Does military spending promote social welfare? A comparative analysis of the BRICS and G7 countries

Whether military spending is capable of promoting social welfare is currently a controversial issue. The aim of this paper is to investigate how military spending affects the input and output of social welfare (i.e. social welfare expenditures and social welfare index). A panel cointegration analysis and an impulse response function are conducted with multi-country panel data, over two time periods, 1998–2011 and 1993–2007. In addition, to extend a comparative analysis over different economies, BRICS (i.e. Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and G7 (i.e. the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Canada) countries are selected as representatives of emerging economies and developed countries, respectively. The empirical results show that military spending enhances social welfare expenditures in developed countries, while the effect is ambiguous in emerging economies. Also, military spending is capable of promoting the social welfare index based on the FMOLS estimation. The comparative analyses indicate that unlike in the G7, the effect of the growth of military spending on the growth of social welfare expenditures is negative and shorter in the BRICS.     

Defense–Growth Causality: Considerations of Regime-Switching and Time- and Country-Varying Effects

This paper develops a panel smooth transition vector autoregressive model to investigate the economic growth–defense causality. This model simultaneously resolves the estimation problems of endogeneity, heterogeneity, and nonlinearity. Empirical results support that the causality is bidirectional, nonlinear, time- and country-varying. Economic growth has a negative impact on military spending and vice versa. The larger the HDI, the smaller the negative causality. Evidently, the increase in the level of country development can reduce the negative impact of military outlays on economic growth. Reducing the ratio of military spending to GDP is beneficial for countries with low HDI scores; however, moderately increasing the share of military expenditure is favorable for countries with extremely high HDI scores. Policy authority needs to set optimal education, health, and economic development shares of GDP for purchasing a maximum economic growth rate.     

Flexible capacity strategy in an asymmetric oligopoly market with competition and demand uncertainty

This article studies flexible capacity strategy (FCS) under oligopoly competition with uncertain demand. Each firm utilizes either the FCS or inflexible capacity strategy (IFCS). Flexible firms can postpone their productions until observing the actual demand, whereas inflexible firms cannot. We formulate a new asymmetrical oligopoly model for the problem, and obtain capacity and production decisions of the firms at Nash equilibrium. It is interesting to verify that cross‐group competition determines the capacity allocation between the two groups of firms, while intergroup competition determines the market share within each group. Moreover, we show that the two strategies coexist among firms only when cost differentiation is medium. Counterintuitively, flexible firms benefit from increasing production cost when the inflexible competition intensity is sufficiently high. This is because of retreat of inflexible firms, flexibility effect, and the corresponding high price. We identify conditions under which FCS is superior than IFCS. We also demonstrate that flexible firms benefit from increasing demand uncertainty. However, when demand variance is not very large, flexible firms may be disadvantaged. We further investigate the effects of cross‐group and intergroup competition on individual performance of the firms. We show that as flexible competition intensity increases, inflexible firms are mainly affected by the cross‐group competition first and then by the intergroup competition, whereas flexible firms are mainly affected by the intergroup competition. Finally, we examine endogenous flexibility and identify its three drivers: cost parameters, cross‐group competition, and intergroup competition. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 64: 117–138, 2017     

Cf/SiC复合材料制备过程对碳纤维的损伤

对几种类型的碳纤维在Cf/SiC复合材料制备工艺中的先驱体中氧含量及高温热处理和PCS浸渍裂解处理过程中造成的损伤进行了考察,并探讨了损伤机制.结果表明,碳纤维石墨化程度和表面状态的差别会对其在复合材料制备过程中的损伤程度产生影响.石墨化程度高的M40JB碳纤维损伤程度较大;表面呈活性的JC1#碳纤维对外界条件的变化较为敏感;而石墨化程度不高而表面不活泼的JC2#碳纤维则损伤程度较小且较稳定.     

孙马大战：国民党中央政权与诸马军阀关系初步定型的关键事件

晚清崛起、长期盘踞于甘宁青三省的诸马军阀集团是近代中央政权治理西北不能忽视的重要军事政治势力。国民党南京政权建政初期,无力西顾,甚为轻忽诸马的实力及其影响力。随着政局趋稳和对西北内部复杂情势的了解,尤其是通过1933年至1934年诸马联合兵拒孙殿荚屯垦青海事件,使国民党中央政权进一步认识了诸马军阀的“利益边界”及其在西北政．治军事格局中的作用和影响,从此国民党中央政权与西北诸马军阀关系初步定型。     

含连续时滞和阻尼项的非线性双曲微分方程解的振动性

研究了一类舍有连续偏差变元和阻尼项的非线性双曲型偏微分方程,获得了该方程在Robin边值条件和Dirichlet边值条件下解振动的一些充分条件,所得结果说明了时滞与阻尼项对解的振动性的影响.     

The assignment of storage locations to containers for a container stack

Assigning storage locations to incoming or reshuffled containers is a fundamental problem essential to the operations efficiency of container terminals. The problem is notoriously hard for its combinatorial and dynamic nature. In this article, we minimize the number of reshuffles in assigning storage locations for incoming and reshuffled export containers. For the static problem to empty a given stack without any new container arrival, the optimum reshuffle sequence is identified by an integer program (IP). The integer program captures the evolution of stack configurations as a function of decisions and is of interest by itself. Heuristics based on the integer program are then derived. Their competitiveness in accuracy and time are established by extensive numerical runs comparing them with existing heuristics in literature and in practice as well as with extensions of the existing heuristics. Variants of the IP‐based heuristics are then applied to the dynamic problem with continual retrievals and arrivals of containers. Again, numerical runs confirm that the IP‐based heuristic is competitive. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

A multifaceted heuristic for the orienteering problem

The orienteering problem involves the selection of a path between an origin and a destination which maximizes total score subject to a time restriction. In previous work we presented an effective heuristic for this NP-hard problem that outperformed other heuristics from the literature. In this article we describe and test a significantly improved procedure. The new procedure is based on four concepts—center of gravity, randomness, subgravity, and learning. These concepts combine to yield a procedure which is much faster and which results in more nearly optimal solutions than previous procedures.     

Approximations for heavily loaded G/GI/n + GI queues

Motivated by applications to service systems, we develop simple engineering approximation formulas for the steady‐state performance of heavily loaded G/GI/n+GI multiserver queues, which can have non‐Poisson and nonrenewal arrivals and non‐exponential service‐time and patience‐time distributions. The formulas are based on recently established Gaussian many‐server heavy‐traffic limits in the efficiency‐driven (ED) regime, where the traffic intensity is fixed at ρ > 1, but the approximations also apply to systems in the quality‐and‐ED regime, where ρ > 1 but ρ is close to 1. Good performance across a wide range of parameters is obtained by making heuristic refinements, the main one being truncation of the queue length and waiting time approximations to nonnegative values. Simulation experiments show that the proposed approximations are effective for large‐scale queuing systems for a significant range of the traffic intensity ρ and the abandonment rate θ, roughly for ρ > 1.02 and θ > 2.0. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 187–217, 2016     

院校办学绩效集对分析评定

讨论了集对分析方法评定院校办学绩效．作为算例,对军队16所工程技术院校进行了排序,并用主成分分析法进行了验证．