Long-term projection of Myanmar economy by macro econometric model
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the long-term growth prospects of Myanmar economy under such scenarios as intensifying investment and improving total factor productivity (TFP), to represent demand-management policies necessary to sustain its long-term economic growth, to provide strategic implications on the prerequisites to achieve an optimal growth path, and also to represent the sectoral breakdowns for GDP and labor projections. For these purpose, we construct a simple macro-econometric model as shown in Appendix 1 in detail, and conduct sectoral breakdowns by the methodology of using Thailand input-output tables.
International Variations in the Incremental Capital-Output Ratio
The incremental capital-output ratio (ICOR) has been extensively used (and abused) in theories of growth and development planning in spite of severe strictures expressed by a number of economists on the appropriateness and soundness of the concept.' In fact, this seems to be the only available hitching post to which we can harness our macroeconomic projections of investment requirements when we deal with less-developed countries in view of the current lack of data appropriate for sophisticated model construction. In order to justify this practice, however, we should at least discern the existence of regularities in variations of the ICOR over space and time. There have been some such attempts along this line. For instance, Kuznets 2 undertook such a study as part of his extensive work on quantitative aspects of modern economic growth. Having examined variations in the ICOR for thirty-three countries in the period of 1951-57, he concluded that the gross ICOR tended to be higher in countries with higher per capita income, ranging from above 7 to between 2.5 and 3.3 He also
Computational fluid dynamics as a development tool for rotary blood pumps.
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is beginning to significantly impact the development of biomedical devices, in particular rotary cardiac assist devices. The University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Center for Artificial Organ Development has extensively used CFD as the primary tool to analyze and design a novel axial flow blood pump having a magnetically suspended rotor. The blood-contacting surfaces of the pump were developed using a design strategy based on CFD that involved closely coupling a Navier-Stokes solver to a parameterized geometry modeler and advanced mesh movement techniques. CFD-based blood damage models for shear-induced hemolysis as well as surrogate functions describing thrombosis potential were employed to help guide design improvements. This CFD-based design approach resulted in the timely development of a pump subjected to multiple geometric refinements without building expensive physical prototypes for each design iteration. A physical prototype of the final improved pump was fabricated and experimentally analyzed using particle imaging flow visualization. The CFD predicted results correlated well with the experimental data including pressure-flow (H-Q) performance and specific flow field features. It is estimated that the present CFD-based design approach shortened the overall design time frame from an order of years to months.