This paper examines the impact of a new Central Bank mandate on agricultural competitiveness and on the ability of the agricultural sector to articulate its policy interests within Argentina’s policymaking process. Reforms to Argentina’s Central Bank charter, passed into law in April 2012, loosened restrictions on Central Bank lending to Argentina’s Treasury and authorized the Central Bank to act to reduce unemployment and spur economic development. The Central Bank carries out its new mandate within a policymaking process characterized by strong presidential authority, weak political institutions, powerful provincial governments, and a budget system that politicizes the transfer of fiscal resources from the federal government to the provinces. Within these policymaking dynamics, this paper analyzes the actions of the Mesa de Enlace, an interest group coalition comprised of Argentina’s four largest agricultural producer associations, and its response to changes in Central Bank governance. My argument is twofold. First, I argue that the new mandate in the long run will exert inflationary pressure on Argentina’s real exchange rate, a key determinant of competitiveness for primary commodity exports, particularly soy. Public statements made by various representatives of the Mesa de Enlace indicate strong opposition to the nominal overvaluation (atraso cambiario) of the peso. Second, I argue that the new mandate politicizes an already-politicized Central Bank. Given the agricultural sector’s waning influence in institutionalized policymaking channels, executive intrusion in Central Bank operations is economically harmful. Such government interference serves to diminish agricultural considerations in monetary policymaking and to encourage the Mesa de Enlace’s exploitation of informal channels for interest articulation, creating disincentives for robust investment and causing undesired work stoppages, hoarding, and social protest. / text

In a time when record numbers of dollars are being spent on campaigns the unregulated dollars are flowing faster than ever. Hundreds of millions of dollars in independent expenditures are being used for “issue advocacy”, print and broadcast advertising, which does not expressly endorse or oppose a candidate for office. The one-time campaign finance ceiling has become the campaign finance basement. Individuals are able to give unlimited dollars to 527 organizations, which function outside of all campaign finance regulation and provide a new path for the flow of political dollars. Since the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act, federally regulated lobbyists and PACS are being edged out of the political dollar due to contribution limits. It is in 1996 that we witness the birth of 527 organizations and the flourishing growth of soft money spending in the campaign process.

QoS routing is one of the major building blocks for supporting QoS in communication networks and, hence, a necessary component of future communication networks. Bandwidth- Constrained Routing Algorithm (BCRA) may help to satisfy QoS requirements such as end-to-end delay, delay-jitter etc when WFQ-like (Weighted Fair Queuing) scheduling mechanisms are deployed. The existing algorithms for bandwidth constrained routing suffer from high message overhead and have a high computational and space complexity. The work presented in the thesis, therefore, focuses on the different techniques that an be used to reserve bandwidth for a unicast connection with low protocol overhead in terms of number of messages. We have compared the performance of the proposed routing algorithms using simulation studies with other bandwidth constrained routing algorithms. The call blocking ratio and message overhead have been used as the performance metric to compare the proposed algorithm with the existing ones. We present three source routing algorithms for unicast connections satisfying the band- width requirement. The first two routing algorithms are based on the partitioning of the network. The link-state broadcasts are limited to the partition. In the first algorithm, the source node queries the other partitions for the state information on a connection request and computes the path based on the information received from the other partitions. The second algorithm is based on state aggregation. The aggregated state of other partitions is maintained at every node. The source node finds a feasible path based on the aggregated information. The path is expanded in every partition, if required, at the time of resource reservation. The third QoS routing algorithm uses the Distance Vector Tables to find a route for a connection. If the shortest path satisfies the bandwidth requirement, then it is selected; otherwise a random deviation is taken at the point where bandwidth requirement is not satisfied and shortest path algorithm is again followed. In all the three algorithms presented, the packets carry the entire path information to the destination node. Therefore, no per connection information is required to be maintained at the intermediate nodes. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithms indeed help educing the protocol overhead considerably, and at the same time they give comparable or better performance in terms of resource utilization across a wide range of workloads.