A very timely issue for economic agent-based models (ABMs) is their empirical estimation. This paper describes a line of research that could resolve the issue by using machine learning techniques, using multi-layer artificial neural networks (ANNs), or so called Deep Nets. The seminal contribution by Hinton et al. (2006) introduced a fast and efficient training algorithm called Deep Learning, and there have been major breakthroughs in machine learning ever since. Economics has not yet benefited from these developments, and therefore we believe that now is the right time to apply Deep Learning and multi-layered neural networks to agent-based models in economics.

China’s strategies for oil, refining and petrochemical production are very different from those in the West, as analysis of Sinopec’s Annual and 20-F Reports confirms. Clearly no western company would ever dream of spending such large amounts of capital for so little reward. But as a State Owned Enterprise, Sinopec’s original mandate was to be a reliable supplier of raw materials to downstream factories, to maintain employment. More recently, the emphasis has changed to providing direct support to employment, through increased exports of refined products into Asian markets and increased self-sufficiency in petrochemicals”.

Con una fuerte deuda a cuestas, la fuentes de acceso a divisas por el suelo y la espiral de los intereses creciendo sin cesar, nuestros países debieron recurrir al Fondo Monetario Internacional. Éste conformaba la alcabala obligatoria para acceder al refinanciamiento bancario internacional, imponiendo las condiciones para ello. Tales condiciones implicaron, entre otras cosas, el desmantelamiento de las barreras arancelarias. Sin protección, las industrias regionales fueron arrasadas por la competencia extranjera. Fue así que la mayor parte de la región debió volver a concentrarse, como en tiempos coloniales, en los recursos naturales.

Recent heterodox economic literature makes reference to Hilferding’s “Finance Capital” and Lenin’s “Imperialism” as early insights on the phenomenon of Financialization of capital. In this regard ideas which became dominant in the left during the first decades of the previous century are applied in the explanation of the current crisis, as well as the understanding of contemporary capitalism from a methodological, analytical and political standpoint. This paper traces the underlying argument of the Monopoly model and its main political applications in the first three decades of the 20th century, in an effort to draw rough historical analogies with its revival in contemporary literature. It is argued that the Hilferding model, from which Lenin’s ”Imperialism” is derived, has very little or nothing to do with Marx’s economics but much to do with the neoclassical theory of Monopoly and Oligopoly. This theoretical association abolishes labor value theory from the analytical framework and with it any possibility of inherent breakdown (depression) in capitalist accumulation. Consequently political economy was pushed to the background and the confrontations between Lenin and Kautsky and subsequently Trotsky, Bukharin and Stalin were fought around political and geopolitical considerations a factor which played important part in the outcome.

This essay argues that Emil Lederer formulated his research agenda and his main theses in close theoretical contact with the conceptual framework of other schools of thought, as represented by major scholars such as Joseph Schumpeter, Rudolf Hilferding and Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranowsky. The impact of technological progress on the economic system is a central theme in Lederer’s work, whereas its linkage to the market structure and more specifically to the emergence of monopolies is also shared by Hilferding. Moreover, Lederer argued that business cycles constitute an endogenous characteristic of capitalism and should not only be attributed to external shocks which disrupt an otherwise harmonious economic environment. In his major work Technical Progress and Unemployment (1938), Lederer argued that business cycles could arise from the disruptions created by innovations which are introduced discontinuously into the economic system, a thesis that is traditionally known to be of Schumpeterian inspiration. Hilferding and Tugan–Baranowsky delivered theories of economic fluctuations focusing on the role of disproportional growth between production sectors.

We report an investigation of data analysis methods derived from other disciplines, which we applied to physics software systems. They concern the analysis of inequality, trend analysis and the analysis of diversity. The analysis of inequality exploits statistical methods originating from econometrics; trend analysis is typical of economics and environmental sciences; the analysis of diversity is based on concepts derived from ecology and treats software as an ecosystem. To the best of our knowledge, this is an innovative exploration, as we could not find track of previous use of these methods in the experimental physics domains within the scope of the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium. We applied these methods in the context of Geant4 physics validation and Geant4 maintainability assessment.

This paper analyzes the informational efficiency of oil market during the last three decades, and examines changes in informational efficiency with major geopolitical events, such as terrorist attacks, financial crisis and other important events. The series under study is the daily prices of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) in USD/BBL, commonly used as a benchmark in oil pricing. The analysis is performed using information-theory-derived quantifiers, namely permutation entropy and permutation statistical complexity. These metrics allow capturing the hidden structure in the market dynamics, and allow discriminating different degrees of informational efficiency. We find that some geopolitical events impact on the underlying dynamical structure of the market.

El debate en torno a la economía venezolana durante el año 2016 se asemejó a una elección dual como que se le plantea a Neo en Matrix. Llegado el momento el gobierno de Venezuela debió elegir entre pagar su deuda externa en detrimento de una reducción de las importaciones que harían colisionar el consumo interno, o no sacrificar el consumo interno cayendo en un impago de la deuda. ¿Existe acaso una tercera elección? De existir ¿qué tanto dependería de pensar las cosas desde otros fundamentos desplazándonos de la matriz metafísica en la que nos encontramos clausurados?

A enero de 2017 aún no se tiene ninguna cifra concreta de la inflación acaecida en el año 2016, ni siquiera la de los primeros meses. Aunque todas las estimaciones concluyen que el año 2016 fue más negativo que el 2015, aún no se sabe cuánto más decreció la economía. Como boom noticioso se ha propagado una supuesta filtración de cifras preliminares del Banco Central de Venezuela.Reuters comenta que tuvo acceso a documentos donde se cuelan cifras que indican que el PIB cayó en 18,6 %, la inflación fue de 799 % y las importaciones se desplomaron en un 52 %. En la epidermis de tan tremebundo panorama se observa un desastre monetario nunca antes visto, impulsado por una serie de medidas monetarias peculiares. De ello hablaremos de manera sucinta en este escrito.

We present macroeconomic model that describes evolution of macroeconomic variables and macroeconomic waves on economic space. Risk ratings of economic agents play role of their coordinates on economic space. Aggregation of economic variables like Assets and Investment, Credits and Loans of economic agents at point x define corresponding macroeconomic variables as functions of time t and coordinates x on economic space. Evolution of macroeconomic variables is determined by economic and financial transactions between economic agents. Such transactions can occur between economic agents with any coordinates x and y and that reflect non-local “action-at-a-distance” character of internal macroeconomic interactions.