I show that the prices of the internationally traded crypto-currency bitcoin can be used to estimate a currency's unofficial exchange rate and capital controls at a daily interval. Two important bitcoin features are documented: (1) Bitcoin-based exchange rates approximate the behavior, but not the level, of unofficial exchange rates, and (2) Bitcoin prices contain a bitcoin-trend term and must be appropriately normalized prior to being used for this purpose. Bitcoin-based exchange rates reveal that (3) there is no consistent pattern of Granger causality between unofficial rates and official rates by exchange rate regime or barriers at the daily frequency, and (4) that countries can engage in short-interval capital controls.
Organizational management in public institutions had previously based on traditional functional departments that hampered the customer orientation structures. Process management has evolved into the management of institutions and that takes as an interrelated system process that together contribute to increase customer satisfaction.
Under this background analysis to the Autonomous Government Decentralized Saraguro ,where it was possible to know the problems of this institution was performed , it was determined that the public entity has no formal documents , such as the Organic Statute , affecting the functions and processes develop informally.
This research aims to analyze the administration of the municipality of Saraguro and make a diagnosis and to detail some of the critical points that define an efficient and effective management. From this make the proposal: Constitution of Organizational Process Management.
Finally , the purpose of this research topic is to contribute to improvement in regard to the administration of the municipality to achieve Saraguro promoting institutional development, strengthening the organizational structure and culture through the implementation of a process management system as a management tool of the municipality, in accordance with the new conceptual and legal trends set by the state, allowing providing quality service , achieving meet and exceed the requirements of the community , optimizing institutional, updating and improving business processes and improving the work environment.
This chapter addresses the remarkable disconnect between resilience literature and military theory. War puts high demands on the resilience of military organizations. Western militaries have adopted organizational and operational concepts to cope with the myriad challenges of violence, turbulence, uncertainty and an adaptive opponent that, when studied against the background of resilience literature, are quite sound. The maneuvrist approach and the idea of strategic paralysis both target the multiple nodes across various layers of an opponentâs organization that allow it to display coherent and purposeful behaviour. Both aim to disrupt the resilience of the opponent. In turn, the concept of mission command and recent operational concepts such as network centric warfare and swarming are fully congruent with the literature about complex systems, adaptability and current insights on what produces organizational resilience in highly threatening and fluid environments: decentralization, formal and informal networks, solid feedback mechanisms, self-organization, mutual trust, and semi-autonomous units. This chapter suggests that, where resilience studies are still in the exploratory stage, without clear definition and coherent theory, there is benefit in studying military theory and military organizations, which are increasingly informed by the same literatures as resilience studies.
Supply Chain Resilience and Risk Management
Peacebuilding and International Security
Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis
Research is moving on from the early observations that the existence of symptomsdecrease acceptance of original income area (PAD) the effect on the low success ofthe Organization of the autonomous region, particularly in North Halmahera Regency. Thus, this research aims to know the ada-tidaknya the influence of Regional financial capability against the success of the Organization of the autonomous region of North Halmahera Regency. Methods of descriptive and quantitative approaches used to solve problems in this research. A simple random sample set as many as 60 employees at the same time as the respondent. Data collection is done with the interview techniques, observation and documentation in order to capture data and secondary data promer. To analyze the data applied statistical methods descriptive statistics and inferensial with the technique of percentage, simple linear regression and correlation. Research results show that the positive effect of the regional financial capabilities and significantly to the success of the Organization of the Autonomous Region of North Halmahera Regency with the degree of determination of 92.7%. However, the ability of the financial area of North Halmahera Regency still categorised less as seen from the ratio of independence, fiscal decentralization and index capabilities resulting in a routine yet optimal achievement of the success of the Organization of the autonomous region which was only categorised. Referring to the results of the findings in this research, then it is seen necessary to give some suggestions, as follows: (1) it is recommended that the regional Government of North Halmahera Regency dig resources potential, such as PAD tourism which has not been optimally managed, in addition to streamline receipt PAD resources.(2) the need to study more about the setting of the target PAD based on the real potential that is available.
Enterprise systems play a central role in the business processes and management of data within an organization. However it is not uncommon for organizations to posses a multitude of autonomous systems. This thesis examines the way organizations can integrate financial data from different autonomous source systems and examines different factors that can have an impact on data integration processes. The empirical findings were gathered through a case study at Sandvik, a large Swedish industrial firm, making use of qualitative research techniques. The findings contribute to create an in-depth understanding of financial data integration processes. The empirical findings show how an organization can accomplish financial data integration without tight coupling of autonomous systems. Moreover the research contributes by describing various organization and technological factors that impact data integration. The findings indicate that a decentralized organizational structure and singular system architecture play an important role in financial data integration processes. Hereby the research helps to further explore the topic integration within enterprise system research and provides context behind the organizational and technological factors that influence financial data integration processes.
Contents:Introduction: How Multilevel Finance has Contributed to the Crisis and is Affected by it? Ehtisham Ahmad, Massimo Bordignon and Giorgio BrosioPART I MANAGING SUBNATIONAL LIABILITIES IN EUROPE1. Promoting Stabilizing and Sustainable Ssub-national Fiscal Policies in the Euro AreaTeresa Ter-Minassian2. Political Economy of Information Generation and Financial Management for Subnational Governments. Ehtisham Ahmad3. History of the Constitutional Limits in Germany and the New Debt Brake -Experiences and Critique: Georg MilbradtPART II INCIPIENT PROBLEMS IN THE BIGGEST COUNTRIES IN EUROPE4. The German ExperiencePaul Bernd Spahn5. French Subnational Public Finances: On the Difficulty of being a Decentralized Unitary State. Pierre GarelloPART III THE TROUBLED COUNTRIES OF SOUTHERN EUROPE6. Economics and Politics of Local Greek GovernmentGiorgios Chortareas and Vassileios E. Logothetis7. PortugalMario Fortuna8. Multi-level Finance and Governance in Spain: The Impact of the Euro CrisisSantiago Lago Penas and Alberto Sole Olle9. Economic Crisis and Fiscal Federalism in Italy Maria Flavia Ambrosanio, Paolo Balduzzi and Massimo BordignonPART IV CITIES, THE OLYMPICS AND GROWTH 10. A Tale of Two Cities: The Olympics in Barcelona and Torino. G. Brosio, J. Suarez Pandiello and S. PipernoPART V ACCESSION STATES11. The Impact of the Global Crisis on Macedonian Local Governments.Marjan NikolovPART VI SOME GENERAL LESSONS12. Clientelistic Politics and Multilevel Finance: Some Implications for Regional Inequality and GrowthAlex Mourmouras and Peter Rangazas 13. Incentives Facing Local Governments in the Absence of Credible EnforcementLeo Fulvio Minervini and Annalisa VinellaIndex
This paper presents an analysis of the decentralization process that has been taking place in Bolivia over the last couple of decades. It starts with a review of the legal framework that determines the distribution of responsibilities and financial resources to the sub-national governments (9 departments and 339 municipalities), and continues with an analysis of the evolution and distribution of financing to these entities between 2001 and 2013. It then proceeds to describe the resulting progress in social indicators between 2001 and 2012 at the municipal level, and identifies the main remaining gaps in basic services by 2012. Finally, the paper offers an analysis of the factors that are most closely associated with progress in the main social indicator used by the Bolivian government - the Unsatisfied Basic Needs index. This provides the basis for a final section on recommendations for public investment in Bolivia.
In this paper, I analyze Bitcoin price formation and adoption rates at a global and national level. In determining Bitcoin prices, I consider contemporaneous and lagged values of traditional determinants of currencies, such as inflation and industrial production, and digital currency specific factors, primarily public interest. Using monthly time-series data across five years (2011 â 2016), I find that global public interest in Bitcoin, measured by Google searches for the keyword âBitcoin,â has a positive and significant impact on Bitcoin prices. I extend the analysis to a country level by employing a proxy for adoption rates, represented by the number of local Bitcoin client downloads, which is a useful predictor of prices. I examine pooled data across 12 countries to show that searches for âBitcoinâ can be used to predict adoption rates and, consequently, prices. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first academic article to study Bitcoin usage at a national level. I find that contemporaneous values of traditionally used macroeconomic determinants of currency prices, except inflation, do not have a significant impact on Bitcoin prices.
Client puzzles have been proposed as a mechanism for proving legitimate intentions by providing proofs of work, which can be applied to discourage malicious usage of resources. A typical problem of puzzle constructions is the difference in expected solving time on different computing platforms. We call puzzles which can be solved independently of client computing resources fair client puzzles.
We propose a construction for client puzzles requiring widely distributed computational effort for their solution. These puzzles can be solved using the mining process of Bitcoin, or similar cryptocurrencies. Adapting existing definitions, we show that our puzzle construction satisfies formal requirements of client puzzles under reasonable assumptions. We describe a way of transforming our client puzzles for use in denial of service scenarios and demonstrate a practical construction.
With more than three billion internet users, each with multiple digital
identities, the management of these identities is very important.
Surveys show that people often use the identity management systems
they don't want to use. They don't have full control over their infor
mation, have no way to know what is shared with other parties and are
dependent on trusted parties when logging in to websites.
Blockchain technology is used as basis for a secure and transparent
distributed ledger for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Its decentralized, pub
lic and immutable properties solve the double spending problem and allow
every participant of the network to read the transaction history, help in
the validation process and pay and receive Bitcoin.
Cryptographically complex math ensures that everyone can do trans
actions with everyone without the need for a trusted third party. Next
to financial transactions, this also holds for other claims. Entities can
put claims on a decentralized ledger by digitally signing it, which allows
any other entity to verify that these claims are made by that specific entity.
This allows authorities like governments to make claims about indi
viduals, which can be combined with other claims to create a very strong
claim about someone. Because both the claimant and the claimee can
be verified, this allows entities like mortgage lenders to outsource their
Customer Due Diligence (CDD) processes.
In this research we will explore the possibility of self-sovereign identity,
where you are in control of your digital identity.
We started with a desk research on currently available identity man
agement solutions. We concluded that in most systems, the end-user is
not able to store their own data. Currently only one decentralized system
is available, but has not gained wide adoption yet.
A case study has been performed on a solution which allows the ex
change of KYC attributes, resulting from thorough Customer Due Dili
gence (CDD) as is often performed when opening a bank account. These
attributes can be used by other entities, like insurance companies and
mortgage lenders to make their on-boarding process easier for customers,
since they don't need to supply copies of the same documentation all over
again. Also, the companies themselves could outsource their Customer
Due Diligence (CDD) this way to lower costs and make fewer errors. Al
though the idea is very interesting, the studied solution did not meet the
expectations. At the time the company behind the solution was very small
and the process to improve very complex. The solution was also propri
etary, creating dependence on the vendor, which heightens the adoption
barrier.
Because of the lessons learned from the case study, the results of the
literature research and the desk research, we designed an architecture for
a Decentralized Identity Management System (DIMS) using the concept
of claim-based identity and blockchain technology. To lower adoption barriers and create a self-sustaining ecosystem, it
will be developed on a public blockchain and source code will be made
open-source. The solution will be privacy-friendly by using privacy-enhancing
techniques and storing only claims about one's identity. We also provide a
solution to allow retrieval of more sensitive data, and made it as modular
as possible to make integration within existing IT architecture easier.
The Decentralized Identity Management System (DIMS) can be use
ful in a wide range of use cases, like proving your age when buying liquor
at the supermarket or applying for a health insurance where you get a
student discount if you can show your are enrolled at a university.
This shows that our work resulted in a solid foundation for self-sovereign
identity using blockchain technology.
A fundamental open problem in the area of blockchain protocols is whether the Bitcoin protocol is the only solution for building a secure transaction ledger. A recently proposed and widely considered alternative is the \GHOST protocol which, notably, was proposed to be at the core of Ethereum as well as other recent proposals for improved Bitcoin-like systems. % The \GHOST variant is touted as offering superior performance compared to Bitcoin (potentially offering block production speed up by a factor of more than 40) without a security loss. Motivated by this, in this work, we study from a provable security point of view the \GHOST protocol.<br/><br/>We introduce a new formal framework for the analysis of blockchain protocols that relies on trees (rather than chains) and we showcase the power of the framework by providing a unified description of the \GHOST and Bitcoin protocols, the former of which we extract and formally describe. We then prove that \GHOST implements a ``robust transaction ledger'' (i.e., possesses liveness and persistence) and hence it is a provably secure alternative to Bitcoin; moreover, our bound for the liveness parameter is superior to that proven for the bitcoin backbone in line with the original expectation for \GHOST. Our proof follows a novel methodology for establishing that \GHOST is a robust transaction ledger compared to previous works, which may be of independent interest and can be applicable to other blockchain variants.
Technology innovation and new consumersâ habits are fostering two interesting experiences in the paymentsâ landscape: the increasing use of mobile payment instruments and the emergence of alternative payment schemes without fiat or banking money, like Bitcoin. This contribution considers both cases as useful drivers for innovation, but at present their positive outcomes are unclear. A synthetic economic analysis highlights costs and benefits for consumers and third-party operators, arguing that mobile payments could improve competition and force banks to rethink their strategies. More controversial issues concern bitcoin: on this topic enthusiastic expectations of financial operators are jointly considered with cautious positions expressed by regulatory and monetary authorities. Recent tendencies in Bitcoinâs informal infrastructure are confirming that an effective decentralized and peer-to-peer payments system is rather hard to build.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies transformed the trade in illegal goods, especially drugs. Thanks to them in conjunction with other anonymization tools could arise dark markets, illegal marketplaces in cyberspace. Despite active intervention by the authorities, their number and quantity of goods on offer is growing significantly. Besides, we observed a tendency to change the structure of the drug market. This article is next to the description of the operation of dark markets based on identified trends and look to the future of how will dark markets look like. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thesis: S.M. in Real Estate Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2016.