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Background: Movement disorders are one of the common neurological problems seen by General physicians and neurophysicians. The clinical phenotype of Movement disorders is variable. Aim of the study: The objective of the study was to study the clinical profile, disease severity and treatment response of Movement disorders at a tertiary care teaching hospital. Results: The present study was a prospective observational study comprising 55 clinically detectable patients of movement disorders. Out of fifty-five, the frequency of various Movement disorders were as follows: Parkinson’s disease- 25 (45.5%), Wilson`s disease (WD)-9 (16.36%), Progressivesupranuclear palsy- 8(14.54%), Essential Tremor with Parkinson disease 5 (9.0%), Choreiform disorders- 5(9.0%). Mean MDS-UPDRS Part III score in OFF stage of PD was 57.7±13.2 and in ON stage was 28.2±10.2 suggesting significant improvement. Seventy-six percentages of PD patients had Good response to Dopaminergic agonists and Levodopa administration, while better response was seen in WD, ET+PD and the poor response in PSP patients respectively. Conclusion: Identifying and describing the clinical phenomenology of Movement disorders is the first step in the diagnostic evaluation of the patients as against to the localization in General Neurological disorders. Disease severity scales do assess the progression of the disease at the earliest and there are affordable regimes of various medications are available to treat them at the earliest, so as to reduce the morbidity and to increase health related quality of life.

Though 100% Fly Ash Utilization has been one of the thrust areas for more than a decade, in India, the actual utilization remains much lower than its generation from thermal power plants. Utilization of ash in civil construction activity, road laying, embankments, agriculture, and development of building materials is unable to keep pace with the huge production to comply with the requirement of MoEF notification. In view of the above, it is essential to focus on the areas suitable for bulk utilization of ash. In this paper, the present scenario of fly ash generation and utilization is studied. It is observed that unless bulk utilization practices are adopted, it is difficult to get rid of the problems of ash disposal in the near future. Few attempts were made in India, for bulk use of fly ash in underground stowing and backfilling of OC mines in the past decade. The problems faced during the experimentation and the feasible solutions to resolve the impediments, based on the earlier attempts, are brought out. It is concluded that it is wise to send the ash to where it has come from, that is to the place where coal has been produced from.

In this paper we estimate the growth effects of human capital with country-specific time series data for Australia. Previous empirical studies, based on international data, have been inconclusive, in terms of the extent of the contribution of human capital to growth. We extend the Solow (1956) growth model by using educational attainment as a measure of human capital, as developed by Barro and Lee (2010). The extended Solow (1956) model performs well after allowing for the presence of structural changes. Our results, based on alternative time series methods, show that educational attainment has a small and significant permanent effect on the growth rate of per worker output in Australia. Alternative measures of human capital are also utilized to ensure robustness of results.

This short note estimates using the Kmenta's (1967) approximation, a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function for Australia for 1960–2004. It is found that the elasticity of substitution is 2.44, technical progress is capital augmenting and the steady-state growth rate (SSGR) of Australia is about 0.34%.

This article estimates using the Bayesian methods a Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function for Singapore for 1960–2009. It is found that the elasticity of substitution is 0.6, technical progress is labour augmenting and the Steady-State Growth Rate (SSGR) of Singapore is about 1.8%.

This paper estimates the steady state growth rates for the main European countries with an extended version of the Solow (1956) growth model. Total factor productivity is assumed a function of human capital, trade openness and investment ratio. We show that these factors, with some differences, have played an important role to improve the long run growth rates of Italy, Spain, France, UK, and Ireland. A few policies to improve the long-run growth rates for these countries are suggested.

This article analyses possible targets for the Italian debt-to-GDP ratio with a small macroeconomic model. The role of international macroeconomic variables such as the US GDP growth, prices of raw materials, EUR/USD exchange rate and European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy stance and domestic policy instruments is analysed in the debt dynamics. We find that external conditions play a fundamental role for the Italian fiscal consolidation. To reach a target of 100% of debt-to-GDP ratio by 2020, a further growth-sustaining policy has to be implemented.

This article develops a framework to analyse the determinants of the long term growth rate of Bangladesh. It is based on the Solow (1956) growth model and its extension by Mankiw et al. (1992) and follows Senhadji's (2000) growth accounting procedure to estimate Total Factor Productivity (TFP). Our Growth Accounting Exercise (GAE) shows that growth rate in Bangladesh, until the 1990s was primarily due to factor accumulation. Since then, however, TFP has made a small positive contribution. Using our results on the determinants of TFP, we also examine policy options to double per capita income of Bangladesh in about 15 years.

This paper propose a new method for adding of sums and carries at the final stage of the Modified Booth Encoding (MBE) multiplier. In a conventional multiplier final stage, i.e carry propagate adder is used to add sums and carries. After partial product reduction these sums and carries are generated. In this method Carry Save Adder (CSA) is used to reduce the partial products generated by encoder and decoder. The carry generated by a column is fed to the input of a first adder of the next column on left side of the CSA and so on for few columns on Most Significant Bit (MSB) side. Due to removal of the few Adders, the proposed MBE 8x8 multiplier consumes less power, occupies less area, and operates at low voltages i.e at 1.0 V. H-Spice is used to carry out the results for 180 nm CMOS technology.

The aim of this paper is to reduce power and area of the Modified Booth Encoder. The encoders of the multiplier are implemented with Pass transistor XOR-XNOR block instead of two separate XOR and XNOR gates. The encoder consists of one XOR and XNOR with common inputs. The proposed encoder is designed with one XOR with two inputs and two outputs. Between two outputs, one is taken at before an inverter, the function is XNOR. Second is taken at after the inverter for XOR function. Due to this the proposed design eliminates two transistors. Hence this design consumes 47% and 77% less power than Pass Transistor XOR-XNOR [11] and CMOS XOR-XNOR respectively and also occupies less area. The results are obtained using H-spice at 2.0 V for 180 nm technology

Development economists believe that migrant workers’ remittances are an important source of funds for long run growth. Therefore, recent studies have investigated the growth effects of remittances and reached different conclusions. In many such studies the growth of output is simply regressed on both remittances and the channels through which remittances affect growth. Thus there is no distinction between the indirect and direct growth effects of remittances and such specifications may give unreliable estimates because of the correlation between the channels and remittances. In this paper we make a distinction between the indirect and direct effects of remittances. Our model is estimated with panel data of 40 high remittance recipient countries and a system GMM panel data estimation method.

In the relationship between economic growth and financial development, it is generally conceded that both variables are likely to be interdependent. However, no attempt has been made so far to estimate a simultaneous equations model to test whether finance causes growth or vice versa. This article uses the Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) method to estimate a two equations model of growth and finance for India to determine the strength of this interdependence. Our results show that Financial Developments (FD) have a small but significant permanent growth effect. However, there is no evidence to support the view that ‘where enterprise leads, finance follows’.

The demand for money (M1) for the US is estimated with annual data from 1960 to 2008 and its stability is analysed with the extended Gregory and Hansen (1996b) test. In addition to estimating the canonical specification, alternative specifications are estimated which include a trend and additional variables to proxy the cost of holding money. Results with our extended specification showed that there has been a structural change in 1998 and the constraint that income elasticity is unity could not be rejected by subsample estimates. Short run dynamic adjustment equations are estimated with the lagged residuals from the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) estimates of cointegrating equation and also with the General to Specific (GETS) approach.

This article estimates Total Factor Productivity (TFP) for Bangladesh and analyses its key determinants. According to the Solow (1956) growth model, long-run growth rate equals TFP. Estimated β-coe...

The relationship between globalization and economic growth, especially in the poorer developing countries, is controversial. Many previous studies have used single globalization indicators such as the ratio of exports plus imports to GDP. This paper uses a comprehensive measure of a globalization of Dreher (2006), which is based on measures of globalization of the economic, social and political sectors. Panel data estimates with data of 21 low income African countries show a small but significant positive permanent growth effects. The sensitivity of this growth effect is examined with the extreme bounds analysis (EBA). Contrary to the findings by Levine and Renelt (1992) that cross country growth relationships are fragile, the effects of globalization and some other determinants of the long run growth rate are found to be robust by EBA.

The Pedroni method is used to estimate the Feldstein-Horioka equation from 1960-2007 with a panel of 13 OECD countries. It is found that the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle exists in a weaker form with a much reduced saving retention coefficient. The Bretton Woods agreement in particular has weakened the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle by significantly improving the international capital mobility. In comparison the Maastricht agreement seems to have improved capital mobility only by a small magnitude. The structural break tests of Westerlund are used in this paper.

Many studies have estimated the growth effects of globalization where globalization was measured with a few economic variables, ignoring its social and political dimensions. Recently, Dreher (2006) has developed a comprehensive measure of globalization with several variables from the economic, political and social sectors. He showed, with the panel data methods, that globalization has positive growth effect implying that countries with higher globalization grow faster. We argue that 5-year average growth rates, used in many panel data studies, are inadequate proxies for the unobservable Steady State Growth Rate (SSGR). Using the Dreher indices, we extend the Solow (1956) model to derive country-specific estimates of SSGRs for Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and the Philippines. Our results show that countries with higher levels of globalization have higher SSGRs but the growth effects on SSGRs are smaller than in many studies.

This paper investigates the new detailed adaptive noise canceller (ANC) system for Electrocardiogram (ECG) enhancement with robustness based on multiband structured sub band adaptive filter (MSAF). The proposed design is probably a new realization form of algorithm which guaranteed a more stable transformation and solves the structured problems in conventional sub band adaptive filter (SAF). The objective of the examination is to give arrangement keeping in mind the end goal to improve the execution of ANC as far as filter parameters which are procured with the assistance of uniform filter banks (UFB) and non uniform filter banks (NUFB) structured MSAF's using LMS algorithm. Computer simulation demonstrates that the proposed system gives improved performance and achieves good adaptation. NUFB structured MSAF algorithms are applied on ECG records obtained from standard MIT-BIH data base and the performance is compared with UFB structured MSAF algorithms in terms of parameters SNR, MSE, RMSE and distortion. The SNR for various NUFB structured MSAF's was found to be higher than the UFB structured MSAF's. The five channel NUFB structures with decimation factors (16, 16, 8, 4, 2) has on average SNR of 17.67064 dB is obtained using LMS algorithm which is superior to existing algorithms.

In the extended Solow growth model of Mankiw et al. (1992), human capital has only permanent level and no growth effects. In the endogenous growth models human capital is a growth-improving variable. Human capital may have both a permanent level and a permanent growth effect, we show how both can be estimated with an extension to the Solow model.

The Solow (1956) growth model is extended with an endogenous growth framework to estimate the effects of trade openness on the Steady State Growth Rate (SSGR). Estimates of the augmented production functions are used to compute the SSGRs for Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, India and Thailand. Good policies that increase the growth effects of openness is also tested with an interactive term. Our results show that Singapore has the highest SSGR of 2.75%, followed by Hong Kong and Thailand with 2.5%. India and Malaysia have lower SSGRs of 1.7% and 0.5%, respectively.

A systems GMM estimation method is used to estimate the Feldstein-Horioka equation from 1960-2007 with a panel of 12 OECD countries. It is found that the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle exists in a weaker form with a much reduced saving retention coefficient. The Bretton Woods agreement in particular has weakened the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle by significantly improving international capital mobility. In comparison the Maastricht agreement seems to have improved capital mobility only by a small magnitude. The Blundell and Bond approach systems GMM method and the structural break tests of Mancini-Griffoli and Pauwels are used in this paper.

Applied economists working with time series data face a dilemma in selecting between models with deterministic and stochastic trends. While models with deterministic trends are widely used, models with stochastic trends are not so well known. In an influential paper Harvey (1997) strongly advocates a structural time series approach with stochastic trends in place of the widely used autoregressive models based on unit root tests and cointegration techniques. Therefore, it is important to understand their relative merits. This article suggests that both methodologies are useful and they may perform differently in different models. This article provides a few guidelines to the applied economists to understand these alternative methods.

Mankiw et al. (1992) have extended the Solow (1956) model by augmenting the production function with human capital. Its empirical success is impressive and it showed a procedure to improve the explanatory power of the neoclassical growth model. This article suggests an empirical procedure to further extend the neoclassical growth model to distinguish between the growth and level effects of shift variables like the human capital. We use time-series data from Guatemala to show that while the growth effects of education are small, they are significant and dominate the level effects.

Country specific time-series models of the determinants of output for the small developing island countries in the Pacific region are relatively few. This article explores the applicability of the framework underlying Solow (1956) to analyse the determinants output in Kiribati for the period 1970 to 2005. It is found that technical progress in Kiribati has been negative virtually offsetting the positive effects of factor accumulation. Aid and remittances have negative effects and exports have only a small positive effect in the short-run.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a measure of the electrical movement of the heart, and is obtained by surface electrodes at standardized locations on the patient’s chest. During acquisition, various artifacts/noises such as power-line interference (PLI), baseline wander (BW), muscle artifacts (MA) and motion artifacts (EM) obscure the ECG. It is important that these artifacts are minimized for the clinicians to make better diagnosis on heart problems. This paper researches the creative idea of adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) using two stage form of adaptive filters. The concept of cascading and its algorithm for real-time application is simulated on MATLAB. The proposed algorithm utilizes two adaptive filters to estimate gradients accurately which results in good adaptation and performance. The objective of the present investigation is to provide solution in order to improve the performance of noise canceller in terms of filter parameters which are obtained with the help of adaptive algorithms. Different kinds of two stage ANC algorithms are used to eliminate artifacts in ECG by considering the noises such as power line interference and baseline wander. The simulation results show that the performance of the two stage ANC is superior to the conventional single stage ANC system in terms of higher signal-to-noise ratio. Two stage adaptive algorithms are applied on real time ECG signals and compared their performance with the conventional single stage adaptive algorithms in terms of parameters Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Distortion.

This paper develops an extended version of the Solow (1956) growth model in which total factor productivity is assumed a function of two important externalities viz., learning by doing and openness to trade. Using this framework we show that these externalities have played an important role to improve the long run growth rates of six Asian countries viz., Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Korea and the Philippines. A few broad policies to improve the long run growth rates of these countries are suggested.

This article examines the use of specifications based on the endogenous and exogenous growth-models for country-specific growth policies. It is suggested that time-series models based on the Solow (1956) exogenous growth-model are useful and they can also be extended to capture the permanent growth-effects of some variables. Our empirical results, with data from Fiji, show that trade openness and human capital have significant and permanent growth-effects. However, these growth-effects are small and eventually converge over time.

Several studies have examined the relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth. However, most of them did not take into account financial developments and institutional quality. Moreover, Stern [Stern, D., 2004. The rise and fall of the environmental Kuznets curve. World Development 32(8): 1419–1439.] noted that there are important econometric weaknesses in the earlier studies, such as endogeneity, heteroscedasticity, omitted variables, etc. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the linkage between not only economic development and environmental quality but also financial development and institutional quality. We employ the standard reduced-form modelling approach to control for country-specific unobserved heterogeneity and GMM estimation to control for endogeneity. Our study considers 24 transition economies and panel data for 1993–2004. Our results support the EKC hypothesis while confirming the importance of both institutional quality and financial development for environmental performance. We also found that financial liberalization may be harmful for environmental quality if it is not accomplished in a strong institutional framework.

The neoclassical growth model was extended by Mankiw et al. (1992) to estimate the level-effects of human capital. We suggest a further extension to capture their permanent growth-effects. Time-series data from Fiji are used to show that the growth-effects of human capital, although small, are significant and specifications with growth-effects perform better.

This paper examines how energy-output ratios (EYRs) in Fiji have responded to the major energy crises and in particular if these ratios have declined after the energy shocks. The expectation is that energy efficiency should improve after an energy crisis. For this purpose we have used at first a few simpler procedures and then a recently developed more powerful tests for structural breaks by Bai and Perron [Bai, J., Perron, P., 1998. Estimating and testing linear models with multiple structural changes. Econometrica 66, 47–78; Bai, J., Perron, P., 2003a. Computation and analysis of multiple structural change models. Journal of Applied Econometrics 18, 1–22; Bai, J., Perron, P., 2003b. Critical values for multiple structural change tests. Econometrics Journal 6, 72–78]. Policy implications of our results are discussed.

Three panel data estimation methods are used to estimate the cointegrating equations for the demand for money (M1) in 14 developing Asian countries. Tests for the effects of financial reforms are made with estimates for two sub-samples of 1970-1985 and 1986-2005. Our results show that money demand functions in these Asian countries are stable and financial reforms have yet to have any significant effects. This implies that the central banks of these countries should use money supply, instead of the rate of interest, as the monetary policy instrument.

Compared to many cross-country studies on the determinants of growth rate, time series works are relatively few and limited in scope. However, time series studies are useful for country-specific policies. But in many recent works ad hoc specifications have been used to analyse the contribution of various factors to growth. This article uses an improved specification to estimate the effects of openness on growth in a small open economy namely Fiji. In addition to trade openness, we include, as additional variables, the basic conditioning variables namely factor inputs into our specification. The need for the inclusion of some basic conditioning variables has been emphasized by Boswoth and Collins (2003) in their cross country studies. Our results show that trade openness and output are cointegrated. Neglecting the conditioning variables seems to lead to some overestimation of the effects of openness and at times a cointegrating vector may not exist.

This article allows for endogenous structural breaks in the cointegration equation and investigates if there is a stable demand for money for Bangladesh. We have used the Gregory and Hansen framework and found that there was an intercept shift and a well-determined and stable demand for money in Bangladesh exists.

Accurate estimates of the price and income elasticities of exports are valuable for growth policies based on trade promotion. However, not sufficient attention seems to have been paid to the specification of the relative price variable in some influential empirical works. This article estimates the export equation for Fiji, to show that inappropriate specification of the relative price variable may give underestimates of the price elasticity and overestimates of the income elasticity.

Many applied economists face problems in selecting an appropriate technique to estimate short and long-run relationships with the time series methods. This article reviews three alternative approaches viz., general to specific, vector autoregressions and the vector error correction models. As in other methodological controversies, definite answers are difficult. It is suggested that if these techniques are seen as tools to summarize data, as in Smith (2000), often there maybe only minor differences in their estimates. Therefore a computationally attractive technique is likely to be popular.

In the cross-country and time series studies on the determinants of the growth rate, capital stock is often proxied with the investment ratio due to lack of reliable data. While investment ratio may give good results with OLS, their robustness is doubtful. In addition there are other problems: (a) investment ratio may be a good proxy for the change in capital stock, but combining it with the level of employment to estimate a production function leads to misspecification bias; (b) it is not possible to impose any valid constraints on the coefficients of these variables and (c) if instrument variables are used to minimize any endogenous variable bias, the equation with the investment ratio seems to be fragile.

Methodological controversies on the relative merits of estimating time-series models with alternative approaches exist. However, applied researchers may eventually opt for an easy to use and computationally less demanding approach. This article shows that the LSE/Hendry approach, known as GETS, is promising when it is implemented with PcGets. To illustrate we report the GETS and the Johansen co-integration-based ECM equations, with PcGets, of the demand for money for Fiji.

This paper examines the effects of fiscal deficits on the current account deficits in the Indian economy. In many developing countries, fiscal deficits are mostly financed through monetization, causing crowding out of private investment expenditures. However, fiscal deficits in India are mostly financed through official borrowings from various external sources, leading to higher interest payments and outgoings on the external account. Such a policy could eventually precipitate balance of payments crises despite favorable trade account and real exchange rate. Data over three decades for the Indian economy show that, in addition to the real exchange rate and the ratio of private investment to GDP, fiscal deficits significantly contribute to the current account deficits.

The demand for money, especially in the developing countries, is an important relationship for formulating appropriate monetary policy and targeting monetary variables. In this paper the demand for narrow money in India is estimated and its robustness evaluated. It is found that there is a stable demand for money for almost half a century from 1953 to 2003. There is no evidence for any significant effects of the 1991 financial reforms.

Hall (1978) has stimulated considerable controversy and empirical work on testing the validity of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH). Much of this work is on the developed countries. In the developing countries per capita incomes show larger fluctuations and for the majority, opportunities for intertemporal substitution are limited. This paper uses the extended framework of Campbell and Mankiw (1989) and finds that current consumption is determined by current income for more than two thirds of the consumers in Fiji.

This article estimates with the Least Trimmed Least Squares (LTS) a specification suitable to estimate the permanent growth effects of human capital, using educational attainment (H) as a proxy. Our results show that H has significant permanent growth effects but these are much smaller than in Temple (1999).

Aggregate demand and supply analysis is the basic paradigm presented to students in virtually all modern textbooks. This chapter aims to show that, as presented in the textbooks, aggregate demand and supply analysis has several weaknesses, the most serious of which is the use of contradictory assumptions or inconsistent modes of thought.