The objective of this study was to evaluate the growth of four lettuce cultivars in Southern Piauí to recommend the best ones for the region. The experiment was conducted in a greenhouse with randomized blocks, with evaluation in subdivided time plots, evaluated in six seasons (20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40 days after sowing—DAS) and with treatments corresponding to four cultivars (Americana Rafaela^®, Grand Rapids TBR^®, Crespa Repolhuda^® and Repolhuda Todo ano^®) with five repetitions. Leaf area, number of leaves, collar diameter, aboveground fresh mass, aboveground dry mass, root dry mass and total and the physiological indices of growth analysis were evaluated. The lettuce cultivars interfered significantly in the studied parameters, being that Americana Rafaela^® and Repolhuda todo ano^®, in the conditions that they were submitted, presented better performances and bigger morphophysiological indexes, cultivated in pot. The cultivars Americana Rafaela^® and Repolhuda todo ano^® can be produced under the conditions of the south of Piauí.

To analyze the effect of an increase in the quantity or quality of public investment on growth, this paper extends the World Bank’s Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM), by separating the total capital stock into public and private portions, with the former adjusted for its quality. The paper presents the LTGM public capital extension and accompanying freely downloadable Excel-based tool. It also constructs a new infrastructure efficiency index, by combining quality indicators for power, roads, and water as a cardinal measure of the quality of public capital in each country. In the model, public investment generates a larger boost to growth if existing stocks of public capital are low, or if public capital is particularly important in the production function. Through the lens of the model and utilizing newly-collated cross-country data, the paper presents three stylized facts and some related policy implications. First, the measured public capital stock is roughly constant as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) across income groups, which implies that the returns to new public investment, and its effect on growth, are roughly constant across development levels. Second, developing countries are relatively short of private capital, which means that private investment provides the largest boost to growth in low-income countries. Third, low-income countries have the lowest quality of public capital and the lowest efficient public capital stock as a share of GDP. Although this does not affect the returns to public investment, it means that improving the efficiency of public investment has a sizable effect on growth in low-income countries. Quantitatively, a permanent 1 ppt GDP increase in public investment boosts growth by around 0.1–0.2 ppts over the following few years (depending on the parameters), with the effect declining over time.

Japan’s investment in the domestic construction industry has fallen to less than half its peak in 1992. Given the country’s declining population, Japanese construction companies must go global to remain profitable. To what extent the Japanese government and Japanese companies can contribute to meeting the growing infrastructure needs in the region is unclear as Japanese companies have long been operating primarily in Japan. The Japanese government has in recent years passed a series of new laws that encourage private sector participation in financing, building and operating public infrastructure. Through involvement in such public projects, Japanese companies have developed the skills and technologies to build a variety of infrastructures that are resilient to natural disasters and adaptable to various geographical conditions and social and economic development. But the major challenge for Japanese companies is to transform their business model drastically from one that relies on the domestic market to one that contributes to the social and economic development of third countries.

We investigate the impact on intertemporal distribution caused by a change of policy from tax to deficit financing of public investment, using a simple theoretical framework which combines the one-period McGuire-Olson economy with the conventional long-run Solow economy. This theoretical framework provides a simple way to highlight some significant interdependencies between private and public investments as well as the negative impact of taxation on aggregate productivity, and to trace some possible transmission mechanisms between deficit financing policies and the long-run path of consumption per head. The main tentative (theoretical) result is that although under fairly acceptable assumptions the likely impact of a deficit financing policy is to benefit the present at the expense of the future, under equally acceptable assumptions concerning the possibility of an excessive macro private saving–investment propensity, and/or of a significant productivity loss due to the excess burden of taxation, the adverse intertemporal distributional impact of deficit financing might become negligible, or even disappear altogether.

The present article reports the applications of Caputo-Fabrizio time-fractional derivatives. This article generalizes the idea of unsteady MHD free convective flow in a Walters.-B fluid with heat and mass transfer study over an exponential isothermal vertical plate embedded in a porous medium. The governing equations are converted into dimensionless form and extended to fractional model. The generalized Walters-B fluid model has been solved analytically using the Laplace transform technique. From the general solutions we reduce limiting solutions when to the similar motion for Newtonian fluid. The corresponding expressions for and Nusselt and Sherwood numbers are also assessed. Numerical results for velocity, temperature and concentration are demonstrated graphically for various factors of interest and discussed. As a result, we have plotted the influence of fractional parameter on fluid flow and drawn comparison between fractional Walters’-B and fractional Newtonian fluid and found that fractional Newtonian fluid is faster than fractional Walters’-B fluids.

Nothofagus pumilio forests constitute the most economically important forest stand in southern Argentina and Chile. Total volume stocking and volumetric yield vary according to site quality, degree of occupation, growth stage and forest history of the stand. The objective of this work was to evaluate the stocking and the productive potential in quantity and quality of products for the sawmilling industry, using three harvesting systems (short logs, long logs and complete shafts) in the protection cut of a N. pumilio forest of site quality III in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina). The trials were conducted in an irregular mature forest with two strata and abundant regeneration (3.0 ha; RDI 93.8–113.4%). Total volumes varied between 726.5 and 850.3 m³∙ha^-1, with a volume/basal area ratio of 11.8 to 12.1 m³∙m^-2. The harvesting rates obtained were: 45.5% for complete logs, 21.3% for long logs and 22.4% for short logs. A model was used to estimate the timber volume for each system, where full shafts resulted in a significant increase in timber volume. Considering new alternatives in the planning of harvesting in forest management for N. pumilio forests, such as the system of complete shafts, allows obtaining higher harvesting rates, increasing the benefits for the forestry company and minimizing the damage to the forest, due to the shorter distance of the machinery in the forest harvesting.