The spectacular growth of many economies in East Asia over the past 30 years has amazed the economics profession and has evoked a torrent of books and articles attempting to explain the phenomenon. Articles on why the most successful economies of the region Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan Province of China have grown, to say the least, robustly invariably refer to the phenomenon as "miraculous." When practitioners of the Dismal Science have recourse to a Higher Power, the reader knows that he is in trouble. Confusion is compounded when he discovers that ideological debate has multiplied even further the analyses of this phenomenon. Rather than swelling the torrent of interpretations, this paper sets for itself the modest agenda of reviewing the weightiest arguments in the literature that attempt to identify the reasons for the extraordinary economic growth in East Asia and trying to decide which arguments make sense. The exercise has value because finding the right explanation might suggest how to replicate this success elsewhere and, as a bonus, might also satisfy the reader's urge to solve an engaging intellectual puzzle. It is best if we start with the facts.
The revisionist view recognizes that the government must often choose firm-specific, highly complex, and nonuniform interventions. In extreme contradiction to the neoclassical doctrine, it allows, and even recommends, the active use of tax policy to manipulate relative prices in the economy. Even the World Bank (1993) report, after emphasizing the necessity of neoclassical "getting the basics right" policies in East Asia, concedes thatthese fundamental policies do not tell the entire story. In each of these economies the government also intervened to foster development, often systematically and through multiple channels. Policy interventions took many forms: targeted and subsidized credit to selected industries, low deposit rates and ceilings on borrowing rates to increase profits and retained earnings, protection of domestic import substitutes, subsidies to declining industries, the establishment and financial support of government banks, public investment in applied research, firm- and industry-specific export targets, development of export marketing institutions, and wide sharing of information between public and private sectors.
Sector 4: Extraction torrent
Third, public policy in the successful East Asian economies is far from homogeneous. Variation is large in the specific sectors and industries targeted for selective intervention in different countries. The more one examines the policies individual East Asian economies have pursued, the more evident it becomes how different, and indeed contradictory, these policies have been. Rodrik (1994), for example, remarks that the East Asian model encompasses highly interventionist strategies (Japan and Korea), as well as noninterventionist ones (Hong Kong and Thailand); explicitly redistributive policies (Malaysia), as well as distributionally neutral ones (most of the rest); clientelism (Indonesia and Thailand), as well as strong, autonomous states (Japan, Korea, Singapore); emphasis on large conglomerates (Korea), as well as on small, entrepreneurial firms (Taiwan). This range of strategies, all followed more or less successfully, suggests that the search for a simple explanation of the East Asian miracle may well be futile.
Among the many reasons suggested to account for the East Asian success, the investment rate and the export orientation of these economies enjoy enthusiastic support. These are often called "engines of growth" because their strength seems to be pulling the whole economy forward. Moreover, they appear to generate beneficial spillover effects for the rest of the economy. The policy implication of this view is obvious. If the hypothesis is valid, the government should jump start the engines of growth, and if certain sectors continue to contribute to economic progress, while others do not, then government should assist the economy's forward motion by promoting the "good" sectors. Therefore, it should encourage investments and exports, using such policy instruments as direct subsidies or preferential allocation of credit to promote these activities.
The energy industry is the totality of all of the industries involved in the production and sale of energy, including fuel extraction, manufacturing, refining and distribution. Modern society consumes large amounts of fuel, and the energy industry is a crucial part of the infrastructure and maintenance of society in almost all countries.
Widespread demand for energy may encourage competing energy utilities and the formation of retail energy markets. Note the presence of the "Energy Marketing and Customer Service" (EMACS) sub-sector.[2]
The energy sector accounts for 4.6% of outstanding leveraged loans, compared with 3.1% a decade ago, while energy bonds make up 15.7% of the $1.3 trillion junk bond market, up from 4.3% over the same period.[3]
Countries in North America use the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The NAICS sectors #21 and #22 (mining and utilities) might roughly define the energy industry in North America. This classification is used by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Government encouragement in the form of subsidies and tax incentives for energy-conservation efforts has increasingly fostered the view of conservation as a major function of the energy industry: saving an amount of energy provides economic benefits almost identical to generating that same amount of energy. This is compounded by the fact that the economics of delivering energy tend to be priced for capacity as opposed to average usage. One of the purposes of a smart grid infrastructure is to smooth out demand so that capacity and demand curves align more closely.Some parts of the energy industry generate considerable pollution, including toxic and greenhouse gases from fuel combustion, nuclear waste from the generation of nuclear power, and oil spillages as a result of petroleum extraction. Government regulations to internalize these externalities form an increasing part of doing business, and the trading of carbon credits and pollution credits on the free market may also result in energy-saving and pollution-control measures becoming even more important to energy providers.
Economic and political instability can lead to an energy crisis. Notable oil crises are the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 oil crisis. The advent of peak oil, the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, will likely precipitate another energy crisis.
Between 1985 and 2018, there have been around 69,932 deals in the energy sector. This cumulates to an overall value of 9,578 bil USD. The most active year was 2010 with about 3.761 deals. In terms of value 2007 was the strongest year (684 bil. USD), which was followed by a steep decline until 2009 (-55,8%).[19]
The first step in any kind of data recovery from floppy media is to create a disk image, a sector by sector copy of the entire disk, including the parts of the disk not normally seen by users (boot sector, file table, sector numbering, data marked deleted but not yet overwritten). Any further manipulation of the disk contents (such as content extraction) is done from a copy of the disk image. This has the benefit of minimizing the handling of the original floppy media, and provides a baseline known good state to control for inadvertent changes that could be introduced by subsequent manipulation of the contents. Write blocking is critical in the imaging process in order to prevent inadvertent alterations to the source media. In this my approach differs not at all from standard digital forensics methodology.
Given its versatility, the Kryoflux is the generally preferred option for floppy disk imaging. However, the other two devices have occasionally provided better results in accessing the contents of copy-protected disks and disks with unusual sector formats. And one should always be conscious that floppy drives can silently go out of alignment, resulting in disk images that cannot be read, or worse still, contain corrupted files. Having multiple drives and devices available makes it possible to periodically run sanity checks on your imaging output.[6]
The forensics community designs tools for criminal investigators, not for digital archaeologists. Tools that support AFF and EWF (Guymager, fiwalk and The Sleuth Kit for example), while undoubtedly valuable in their problem domain, were not designed to recover and preserve content from computer media from the 1980s. Most of the tools that can recover content from 1980s floppy disks either output or expect to work with standard sector image formats.
It is worth noting that acquiring only stream files would be a workable strategy for obtaining floppy disk images in situations where it is necessary to use semi-skilled labour to do the imaging work. In such cases the work of converting streams to sector images could be deferred until later.
Sector images invert the characteristics of stream files: they are typically the same size as the original disk, accessible to emulators and content extraction tools, non-proprietary in most cases, and are not a complete recording of all the low level data the controller was able to read from the disk, such as flux reversals and index blocks.
Except where otherwise noted, all of the work was done on a modern Lenovo Thinkpad 450s running Ubuntu Linux 15.10. Most open source content extraction tools and emulators work well in Ubuntu. Many of these tools have a command line interface, which makes it possible to script the repetitive parts of the job.
Also, working in Linux provides added security against computer viruses. Floppies were an attack vector for viruses in their day and many of the viruses from 25 years ago are still perfectly capable of infecting a modern Windows computer. For this reason, files recovered from floppy disk images should be immediately scanned for viruses prior to further handling. I use the open source ClamAV[10] for this purpose. The images themselves should also be scanned to check for boot sector viruses. 2ff7e9595c
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