This paper attempts to answer the following question: If the HIPC Initiative is fully successful and managed to write-off all debt that is owed by Africa, will the debt problem be over? The answer is ‘no’. This pessimist answer is arrived at by examining the historical origin of African debt and the structural problems the continent is confronted with. The literature about the origins of the Af...

Structural  design  optimization  usually  deals  with  multiple  conflicting  objectives  to  obtain the minimum construction cost, minimum weight, and maximum safety of the final design. Therefore, finding the optimum design is hard and time-consuming for  such problems.  In this paper, we borrow the basic concept of multi-criterion decision-making and combine it with  Particle  Swarm  Optimi...

[1] We formulate and apply a multicommodity network flow node-arc optimization model capable of tracking trade transactions in complex water resource systems. The model uses a simple node to node network connectivity matrix and does not require preprocessing of all possible flow paths in the network. We compare the proposed node-arc formulation with an existing arc-path (flow path) formulation ...

on one hand, iran due to the low annual rainfall and lack of appropriate spatial and temporal distribution in precipitation is considered as an arid and semi-arid country experiencing stress and water scarcity; on the other hand, 90% of annual water consumption has been allocated to agriculture sector in iran and efficiency and productivity of water consumption do not enjoy favorable status in ...

the main purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of trade openness on the employment and the real wage for the iranian food and beverage industries over the year 2007. for this purpose in this study, the ratio of export to production value has been considered as a proxy for trade openness and the main model has been estimated using a dynamic panel data (dpd) approach. the main findin...

Over the past few years, swarm intelligence based optimization techniques such as ant colony optimization and particle swarm optimization have received considerable attention from engineering researchers. These algorithms have been used in the solution of various structural optimization problems where the main goal is to minimize the weight of structures while satisfying all design requirements...

This article investigates the relationship between the exchange rate and non-oil trade balance in Iran between 1981 and 2014. A structural vector auto-regression model is built. The results indicated that the increasing effect of the real effective exchange rate worsens the non-oil trade balance in the short term. In contrast, the increasing effect of the real effective exchange rate improves t...