Country survey IX: Spain

From the early 1980s Spain embarked on a wide‐ranging process of military reform, from organisational changes to defence industrial policies. Investment in military equipment was set to grow, policies were drawn up to foster the domestic defence industrial base, defence R&D rocketed, and Spain joined a myriad of international arms development programmes. Yet, by 1991 the process of reform had run out of steam. Expenditure planning proved unreliable, and firms suffered from sharp cutbacks in procurement expenditure. The model of defence industrial growth sketched in the mid‐1980s had floundered. The Spanish case provides an example of how the quest to maximise defence procurement from domestic sources can fall victim to industrial and budgetary constraints. Spanish defence producers are now becoming increasingly intertwined with foreign defence companies.     

THE DEFENCE SPENDING–EXTERNAL DEBT NEXUS IN ETHIOPIA

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of defence spending and income on the evolution of Ethiopia’s external debt over the period 1970–2005. Using the bounds test approach to cointegration and Granger causality tests, we find a long run and a causal relationship between external debt, defence spending and income. Defence spending had a positive and a significant impact on the stock of external debt while income had a negative and a statistically significant impact on external debt. Our findings suggest that an increase in defence spending contributes to the accumulation of Ethiopia’s external debt, while an increase in economic growth helps Ethiopia to reduce its external debt.     

TIME-VARYING CHARACTERISTICS OF SOUTH KOREA-UNITED STATES AND JAPAN-UNITED STATES MILITARY ALLIANCES UNDER CHINESE THREAT: A PUBLIC GOOD APPROACH

This paper investigates the nature of two military alliances under Chinese threat. The findings are as follows: First, South Korea does not consider China a significant threat while Japan and the United States have recognized China as a serious threat since the 1990s and the 2000s, respectively. Second, the relationship between South Korea and the United States is a true military alliance for all time periods, but the nature of the alliance has changed since the 1970s. Third, although Japan began to form an alliance relationship with the United States in the 1990s, Japan is considered a more significant ally by the United States. This paper implies that, should China provoke a military confrontation, it might be difficult to deduce a common solution among the three countries because of the different response to military threats from China.     

DOES MILITARY EXPENDITURE MATTER FOR INFLATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH?

This paper sets up a monetary endogenous growth model, and uses it to explain the ambiguous linkage between the military burden and the inflation rate observed in existing empirical studies. It is found that an expansion in the military burden has an ambiguous effect on the inflation rate depending upon the relative extent of two conflicting forces. More specifically, if the increase in the marginal benefit from holding money exceeds (falls short of) the increase in the marginal product of private capital, the inflation rate will rise (fall) in response. Moreover, it is found that an increase in the military burden will stimulate the balanced growth rate, confirming Benoit’s famous empirical findings.     

水中大肠杆菌检测传感器的稳定性

为了找到传感器稳定性最好时的脉冲周期,对传感器检测系统进行优化,实验研究了传感器检测饮用水中大肠杆菌时,脉冲周期对传感器稳定性的影响。传感器的构成属于三电极系统,采用常规脉冲伏安法进行检测。结果显示:脉冲周期为20,40,80 ms时传感器稳定性较好,基本不会影响检测结果;脉冲周期为100 ms时稳定性很差,对检测结果有较大影响。实验表明,选择合适的脉冲周期,加以硬件和软件补偿,可以使传感器获得较好的稳定性。     

土体泊松比对压入管桩单桩挤土位移场的影响

基于ABAQUS有限元软件,采用主从接触算法模拟桩-土相互作用、修正剑桥模型作为土体本构模型,通过在桩顶施加竖向位移荷载以及合适的网格划分技术建立了较为符合压入管桩压桩实际的有限元模型。利用得到的有限元模型模拟了压入管桩压桩产生的挤土位移场,对不同泊松比时压入管桩单桩挤土位移场进行了对比分析。结果表明:不同泊松比时竖向和水平挤土位移场沿深度方向和径向的分布规律趋于一致;土体泊松比的变化会对压入管桩压桩产生的竖向和水平挤土位移场产生较大影响;泊松比越大,压桩产生的竖向和水平挤土位移越大。     

Demand forecasting by temporal aggregation

Demand forecasting performance is subject to the uncertainty underlying the time series an organization is dealing with. There are many approaches that may be used to reduce uncertainty and thus to improve forecasting performance. One intuitively appealing such approach is to aggregate demand in lower‐frequency “time buckets.” The approach under concern is termed to as temporal aggregation, and in this article, we investigate its impact on forecasting performance. We assume that the nonaggregated demand follows either a moving average process of order one or a first‐order autoregressive process and a single exponential smoothing (SES) procedure is used to forecast demand. These demand processes are often encountered in practice and SES is one of the standard estimators used in industry. Theoretical mean‐squared error expressions are derived for the aggregated and nonaggregated demand to contrast the relevant forecasting performances. The theoretical analysis is supported by an extensive numerical investigation and experimentation with an empirical dataset. The results indicate that performance improvements achieved through the aggregation approach are a function of the aggregation level, the smoothing constant, and the process parameters. Valuable insights are offered to practitioners and the article closes with an agenda for further research in this area. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 60: 479–498, 2013