Budgetary trade-offs of security expenditures in Turkey

This paper investigates the budgetary trade-off structure of security (defence+internal security) expenditures in Turkey for the period 1983-1998. A modified version of Todaro's distributive share index of social welfare is used to quantify the impacts on the growth of primary budget expenditures of Security, Education, Health, General Administration, Infrastructure, and Social Services. We find that defence expenditures dominate overall security expenditures and are less affected in times of bottlenecks in the economy. A systematic pattern of negative budgetary trade-offs of security expenditures in terms of other components is not identified. We also analyse the expenditures of the Defence Industry Support Fund in an attempt to find the cost of the modernisation program to the economy.     

AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF SECURITY POLICIES

This paper analyses public policy choices in the security economy from an economic perspective. It discusses the role of public goods for national and global security and identifies the importance of the first‐ and second‐order indirect effects of insecurity on economic activity, which include the behavioural responses of agents and the government to security measures, akin to such effects in insurance economics. Furthermore, key public policy trade‐offs are outlined, in particular between security and efficiency, globalisation, equity and freedom. The analysis identifies suitable policy options for raising security in the national and international contexts and in view of these trade‐offs. A balance between market and non‐market instruments in achieving security should be aimed for in order to minimise the adverse effects of aiming for higher security. In addition, the public good nature of security implies that international coordination of security policies is important, despite this process being fraught with enforcement problems.     

The Cyprus puzzle and the Greek - Turkish arms race: Forecasting developments using genetically evolved fuzzy cognitive maps

The scope of this paper is to forecast the extent to which a settlement of the Cyprus issue may be possible given the decisions taken during the Copenhagen EU summit. It aims, in addition, at investigating the possibilities of improvement in Greek-Turkish relations which may lead, in turn, to reducing the arms race between the two countries. The paper uses a Genetically Evolved Certainty Neuron Fuzzy Cognitive Map algorithm to consider a number of scenarios examining the possible reactions of all sides involved in the Cyprus issue, namely Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, the Turkish-Cypriot community and the international environment. All simulation exercises suggest that the Greek and the Cypriot side should not necessarily rely on the decisions taken during the Copenhagen summit conference. The forecasts point out, in addition, that the optimism of the Greek government concerning the outlook of its relations with Turkey, and a subsequent reduction of the arms race against it, is far from being justified.     

CHOOSING GENOCIDE: ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES ON THE DISTURBING RATIONALITY OF RACE MURDER

An economic theory of genocide is presented with application to Rwanda‐1994. The theory considers ‘macro’ conditions under which an authority group chooses genocide and ‘micro’ conditions that facilitate the spread of genocide. From the macro perspective, a bargaining model highlights four rational explanations for an authority’s choice of genocide: prevention of loss of power, indivisibility, elimination of a persistent rival, and political bias. From the micro perspective, an evolutionary game model shows how supporters of genocide gain the upper hand in group dynamics over resisters and bystanders. The theory and application suggest that the conditions for genocide are not exceptional.     

A mathematical formulation and efficient heuristics for the dynamic container relocation problem

The container relocation problem (CRP) is concerned with emptying a single yard‐bay which contains J containers each following a given pickup order so as to minimize the total number of relocations made during their retrieval process. The CRP can be modeled as a binary integer programming (IP) problem and is known to be NP‐hard. In this work, we focus on an extension of the CRP to the case where containers are both received and retrieved from a single yard‐bay, and call it the dynamic container relocation problem. The arrival (departure) sequences of containers to (from) the yard‐bay is assumed to be known a priori. A binary IP formulation is presented for the problem. Then, we propose three types of heuristic methods: index based heuristics, heuristics using the binary IP formulation, and a beam search heuristic. Computational experiments are performed on an extensive set of randomly generated test instances. Our results show that beam search heuristic is very efficient and performs better than the other heuristic methods.Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 101–118, 2014