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Maize production remains low in Eswatini. The small country is still unable to meet the local demand through local production. Maize is Eswatini’s staple food but the country has not yet reached self-sufficiency. This deficiency or shortfall in local maize production has been a persistent problem since the country’s independence. To fight this shortfall and reach self-sufficiency, the National Maize Corporation (NMC) was formed in 1985. The main purpose of the NMC is to keep the local demand satisfied. The NMC, as the only importer of white maize into Eswatini, does this by importing the deficit demand from South Africa. Stability of the local white maize price is also one of the responsibilities of the NMC. This study’s overarching aim was to determine whether or not a significant relationship exists between the maize prices as quoted on SAFEX and the local maize price in Eswatini. This is done to see if the importer of maize in Eswatini, the NMC, can hedge the price risk on SAFEX. The study also maps the Eswatini imported and local maize value-chain through the current price discovery mechanism. Secondary data offered by the NMC and data from the Ministry of Agriculture in Eswatini and educational journals were used in the study. Econometric time series methods were used along with monthly data from 2008 to 2019. Two hypotheses were tested during the study. The first hypothesis tested for the existence of a significant relationship between maize prices as quoted on SAFEX and the local maize price in Eswatini. The second hypothesis follows the first, determining whether or not hedging on SAFEX could be used as a tool to minimise price risk on the domestic price market in Eswatini. The study confirms that a long-run relationship exists between the South African maize market and the Eswatini maize market. The study showed that a 1% increase in the South African price led to a 0.67% increase in the local Eswatini prices. This indicates a slow rate shift in prices. Short-run dynamics indicated a 12.5% adjustment to equilibrium per term, which is a slow adjustment as a result of market conditions in Eswatini. The study also revealed asymmetry in price transmission and that the Eswatini prices only respond to positive changes (price increase) in the South African prices. This reveals that the two markets are poorly integrated. Due to the significant relationship between the two markets, it can be acknowledged that SAFEX could be used to hedge price risk by Eswatini through the NMC. Through mapping down the maize value-chain, the study discovered that the Eswatini maize market is not a liberalised one and value addition to maize through the chain is minimal. The relationship between the two maize markets, as well as the maize market of Eswatini, could still improve if means to liberate the market were to be exercised by the NMC and local government. This study can serve as the basis for understanding how risk management tools could be used by the Eswatini maize market and how the market could be improved or liberalised. / Dissertation (MSc Agric (Agricultural Economics))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / African Research Consortium (AERC) / Collaborative Master of Science Programme in Agricultural and Applied Economics (CMAAE) / Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / MSc Agric (Agricultural Economics) / Unrestricted

In Swaziland, maize is important for food security, yet its production is low and the country has not achieved self-sufficiency. Swaziland has had a shortfall in domestic maize production since independence. About 80 percent of the rural population never has enough maize for consumption. The National Maize Corporation (NMC) was established as a self-sufficiency mechanism in 1985. The NMC is the only white maize importer and is also responsible for the stabilisation of domestic prices. The organisation has endeavoured to stabilise Swaziland's maize prices, though they are still high by regional comparisons. This study seeks to investigate the relationship between Swaziland and South African white maize prices in the presence of maize marketing and pricing policy, as implemented by the NMC. The maize marketing policy controls flow of maize imports and exports in Swaziland, while the pricing policy controls the domestic white maize prices. The current pricing relationship between the two countries was compared with a scenario where marketing and pricing policies in Swaziland are absent. This was done in order to gauge the effect that these policies have on the integration of Swaziland into the regional maize market and ultimately how Swaziland maize prices are affected by price transmission process in the presence and absence of these policies. The study used secondary data from the NMC, the Ministry of Agriculture, and journals. Monthly data from 2000 to 2014 are used and econometric time series techniques are applied. The study hypothesised that there is a long-run relationship between Swaziland and South African maize prices, given the current market structure. It also hypothesised the short-run dynamics correct deviations from the long run in a fast and efficient manner. Lastly, it is hypothesised that current policies are not hampering marketing integration or impeding regional price signals to flow through to Swaziland maize markets. The results confirm the presence of a long-run price relationship between the above-mentioned markets. In the presence of the current maize marketing and pricing policy, the error correction term corrected or adjusted the disequilibrium, from long-run equilibrium levels, at a speed of 3.8 per cent per period, indicating relatively slow correction. This could serve as evidence of inefficient integration between the two markets and an indication of weak arbitrage process. Weak arbitrage, in turn, has definite welfare implications in that it leads to inefficient allocation of resources. In comparison to the other scenario, there is a slight difference: when analysing the relationship between import parity and Swaziland domestic prices without policy measures, short-run and long-run relationship between markets are also confirmed. Here the error correction term, however corrected the disequilibrium of the system at a speed of 4.7 percent per period. This shows a slight improvement of efficiency when policies are eliminated. This study could be useful to policy makers in that it imparts knowledge on how world price signals are transmitted to their domestic markets. Understanding the price dynamics could, therefore, facilitate policy formulation related to price and marketing in the white maize industry. The findings of this study could ultimately also inform the self-sufficiency versus food affordability debate. / Dissertation (MSc (Agric))--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / MSc (Agric) / Unrestricted

Cloud providers need to optimize the container deployments to efficiently utilize their network, compute and storage resources. In addition, they require an attractive pricing strategy for the compute services like containers, virtual machines, and serverless computing in order to attract users, maximize their profits and achieve a desired utilization of their resources. This thesis aims to tackle the twofold challenge of achieving high performance in container deployments and identifying the pricing for compute services. For performance, the thesis presents a transport-adaptive network architecture (D-TAIL) improving tail latencies. Existing transport protocols such as Homa, pFabric [1, 2] utilize Shortest Remaining Processing Time (SRPT) scheduling policy which is known to have starvation issues for long flows as SRPT prioritizes short flows. D-TAIL addresses this limitation by taking age of the flow in consideration while deciding the priority. D-TAIL shows a maximum reduction of 72%, 29.66% and 28.39% in 99th-percentile FCT for transport protocols like DCTCP, pFabric and Homa respectively. In addition, the thesis also presents a container deployment design utilizing peer-to-peer network and virtual file system with content-addressable storage to address the problem of cold starts in existing container deployment systems. The proposed deployment design increases compute availability, reduces storage requirement and prevents network bottlenecks. For pricing, the thesis studies the tradeoffs between serverless computing (SC) and traditional cloud computing (virtual machine, VM) using realistic cost models, queueing theoretic performance models, and a game theoretic formulation. For customers, we identify their workload distribution between SC and VM to minimize their cost while maintaining a particular performance constraint. For cloud provider, we identify the SC and VM prices to maximize its profit. The main result is the identification and characterization of three optimal operational regimes for both customers and the provider, that leverage either SC or VM only, or both, in a hybrid configuration.

The master thesis deals with the regional differentiation of housing prices in Czechia at the district level. The main goal of the thesis is to evaluate and explain the regional differentiation and development of apartment prices between 2001 and 2017. The first empirical part concerns the general evaluation of apartment prices, where, in addition to cartographic outputs, descriptive statistics are used. The monitored period is divided into smaller time intervals according to the trend of rising prices of apartments and the development of national economy. Both the absolute prices of apartments and the relative changes between different years are observed including establishment of own typology. The second part monitors the influence of selected factors (average salary, migration and population density) on the average price of apartments at district level. Two types of correlation analyses were employed as an analytical tool. Keywords: apartment prices, Czechia, administrative districts

Recent studies of the valuation of real estate have concentrated on the use of hedonic pricing techniques in which the implicit prices of the component characteristics of an asset are inferred from the observed sale price using regression analysis. All of these studies include as explanatory variables one or more locational factors, such as distance to the central business district, as proxies for the effect that location has on the utility of land. In this research, the explicit consideration of the location of real estate in terms of the geographic or Cartesian coordinates (spatial attributes) of observed sales is shown to be a potential substitute for such proxies, either wholly or in part. Such use of spatial attributes could improve the usefulness of the hedonic methodology while at the same time significantly reducing cost and eliminating sources of error.

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This dissertation consists of three essays on housing and macroeconomics. The first chapter documents cross-country evidence on house prices, rental prices, and consumption volatility, especially, by focusing on comparison between emerging country group and rich country group. The second chapter develops a theoretical model framework for small open economy with housing and housing rental markets, and investigates how the model explains the empirical regularities documented in the first chapter. The third chapter discusses the excess consumption volatility observed in emerging countries using higher house price volatility in those countries through a theoretical model. In Chapter 1, I address business cycles in emerging economies exhibit both greater volatility of housing prices and relative consumption compared to business cycles in rich countries. This chapter provides evidence of a positive relationship between housing price and relative consumption volatility across countries. Furthermore, I suggest new stylized facts when housing and non-housing consumption are disaggregated: first, housing consumption is more volatile than non-housing consumption in emerging countries; and, second, even after controlling for housing consumption volatility, non-housing consumption in emerging economies is still more volatile than that in rich countries. In order to investigate the above empirical regularities, this chapter tries to figure out what is different between two country groups in terms of fundamental related to housing, by focusing on homeownership rates and housing rental market characteristics. In Chapter 2, I explore the linkage between house prices and aggregate consumption volatility by building a business cycle model of a small open economy with both housing and rental markets. While housing consumption, as measured through rental prices, is a non-negligible portion of total consumption, the role of the rental market has largely been overlooked in studies of consumption volatility. By explicitly modeling separate housing and rental sectors, this chapter is able to explain some new stylized facts suggested in the first chapter. Simulation results suggest that cross-country variation in the volatility of shocks to credit prices and availability is a driving force in generating the observed relationship between house price and relative consumption volatility. The model also suggests that a financial friction stemming from constraints in housing-collateralized credit can explain excess non-housing consumption volatility in emerging countries, while rental market frictions may account for the greater housing consumption volatility observed. In Chapter 3, I mainly discuss the causal effect of exogenous house price shock in explaining the excess consumption volatility puzzle observed in emerging countries. Specifically, first, this chapter compares the impulse responses of house price shock and income shock to show that house price is more relevant factor in understanding consumption fluctuation, and then analyses homeowners’ and renters’ behavior to figure out how the house price shock transmits to each agent’s consumption. As a result, given the highly volatile house prices in emerging economies, I show that homeowners play an essential role in amplifying the effect of house price fluctuations on consumption fluctuations through a simplified theoretical model. Therefore, this chapter argues that higher house price volatility in emerging countries leads to their excess consumption volatility.

The Swedish housing market has experienced an almost constant increase of housing prices since the economic crisis in the early 90‟s. Many studies have been conducted on the field which have tried to find an explanation to the constant trend and if there is an end in sight. However, this study aims at focusing on the supply/demand relationship in determining the housing prices in the County of Stockholm. The method that was used was both a time series regression and a cross sectional regression, by applying data on the amount of housing that has been constructed per thousand inhabitants in each municipality, the development of housing prices in each municipality and the average annual development of wages. Since there are 26 municipalities in Stockholm County, it would be too time consuming to go through each and every single one of the municipalities, instead the focus was on the 5 municipalities with the highest and lowest construction rate per thousand inhabitants. Thus, we can observe if there is any general difference depending on the construction rate in determining the house price development. The results on the time series regression implies that most of the municipalities housing prices are primarily dependent on the housing construction rate, when construction goes down the prices goes up and vice versa. However, the municipality of Vallentuna had suspicious signs which imply that other factors (then the variables used) are driving the prices up. In the cross sectional regression where both the 5 highest and lowest municipalities with construction rate were regressed together, we can see similar signs as in Vallentuna. It would therefore be interesting to find out what the underlying factors that are driving the prices up in the case of Vallentuna and in the cross sectional analysis.

This paper examines the impact of confirmed shootings on the attractiveness of a neighborhood, measured through local housing prices, in Sweden’s major metropolitan areas during 2016-2019. A novel difference-in-differences approach is proposed where control groups are selected from areas that will be exposed to shootings in the near future but have not yet been so, thus mitigating the problem from previous studies that shootings might be a result of underlying unobserved factors for the neighborhood. The results are inconclusive overall apart from Uppsala, where the estimate is negative and significant, indicating a 4.8 percent drop in nearby housing prices after a shooting. Multiple alternative specifications are used to test the robustness of the results. Overall, the negative estimate for Uppsala seems quite stable, whereas the estimated impact in other regions remains insignificant. One potential explanation could be that gun-violence is a rather new phenomena in Uppsala relative to the other regions, which could make the effect of a shooting in Uppsala more pronounced. A consideration for policy makers may then be that programs aiming to reduce gun-violence will have a larger economic impact in areas where shootings are a relatively new and arising problem.