services like liberalization and regulatory framework in perspective of the national policy objectives under the ongoing negotiations for developing discipline on domestic regulation (Article VI:4) in the Working Party on Domestic Regulation of GATS.
Given the limited performance of 2D cellular automata in terms of space when the number of documents increases and in terms of visualization clusters, our motivation was to experiment these cellular automata by increasing the size to view the impact of size on quality of results. The representation of textual data was carried out by a vector model whose components are derived from the overall balancing of the used corpus, Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). The WorldNet thesaurus has been used to address the problem of the lemmatization of the words because the representation used in this study is that of the bags of words. Another independent method of the language was used to represent textual records is that of the n-grams. Several measures of similarity have been tested. To validate the classification we have used two measures of assessment based on the recall and precision (f-measure and entropy). The results are promising and confirm the idea to increase the dimension to the problem of the spatiality of the classes. The results obtained in terms of purity class (i.e. the minimum value of entropy) shows that the number of documents over longer believes the results are better for 3D cellular automata, which was not obvious to the 2D dimension. In terms of spatial navigation, cellular automata provide very good 3D performance visualization than 2D cellular automata.
The study is the first empirical work taking on the issue of the possible effects of price and the taxation system on the cost efficiency of oil companies. Applying data envelopment analysis in the first stage, we measure the relative efficiency of all oil and gas fields brought on stream since the production started in the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) in the late 1960s. In the second stage, the efficiency scores are regressed against the annual oil price as well as annual royalty, special tax, and corporate tax paid by each field. The results show high inverse (negative) relation between oil price and cost efficiency of the fields suggesting a possible induction of gold plating. The taxation system, as a whole, seems to be non-neutral: the Norwegian Special Petroleum tax has significant inverse relation with cost efficiency of the oil companies, while the corporate tax seems to induce cost efficiency. The effect of royalty is insignificant. The results could interest the policy-makers when levying various taxes on the industry and induce more consciousness about the cost efficiency amongst the decision-makers in the oil companies.
Environment agencies in developing economies demonstrate a poor level of enforcement of environment policies. Command and control measures though widely used, perform poorly due to limitations of the political institutions that are responsible for their monitoring and enforcement. The main objective of this research is to understand and evaluate the shortcomings of government regulatory agencies in developing countries that could explain why even systematically laid-out environmental laws often fail to demonstrate expected results.
Many of the benefits that come from the firm implementation of competition policy are felt by producers. Measures like elimination of anti-competitive actions and prevention of monopolies and cartels benefit firms whose business suffers from abuse. Consumers also benefit from the competition in the market that allows lower prices and better and more diversified products. There is a third benefit – the deterrence effects of CP even when it is not actually implicated.
In this research, an attempt was made to compare both the Microsoft. NET and Sun's J2EE Platforms on various parameters like frameworks, architecture, applications, database connective etc. A multiple choice questionnaire (Appendix 1) was distributed among the users of. net and j2ee platforms (or both platforms). Their opinions were collected and based on their opinions we formulated some graphs and came to a conclusion how much the user is satisfied with their platforms. Customer Satisfaction comes under Customer Relationship Management.
Over the course of 2002 to 2007, the $316 million Renewable Energy Development Project (REDP) sold more than 400,000 solar home systems benefiting two million individuals in north-western China. This study examines the history, benefits, and challenges of the REDP. International development donors and energy analysts have hailed the REDP as a best practice example in solar home system deployment. The article illustrates how solar home systems continue to provide benefits to users and that their portability especially complements the lifestyle of nomadic herders that roam the vast expanses of the country's North-western region. However, it also finds that even for such highly successful programmes as the REDP, purchasing decisions are based on price rather than quality, and after-sales service networks remain weak. Grid electrification and market saturation have also eroded the contributions made under the programme. The article concludes by drawing on what the experiences of the REDP mean for the regulation and governance of off-grid solar electrification projects more generally.
To make living comfortable human has adapted electronic gadgets as part of the life, which generates bulk amount of data. The data can be in free flow textual form, in structured form or in semi-structured; HTML pages are example of semi-structured form. To perform efficient retrieval of the stored data, the data needs to be classified into different categories. Much work in data classification for structured data exists in literature. But not much work is done in unstructured data classification. The paper attempts to perform text classification, which is associated with feature selection and feature reduction. Feature selection is a process to filter out the unwanted, irrelevant features; feature reduction identifies the redundant features and eliminates them. The present paper explores the technique of combining the features into clusters based on fuzzy similarities which is characterised by a membership function taking into account the statistical mean and deviation of the words in the cluster, in the process of feature reduction, which is a nightmare in text classification problems. In order to reduce the features, representative of the cluster is considered rather all the features involved in it which would result in feature reduction to a large extent. KNN classifier to build the model using the clusters obtained was employed. The experimental results obtained were found to be encouraging.
Wikipedia is a free, web-based encyclopaedia with over 3.5 million articles in English. The graph structure of Wikipedia contains the articles as nodes and the links between the articles as the edges. In Wikipedia information is maintained using MySQL schemas. The problem with relational systems is that it is not suitable to maintain adhoc, dynamic, complex and deeply associative information. The vast amount of information in Wikipedia requires the use of specialised databases and data structures to enable efficient search. This paper proposes persistent and in-memory structures for Wikipedia articles considering both the link and content information. Further personalisation and improvement of search efficiency can be brought about by group personalisation. Personalisation at the user level and group level are considered. It maps the persistent structure consisting of group and community information to in-memory B+ Tree graph structure for a particular user. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.
Cluster analysis is typically the first step in data mining and knowledge discovery. The purpose of data clustering is to reveal the data patterns and gain some initial insights regarding data distribution. This paper focuses on exploring the applicability of PSO-K-Means and QPSO on Iris, Wine, Breast Cancer and Yeast datasets from UCI repository. PSO-K-Means is robust to outliers, benefits from both local and global view on data and overcomes the drawbacks of basic K-Means. The experimental results of this paper show that PSO-K-Means improves the performance of basic K-Means in terms of accuracy and computational time. The inter cluster and intra cluster distances using QPSO are found to be better compared to other standards like PSO and guarantees global convergence. The effectiveness of QPSO and PSO-K-Means are observed over PSO and K-Means for three different datasets and encouraging results are obtained.
The purpose of this paper is to present the conceptual and architectural design of an efficient data mining tool/system that supports the implementation of association rule mining algorithms. It has been observed that most of the existing knowledge discovery systems/data mining tools use fixed algorithms for mining knowledge irrespective of characteristics of the database to be mined. Literature reveals that the performance of algorithms also depend on the characteristics of the database to be mined, this has also been realised by the author during the conduction of experiments. These systems also inherit the shortcomings of the algorithms on which they are based. Moreover, such systems are not able to guide the user/decision makers (who may be the non technical person) regarding suitability of algorithms with respect to targeted database. In this research, a new mining system addressing the above issues has been developed. The system is intelligent in the sense that it can automatically select a suitable algorithm on the basis of dataset characteristics. System provides an interactive environment which is convenient, efficient, flexible, user friendly and ultimately enhances ease to its users. Furthermore, system permits the user to flexibly refine the knowledge in order to discover the interesting knowledge and enables the user to use different components independently as per the requirement. System also offers an integrated application based on real-life Mushroom database. Developed application is useful for the identification of associations that exist between the physical properties of Mushroom.
Climate change poses myriad uncertain risks to localities all over the world. The current discourse on risk analysis acknowledges the need for mechanisms to reduce those risks and adapt to changes that may arise. To create efficient strategies for adaptation, adequate mechanisms for finance are needed. It is often assumed that the majority of adaptation finance will come from public funds to support projects that attempt to build adaptive capacity. This paper suggests that while public finance is important, it may not be the most efficient method to manage uncertainties and adapt to climate change. Here we propose a method to finance adaptation via the creation of real options. Real options require a mechanism for valuation and a framework for implementation. We argue that investment grade finance is the best way to realize that framework. This paper elucidates the concept of Resilience Centres as a plausible means to provide the services necessary to implement that framework. We illustrate this framework via the theory of financial gradients. Resilience Centres act as a means for Indeterminate Change Risk Reduction (ICRR), thereby making communities more aware of, and better prepared to execute, best practices in the face of uncertain risks. This paper incorporates an Indian case study to illustrate how this approach to adaptation finance fits into a national context.
This article develops the earlier analyses of the Pareto multiagent problematique concerning collective choice situations, where members of a group, community or society, having diverse values, beliefs, and other predispositions, are faced with alternative allocations, institutional arrangements, or states of the world and may collectively choose a particular allocation, institutional arrangement or state of the world if they can agree on the choice. This type of multi-value governance situation is increasingly prevalent not only at political and societal levels, but also at the level of many enterprises, for instance, those advocating corporate social responsibility and working on economic as well as social and environmental goals. The article builds on research that has identified institutionalized governance mechanisms, which resolve conflicts of inefficient or nonoptimal states and disequilibria. In other words, Pareto optimization problems, in the face of general non-unanimity or conflict regarding the outcomes among involved actors, can be resolved.The approach, based on Sociological Game Theory (SGT), has developed specifi c models of adjudication, negotiation, and democratic procedure and investigated their legitimacy bases, the limits of such societal procedures, and the accomplishment of societal effi ciencies through such procedures. The re-conceptualization of the “Pareto problematique” is based on a general principle of “legitimation of collective choices”. Such collective choices are likely to be accepted by the majority or key agents (such as government agencies, businesses, NGOs, and so on) in the society. However, legitimacy does not guarantee effectiveness. On the one hand, it creates social order and sustainable society, on the other hand, a process legitimized by one or more of the societal legitimizing procedures may nonetheless lead to highly ineffective (or “ineffi cient”) outcomes, even catastrophes. There is no guarantee that legitimate collective choices are the best or right choices (this critique also applies to Pareto’s approach, as we have pointed out elsewhere). In general, effective choices, whether legitimate or not, require the application of relevant or appropriate knowledge (often, multiple types of knowledge are required). Overcoming the dilemma of gaining social acceptance and achieving knowledge-based technical effectiveness requires dual (or multiple) governance systems. This article identifies and analyses the governance structures and procedures, which bring systematic knowledge to bear on collective choice problems. Many contemporary forms of collective decision-making entail mobilizing and applying expertise, such as technical and scientific, economic, organizational, legal, and cultural knowledge, and combining these with legitimizing procedures to gain acceptance of collective decisions and, thereby, accomplish social equilibria. A few models of such integrative governance systems are identified and discussed in the article.
The reform of the urban water supply sector in India has been somewhat slow, thanks to the lack of focus on delivery systems that are under the purview of state and local governments. Urban water supply is still largely viewed as a public good provided by a local government or a parastatal agency without examining its long term sustainability. Even large metropolitan cities are yet to undertake basic reforms for improving the efficiency of water service provision and making it financially self sufficient. There has hardly been any strategic focus on ‘demand management’ and on improvement in service delivery efficiency. This paper provides an analytical overview of the water resource status in general, and that of urban water in particular, with reference to the need for reforming the sector in terms of improving service and delivery.The reform agenda set out includes the aspects of water institutions, finances, and governance. It is also argued that the financial sustainability/cost recovery and affordability/access to the poor may be balanced, both through tariff design as well as new institutional finance models. It is hoped that the large capital investments coming through partnership funding arrangements under JNNURM should provide incentives for urban local governments (ULG) to move on a reform path, so that the assets created are well maintained and utilized beyond their design life span. This calls for building up a comprehensive management capacity in the ULGs that also meets the shifts in demand.
In the wake of the recent economic and financial crisis, board induction and training process has become highly important. This article discusses that an institutionalized and effective board induction and training process could maximize the director's contribution thus improving board effectiveness in banks. Firstly, by using qualitative research methods, the study shows the state of the art measures on board induction and training programs for directors in European banks. And then, it also depicts the results of a survey about the opinions of an Italian panel on the topic. Findings confirm that directors are aware of the importance of induction and training programs as a tool to enhance the effectiveness of corporate governance. However, there is substantially limited dissemination of these practices in banks and, in those cases where these practices are used more extensively, it is possible to spot some areas of improvement compared to best practices. Our results may be justified by: a delay of regulation on governance; a possible disappointment of company executives and a consideration of these practices in terms of mere business “costs” rather than as “opportunities” to improve the bank board effectiveness. On the basis of our knowledge, there is no empirical analysis designed to describe the dissemination and the organizational characteristics of the initiatives of training and updating of directors in banks, so this article will improve the existing literature on bank governance and European boards.
Competition in the electricity industry in India is primarily intended to enhance operational efficiency. With the enactment of Electricity Act 2003, competition got a new nomenclature and thrust. The paper conducts an exploratory analysis of the state of competition in the Indian power sector in the context of reform and restructuring. Evolving trends and patterns of competitive mechanisms are discussed and analysed. The analysis reveals that competition, as it evolved over the last decade or so, reflects a growing trend of an efficient, liquid, and complete market. The paper also identifies certain key anomalies and distortions inhibiting the seamless growth of competition. More action is required on certain directions, such as enhancing the liquidity of the market, addressing transmission congestion and open access problems, controlling market power, strengthening the role of regulators, and importantly, addressing political economy concerns. It concludes that in order to carry forward the momentum, a cautious approach needs to be adopted and necessary ancillary measures are to be undertaken.
In developing countries, the rural poor lack access to electricity. The provision through centralised grids is often unreliable and does not reach rural areas. This creates a negative impact on the rural population's health and limits their socio-economic development. Theoretical debates have been distributing the responsibility of public service provisions between the government and the market sphere, both of which have left the poor widely under-served. Co-production of public services, making use of complementary inputs by the public sector and citizens has been shown to be a successful alternative. The following thesis will transfer the concept of co-production to the case of electricity services for poor rural communities under consideration of decentralized distributed generation from renewable energy technologies. Two examples from India are elaborated here and the feasibility demonstrated. Whilst the decentralized structure of the government created a conducive environment for co-production, challenges arise from the inexperience of public agencies to deliver electricity services through co-production. Appropriate and continuous training and support of the rural communities by a dedicated project implementing agency of governmental or non-governmental nature are crucial to the projects’ success especially during the first implementation stage. Despite promising cases of citizen initiated public service production, the initiation of co-producing electricity services in poor rural areas has to come from the government, NGOs, and also aid agencies.
The present debate in Climate Finance is whether there is a misplaced focus on public sources of funds from developed countries instead of investment grade financial resources. In other words, financing climate action via public funds is proving to be a constraint. Similar constraints also exist in programmes for Energy Access using Renewable Energy, and other resources in the sustainable development domain. To address these constraints, financial and business strategies are often developed. While analyzing such strategies, the concept of “financial gradients” emerged. This paper espouses the idea of financial gradients, which is a potential methodology for a financial mechanism for sustainable development action.
