Cold War “peace that is no peace”

A cold war is a state of conflict between nations that does not involve direct military action but is pursued primarily througheconomic and political actions, propaganda, acts of espionage or proxy wars waged by surrogates. The surrogates are typically states that are "satellites" of the conflicting nations, i.e., nations allied to them or under their political influence. Opponents in a cold war will often provide economic or military aid, such as weapons, tactical support or military advisors, to lesser nations involved in conflicts with the opposing country.

The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, although there were major regional wars, known as proxy wars, supported by the two sides. The Cold War split the temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the Soviet Union and the United States as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences.

"Cold War" was popularized to refer to post-war tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict has been a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and journalists. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet–US relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides.

Although explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism", and "post-revisionism".

"Orthodox" accounts place responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion further into Europe. "Revisionist" writers place more responsibility for the breakdown of post-war peace on the United States, citing a range of US efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. "Post-revisionists" see the events of the Cold War as more nuanced, and attempt to be more balanced in determining what occurred during the Cold War.

The definition which has now become fixed is of a war waged through indirect conflict. The first use of the term in this sense, to describe the post–World War II geopolitical tensions between the USSR and its satellites and the United States and its western European allies.

The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, although there were major regional wars, known as proxy wars, supported by the two sides. The Cold War split the temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the Soviet Union and the United States as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. The USSR was a Marxist–Leninist state ruled by its Communist Party and secret police, who in turn were ruled by a dictator (Stalin) or a small committee ("Politburo"). The Party controlled the press, the military, the economy and all organizations. It also controlled the other states in the Eastern bloc, and funded Communist parties around the world.

The two superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat, but they were heavily armed in preparation for a possible all-out nuclear world war. Each side had a nuclear deterrent that deterred an attack by the other side, on the basis that such an attack would lead to total destruction of the attacker. And deployment of conventional military forces, the struggle for dominance was expressed via proxy wars around the globe, psychological warfare, massive propaganda campaigns and espionage, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions.

The first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The USSR consolidated its control over the states of the Eastern Bloc, while the United States began a strategy of global containment to challenge Soviet power, extending military and financial aid to the countries of Western Europe (for example, supporting the anti-communist side in the Greek Civil War) and creating the NATO alliance. The Berlin Blockade (1948–49) was the first major crisis of the Cold War, with the victory of the communist side.

The United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressureson the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", c. 1985).

Perestroika refers to the reconstruction of the political and economic system established by the Communist Party. Politically, contested elections were introduced to reflect the democratic practices of Western society and allow citizens to have a slight say in government. Economically, Perestroika called for de-monopolization and some semi-private businesses to function, ending the price controls established by the government for the past seven decades. The goal was to create a semi-free market system, reflecting successful capitalist practices in the economies of Germany, Japan, and the United States.

The term “Glasnost” means “openness” and was the name for the social and political reforms to bestow more rights and freedoms upon the Soviet people. Its goals were to include more people in the political process through freedom of expression. This led to a decreased censoring of the media, which in effect allowed writers and journalists to expose news of government corruption and the depressed condition of the Soviet people.

In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform, the purpose of which was to enforce orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet satellites through coordination of communist parties in the Eastern Bloc.
The American government's response to this announcement was the adoption of containment, the goal of which was to stop the spread of communism. Truman delivered a speech that called for the allocation of $400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine, which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes. Even though the insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, US policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to expand Soviet influence.
US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus ultimately persisted European and American communists, paid by the KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line.

Western European governments and the United States announced an agreement for a merger of western German areas into a federal governmental system. In addition, in accordance with the Marshall Plan, they began to re-industrialize and rebuild the German economy, including the introduction of a new Deutsche Mark currency to replace the oldReichsmark currency that the Soviets had debased.

Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948 – 12 May 1949), one of the first major crises of the Cold War, preventing food, materials and supplies from arriving in West Berlin. The United States, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several other countries began the massive "Berlin airlift", supplying West Berlin with food and other provisions.

The Berlin Crisis of 1961 was the last major incident in the Cold War regarding the status of Berlin and post–World War II Germany. By the early 1950s, the Soviet approach to restricting emigration movement was emulated by most of the rest of theEastern Bloc. However, hundreds of thousands of East Germans annually emigrated to West Germany through a "loophole" in the system that existed between East and West Berlin, where the four occupying World War II powers governed movement.

The emigration resulted in a massive "brain drain" from East Germany to West Germany of younger educated professionals, such that nearly 20% of East Germany's population had migrated to West Germany by 1961. That June, the Soviet Union issued a new ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of Allied forces from West Berlin. The request was rebuffed, and on 13 August, East Germany erected a barbed-wire barrier that would eventually be expanded through construction into the Berlin Wall, effectively closing the loophole.

1980s Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as 25 percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors. Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments both caused and exacerbated deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which saw at least a decade of economic stagnation during the late Brezhnev years.

Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges. The Soviet Armed Forces became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their military–industrial base. However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern Bloc dramatically lagged behind the West.

Epilepsy and Autism

Epilepsy is a group of neurological diseases characterized by epileptic seizures. Epileptic seizures are episodes that can vary from brief and nearly undetectable to long periods of vigorous shaking. These episodes can result in physical injuries including occasionally broken bones. In epilepsy, seizures tend to recur, and have no immediate underlying cause. Isolated seizures that are provoked by a specific cause such as poisoning are not deemed to represent epilepsy. People with epilepsy in some areas of the world experience stigma due to the condition.

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD), including Asperger syndrome, are developmental disorders that begin in early childhood, persist throughout adulthood, and affect three crucial areas of development: communication, social interaction and restricted patterns of behavior. There are many conditions comorbid to autism spectrum disorders such as fragile X syndrome and epilepsy.

The cause of most cases of epilepsy is unknown, although some people develop epilepsy as the result of brain injury,stroke, brain tumors, infections of the brain, and birth defects. Known genetic mutations are directly linked to a small proportion of cases. Epileptic seizures are the result of excessive and abnormal nerve cell activity in the cortex of the brain. The diagnosis involves ruling out other conditions that might cause similar symptoms such as fainting and determining if another cause of seizures is present such as alcohol withdrawal or electrolyte problems. This may be partly done by imaging the brain and performing blood tests. Epilepsy can often be confirmed with an electroencephalogram(EEG), but a normal test does not rule out the condition.

Epilepsy that occurs as a result of other issues can be prevented. Seizures are controllable with medication in about 70% of cases. Inexpensive options are often available. In those whose seizures do not respond to medication, then surgery,neurostimulation, or dietary changes may be considered. Not all cases of epilepsy are lifelong, and many people improve to the point that treatment is no longer needed.

In medicine and in psychiatry, comorbidity is the presence of one or more additional conditions co-occurring with the primary one, or the effect of such additional disorders. About 10–15% of autism cases have an identifiable Mendelian (single-gene) condition, chromosome abnormality, or other genetic syndrome, and ASD is associated with several genetic disorders, perhaps due to an overlap in genetic causes.

Distinguishing between ASDs and other diagnoses can be challenging because the traits of ASDs often overlap with symptoms of other disorders and the characteristics of ASDs make traditional diagnostic procedures difficult.

Comorbid conditions

• Anxiety
• Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
• Bipolar disorder
• Bowel disease
• Developmental coordination disorder
• Epilepsy
• Fragile X syndrome
• Gender dysphoria
• Intellectual disability
• Neuroinflammation and immune disorders
• Nonverbal learning disorder
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Tourette syndrome
• Sensory problems
• Tuberous sclerosis
• Sleep disorders

+Corruption in a Process Duration [Invisible from Raw & Unrefined to Finished]

The production process was really interesting and had a lot of complexity to it.

Scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling and optimizing work and workloads in a production process. Companies use backward and forward scheduling to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes and purchase materials.

Production scheduling tools greatly outperform older manual scheduling methods. These provide the production scheduler with powerful graphical interfaces which can be used to visually optimize real-time work loads in various stages of production.

We investigate the determinants of the efficiency of firms with a focus on the role of corruption. We construct a simple theoretical model where corruption increases factor requirements of firms because it diverts managerial effort away from factor coordination. We then exploit a unique dataset comprising firm-level information on 80 electricity distribution firms from 13 Latin American countries for the years 1994 to 2001. 

As predicted by the model, we find that more corruption in the country is strongly associated with more inefficient firms, in the sense that they employ more inputs to produce a given level of output. The economic magnitude of the effects is large. The results hold both in models with country and firm fixed effects. The results survive several robustness checks, including different measures of output and efficiency, and instrumenting for corruption. 

Other elements associated with inefficiency are public ownership, inflation, and lack of law and order, but corruption appears to play a separate and more robust role. 

We investigate the connection between corruption and the efficiency of electricity distribution firms in Latin America. We take advantage of a unique dataset comprising a panel of 80 electricity distribution firms from 13 Latin American countries for the years 1994 to 2001. Our data on corruption were provided by International Country Risk Guide and Transparency International.

Thus, corruption diverts managerial effort away from the productive process, and the way for firms to meet their service obligations is to use more inputs.3 Thus, the model predicts that more corrupt countries will have less efficient firms. The model is agnostic regarding the impact of corruption on profits, and it is compatible with stories of regulatory extortion against firms, regulatory capture, and internal corruption in firms. We then take the model to the data, and find that more corruption in a country is strongly associated with inefficiency, in the sense that firms employ more inputs to produce a given level of output.

Our main focus is on labor efficiency, so our default empirical strategy is to estimate a parametric labor requirement function to analyze the various determinants of labor use. Our result that corruption raises labor requirements holds under a variety of controls beyond basic firm features such as the size of output and capital inputs. Such controls include firm ownership type and the level of development in the country (as approximated by GNP per capita).

The characteristics of the industry and the countries in our sample favor comparability. Electricity distribution involves a mature technology that does not differ significantly across countries. Moreover, all the firms in our sample are from Latin American countries having the same colonial origins, relatively similar regulatory regimes, the same legal origins, and quite homogeneous cultural features. Nevertheless, our econometric specification includes controls varying by country and time such as the prevalence of law and order and indicators of macroeconomic instability. These controls help to disentangle the effects that corruption may have from those of other forces that may also affect efficiency. 

Corruption remains significant after including all of these controls. Inflation, inflation variation, and deficiencies in law and order appear themselves to be associated with greater inefficiency, especially in the firm fixed effects specification. This is interesting because it suggests that corruption plays a separate role that is distinct from the impact of a highly unstable or insecure environment. Of all the factors varying by country and time that we analyze, corruption is the only one that is both invariably significant across specifications and economically important. To check our focus on labor efficiency, we also estimate a model where we measure efficiency in terms of operation and maintenance expenditures, rather than in terms of labor. The significant negative association between corruption and efficiency persists. We also address several potentially serious problems for our estimation, such as the possibility of survey selection bias or results being driven by heterogeneity in degrees of vertical integration. We find no evidence that any of these elements drives results. A crucial aspect in the measurement of efficiency in energy distribution is the measurement of output. Our default measure of output is energy sales (in gigawatts hour—GWh). If energy theft is higher in more corrupt countries, the use of energy sales to measure output would make firms in more corrupt countries appear less efficient than they are. We provide a different treatment using sales plus losses as the output variable (which includes stolen energy) and find again that corruption is significantly associated with inefficiency.

In the case of private firms, they are regulated by an agency that is typically specific to the industry (electricity) or the sector (energy). In the case of publicly owned firms, they are under the oversight of a ministry-type governmental agency. The firms in our sample have the obligation to provide the service of electricity distribution to a given number of customers in a given geographical area. For modeling purposes, we will assume that firms are requested to produce an output of fixed size Q , which here is assumed to be a positive real number. The provision of this service requires the use of labor, capital, and managerial effort in the form of coordination and supervision of the use of labor and capital. Managers are able to improve the technology of the firm by exerting effort, in the sense that they can increase the rate at which capital and labor are transformed into output. Capital inputs are tightly dependent upon the extent of service, and treated in the literature on electricity distribution as exogenous in the short run (see Neuberg, 1977; and Kumbakhar and Hjalmarsson, 1998). For example, the firm’s transformation capacity and the extension of its network are tightly related to the number and type of customers to be served and the area over which they are scattered. Thus, variations in efficiency are largely connected with the use of labor. Unless stated otherwise, we say a firm is inefficient when it is not minimizing labor use given its output and capital stock. Given the exogeneity of capital, to save on notation we will consider the following production function,

Q = A(es)f(l)

where es—the managerial effort devoted to supervision and coordination—has the effect of raising total productivity A(.). The amount of labor used is denoted by l. We assume   s Aes > 0, Aeses < 0,  fl > 0, , , and fll < 0 (subscripts next to functions indicate arguments of differentiation throughout). The rationale for this formulation is that, given the number of workers, managers that tightly coordinate and supervise workers will elicit better performance and more output. Another view is that more workers might be required to make up for less attentive supervision. For example, a manager that devotes all his time to overseeing employees can receive information on the state of different transformers and connections from many inspectors scattered on the field. He can then direct a single repair team to each location that comes to need attention. A manager that is not available to receive information and give orders may have to rely on associating repairmen to each one of the inspectors, so that they can execute repairs if needed (thus raising the number of employed repairmen). With variations, this basic story can be told to capture what happens at different levels of the hierarchy in an electric utility. 

It is important to note that, given the contractual obligation to provide Q units of output, the use of l units of labor will imply that managers must provide exactly 

units of supervision effort. This is an important part of our model: a feature specific to the industry analyzed (an exogenous service obligation) determines the relationship between supervision and labor use. Another important part of the model is managerial payoffs. We assume that managers care about their total material rewards y and about the total effort e they exert:

 y−ψ (e),

where the cost of effort ψ (.) is increasing and convex. As will be explained shortly, the total effort e is the sum of effort deployed in various activities. The total rewards y to those running the firm stem from various sources. Managers are typically not the owners of the firm, but they can be expected to care about profits if higher profits trigger higher compensation and perks. Often managers may also pursue objectives that do not generate profit, like rendering services to a political party. In the discussion at the end of the section, we explain how such objectives can be incorporated in the model. For expositional reasons, here we adopt the simplest model possible that captures the effect of interest. So for now, we assume that managers have a stake in profits. Even in public firms where managerial incentives may be less high-powered—and conditional on the pursuit of other objectives—higher profits are likely to benefit managers, if only because higher profits allow more latitude in pursuing other goals. Given this, and to maximize simplicity, we will now abstract from the difference between managers and owners, and suppose that managers care directly about profits (in the discussion at the end of the section we explain how to reintroduce the distinction between owners and managers in the model). Thus, we will write y = π . Profits, in turn, are given by, 

where w are wages paid to workers, and p(.) is the price of a unit of service. This formulation captures the fact that the price charged by the firm may depend on its efforts ep at negotiating with the government and on the degree of corruption in the country. In non-corrupt countries prices are seen as being close to what industry jargon calls the “technical price”, and efforts devoted to moving the price away from the technical benchmark are largely irrelevant. When regulators can be captured instead (or they can blackmail firms), such negotiation efforts are likely to matter. Similarly, p(.) can be seen as a price net of certain costs over which procurement managers of the firm have power. When procurement managers can collude with providers and overcharge the firm, top managers of the firm may want to devote more effort at curbing overcharging and improving the net price for the firm. Thus, our model is compatible with at least two ways in which corruption can damage the efficiency of firms. One concerns external corruption—or the possibility that public officials are corrupt. The other concerns internal corruption—as when procurement by the firm is subject to abuse.

Our key assumption is,

: Higher corruption in the country increases the marginal return to effort in activities go other way from factor coordination 

This assumption captures the central element of our theory of diversion of managerial effort: in more corrupt countries, tasks that do not help the productive process are more rewarding at the margin.9 Note that corruption, however, need not lower nor raise profits (or other sources of managerial payoffs) for a given level of effort. When corruption takes the form of regulatory extortion or internal procurement abuse, profits will tend to suffer unless managers devote significant efforts to courting regulators or monitoring procurement officers. In other circumstances, such as those associated with active rent-seeking, corruption may mean that the regulator can be captured easily. In this case, for any level of effort, the firm’s profits are likely to be higher than otherwise. We remain agnostic regarding the effects of corruption on the level of profits. To abstract from these differences, we assume that, around equilibrium, 

Corruption investigators should be familiar, followed by their application to the proof of Corrupt  Practices.

Direct evidence, as the name implies, is evidence that tends to prove a fact directly – for example, a statement from an eyewitness or the cancelled check used for a bribe payment or a confession by the subject. Direct evidence is usually considered to be the strongest method of proof.

Circumstantial proof of “knowledge and intent”

Proof of knowledge and intent – proof, for example, that the subject knew that a document was forged and submitted it with the intent to defraud another party.