Military spending and economic growth in South Africa

This paper undertakes an empirical analysis of the economic effects of military spending on the South African economy. It estimates a neo‐classical model common in the literature at the level of the macroeconomy and at the level of the manufacturing sector. An attempt is made to improve upon the model by allowing the data to determine the dynamic structure of the model through an ARDL procedure. No significant impact of military spending is found in aggregate, but there is a significant negative impact for the manufacturing sector. This suggests that the cuts in domestic military procurement that have occurred since 1989 could lead to improved economic performance in South Africa through their impact on the manufacturing sector.     

Optimization methods for large-scale multiechelon stockage problems

I examine the problem of determining inventory stockage levels and locations of different parts in a multiechelon system. This stockage problem is complicated by parts commonality—each part may be used by several different end items. Stockage levels and locations of each part affect the availability of end items that use the part, since an end item will be out of service if it requires a part that is not available. Of course, if the part is available at another nearby location, then the end item will be out of service for a shorter period of time. An essential feature of any model for this problem is constraints on operational availability of the end items. Because these constraints would involve nonconvex functions if the stockage levels were allowed to vary continuously, I formulate a 0–1 linear optimization model of the stockage problem. In this model, each part can be stocked at any of a number of prespecified levels at each echelon. The model is to minimize stockage cost of the selected items subject to the end-item availability constraints and limits on the total weight, volume, and number of different parts stocked at each echelon. Advantages and disadvantages of different Lagrangian relaxations and the simplex method with generalized upper-bounding capability are discussed for solving this stockage model.     

Note: Facility location with closest rectangular distances

This paper considers the problem of locating one or more new facilities on a continuous plane, where the destinations or customers, and even the facilities, may be represented by areas and not points. The objective is to locate the facilities in order to minimize a sum of transportation costs. What is new in this study is that the relevant distances are the distances from the closest point in the facility to the closest point in the demand areas. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 77–84, 2000     

On the busy period of the M/G/1 retrial queue

The M/G/1 queue with repeated attempts is considered. A customer who finds the server busy, leaves the service area and joins a pool of unsatisfied customers. Each customer in the pool repeats his demand after a random amount of time until he finds the server free. We focus on the busy period L of the M/G/1$ retrial queue. The structure of the busy period and its analysis in terms of Laplace transforms have been discussed by several authors. However, this solution has serious limitations in practice. For instance, we cannot compute the first moments of L by direct differentiation. This paper complements the existing work and provides a direct method of calculation for the second moment of L. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 115–127, 2000     

Asymptotically optimal linear time algorithms for two‐stage and three‐stage flexible flow shops

We consider two‐stage and three‐stage flexible flow shops with parallel machines in each stage and the minimum makespan objective. We develop linear time algorithms for these problems with absolute worst‐case bounds either sharper or no worse than the currently available ones and we accomplish this with lower complexity algorithms. We also demonstrate the asymptotic optimality of a class of algorithms for multistage flexible flow shop problems (which includes the proposed algorithms) under certain probabilistic assumptions on the job processing times. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 259–268, 2000     

周恩来建设人民海军的理论和实践

周恩来协助毛泽东开创了中国人民海军事业。他高瞻远瞩,为人民海军的创建发展做好顶层设计;他呕心沥血,制定新中国海军建设的战略规划;他事必躬亲,操劳着海军建设方方面面的具体事项;他英明善断,指挥部署人民海军重要战役和重大行动。他对创建和发展年轻的共和国海军,作出了不可磨灭的贡献。周恩来建设人民海军的理论和实践,对今天的海军建设仍具有重要的理论价值和实践意义。     

Military expenditure and economic growth in Middle Eastern countries and Turkey: a non-linear panel data approach

The economic growth effects of military expenditure have been the subject of a large literature in defence economics. Theories on the economic impacts of military expenditure greatly differ and include arguments that they either enhance economic growth or crowd out productive investments. Empirical literature on defence expenditure and economic growth nexus generally employs linear specifications to investigate the impact of defence expenditures on economic growth. Although it is now well established that many economic variables may have a non-linear data-generating mechanism, it seems that this reality has long been neglected in empirical work on defence–growth nexus. This paper attempts to fill this gap by employing non-linear panel data models to examine the effects of military expenditures on economic growth for Middle Eastern countries and Turkey, for the time period 1988–2012. Results show that the effect of military expenditure on economic growth is nonlinear such that the state of the economy actually determines the effect of the former on the latter. This is important not only in showing asymmetric relationship between these variables but also in revealing the reasons of mixed results of earlier literature.