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This chapter examines exchange rate options for East Asian countries, taking into account their real economic linkages as well as their international financial relations. Particular consideration is given to possible exchange rate cooperation within the region. For this purpose, the literature on the optimal peg is reconsidered and subsequently extended to include a country's international financial asset and liability situation. That is, instead of focusing solely on nominal or real effective exchange rates, the chapter proposes a blend of “real” and “financial” exchange rates for analyzing “optimal” exchange rate policy.

The Haitian gourde is one of the most curious and exotic currencies of the world. On it is printed the striking statement: “The banknote, in conformity with the Constitution of the . Republic of Haiti, is payable to the bearer in legal money of the United States of America at the rate of five gourdes for one dollar.” Amazingly, the gourde stands exactly where it was set by the Convention of April 12, 1919 at five gourdes per dollar. This fixity in the exchange rate is a remarkable achievement of an otherwise totally squalid economy record, which has been made very much due to the total convertibility of gourdes into dollars and their easy co‐existence and use in Haiti. Such a feat runs counter to early suggestions in the newly developing currency substitution literature that currency competition promotes instability in rates. A very different story emerges due west on the largest English‐speaking island in the Caribbean, Jamaica, where monetary turbulence has been the rule since 1978. The currency there was initially backed 50 percent by pounds sterling when the Bank of Jamaica began operation in May 1961, but switched to a dollar peg in January 1973 at $1,10 US, a rate maintained through 1977. After the economic problems of 1976–77, the Jamaican dollar was devalued 15½ percent in January 1978 and, under the strong advice of the International Monetary Fund, a further 32 percent in May 1978. Following was a “crawling peg” devaluation of 1½ percent per month until October 1978, then 1 percent a month until May 1979, when the current dollar peg of 56.13 cents per Jamaican dollar was established. This dramatic decline in the currency was caused in part by expansionary monetary policies of the Bank of Jamaica monetizing budget deficits, and in part by the decline in tourism, the fall in bauxite and steel output, and the oil shocks Jamaica experienced. (From 1974 to 1979, the government budget deficit went from 168 million Jamaican dollars (J$) to 551 mill J$ with a peak of 625 million in 1978, holdings of government debt by the central bank from 72 to 898 mill J$, and net foreign assets or reserves of the central bank plunged from 141 to minus 778 mill J$ (Source: International Financial Statistics, IMF 1980 Yearbook and IFS January 1981 issue).) The International Monetary Fund set specific performance criteria such as devaluation and ceilings on government budget deficits for successive draws on a substantial loan of 351 million U.S. dollars or 360 percent of Jamaica's quota at the end of 1979.

This study aims to analyze exchange rate risks and the choice of exchange rate policies in a small open economy indebted in foreign currency, incorporating the financial accelerator mechanism.

To examine discussions on the fear of floating, this study develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which a small open economy model has an open economy financial accelerator mechanism as the external borrowing restriction. The author then compares and analyzes the macroeconomic dynamics in response to an exchange rate shock under different exchange rate systems.

The most interesting finding is that the currency peg for a foreign currency used in borrowing is more efficient than the trade-weighted currency basket policy, regardless of trade openness or trade share.

The result implies that in discussions on the fear of floating, more attention needs to be paid to exchange rate risks in finance. It also suggests that exchange rate policy used to mitigate exchange rate risks in finance stabilizes macroeconomic volatility more efficiently.

The paper provides an answer to the question: which is the more serious problem in the fear of floating and to what would the regime be anchored.

Asia's economic integration into the global system has many dimensions. It is part of the broader globalization process that has taken place over the past two decades and involves dynamics of convergence, integration, and interactions of both real and financial activities. Section 1 examines some of the recent trends in the real and financial interactions between Asia and the rest of the world and among different markets within Asia. It contains four chapters on this theme, addressing the issues of macroeconomic similarities and differences, interactions among Asian stock markets and between them and the US equity market, as well as spillovers across various types of financial markets in the region in response to shocks.

Although China has claimed since 2005 that it will move towards a more market-oriented system of managing its foreign exchange, it has remained, in part, a managed economic system. This chapter examines the relative importance of fundamentalist, chartist and currency arrangements in determining the RMB exchange regime using both traditional linear and non-linear artificial intelligence models. We find that the emphasis on the US dollar as a reference currency has declined. Fundamentalist forces are becoming strong determinants of the currency exchange. The genetic programming approach is among the best performing in minimizing forecasting error.

The performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications is bounded by the limited resources of battery-enabled Sensor Nodes (SNs), which include energy and computational power; the combination of which existing research seldom focuses on. Although bio-inspired algorithms provide a way to control energy usage by finding optimal routing paths, those which converge slower require even more computational power, which altogether degrades the overall lifetime of SNs.

Hence, two novel routing protocols are proposed using the Red-Deer Algorithm (RDA) in a WSN scenario, namely Horizontal PEG-RDA Equal Clustering and Horizontal PEG-RDA Unequal Clustering, to address the limited computational power of SNs. Clustering, data aggregation and multi-hop transmission are also integrated to improve energy usage. Unequal clustering is applied in the second protocol to mitigate the hotspot problem in Horizontal PEG-RDA Equal Clustering.

Comparisons with the well-founded Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithm reveal that RDA converges faster by 85 and 80% on average when the network size and node density are varied, respectively. Furthermore, 33% fewer packets are lost using the unequal clustering approach which also makes the network resilient to node failures. Improvements in terms of residual energy and overall network lifetime are also observed.

Proposal of a bio-inspired algorithm, namely the RDA to find optimal routing paths in WSN and to enhance convergence rate and execution time against the well-established ACO algorithm. Creation of a novel chain cluster-based routing protocol using RDA, named Horizontal PEG-RDA Equal Clustering. Design of an unequal clustering equivalent of the proposed Horizontal PEG-RDA Equal Clustering protocol to tackle the hotspot problem, which enhances residual energy and overall network lifetime, as well as minimises packet loss.

This paper aims to present an optimization algorithm combined with the impedance control strategy to optimize the robotic dual peg-in-hole assembly task, and to reduce the assembly time and smooth the contact forces during assembly process with a small number of experiments.

Support vector regression is used to predict the fitness of genes in evolutionary algorithm, which can reduce the number of real-world experiments. The control parameters of the impedance control strategy are defined as genes, and the assembly time is defined as the fitness of genes to evaluate the performance of the selected parameters.

The learning-based evolutionary algorithm is proposed to optimize the dual peg-in-hole assembly process only requiring little prior knowledge instead of modeling for the complex contact states. A virtual simulation and real-world experiments are implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

The proposed algorithm is quite useful for the real-world industrial applications, especially the scenarios only allowing a small number of trials.

The paper provides a new solution for applying optimization techniques in real-world tasks. The learning component can solve the data efficiency of the model-free optimization algorithms.

This study aims to synthesize polyethylene glycol (PEG)-rosin derivatives from rosin and PEG for the production of solid soldering fluxes. The PEG-rosin derivatives would be water soluble, and the resulting solid soldering fluxes would have reasonable wetting ability when combined with a low-halide-content activator.

This paper presents a synthetic process for PEG-rosin derivatives. The reaction conditions (including catalyst type, catalyst concentration, reaction temperature and PEG type) were optimized for the synthesis of PEG-rosin derivatives. The chemical and physical properties of PEG-rosin derivatives were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry, differential scanning calorimetry and gel permeation chromatography. The production and characteristics of water-soluble rosin fluxes (WSRFs) were studied according to the standards of the Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) Committees.

WSRs were successfully synthesized from rosin and PEG using 2 per cent ZnO as a catalyst, with a 2:1 molar ratio of rosin:PEG at 250°C over 9 h. The resulting WSRs were completely soluble in water. As the PEG3000-rosin had the highest melting point (55.2°C), it was chosen for the preparation of the WSRFs. Activators such as succinic acid, glutaric acid, ethylamine hydrochloride and diethylamine hydrobromide were selected for use in the production of the fluxes. It was found that WSRF 09 and WSRF 04 gave the best performance with the lead-free Sn-0.7Cu solder alloy in terms of good solderability, low halide content (less than 1,500 ppm), high insulation resistance and low corrosion. These fluxes were applied to produce solder pastes with Sn-3.0Ag-0.5Cu alloy and they passed the performance tests as expected for solder paste.

Further studies are necessary on large-scale production and to compare the performance of these fluxes to those from conventional water-soluble fluxes currently available in the market. Application of these fluxes on low-temperature solder alloys such as SnZn and SnBi (Ren et al., 2016) worth further study.

The classification of flux systems according to the JIS 3283 standard does not specify PEG-rosin derivatives in the flux; nevertheless, ranking of the flux systems based on the halide content and corrosion properties of activators would be useful information when selecting flux systems for electronics soldering in water-washable applications. The application of these fluxes in solder paste gave very promising results and is worth investigating into more detail, as well as field test.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct the synthesization of LiFePO₄-C (LFP-C) with fine particle size and enhanced electrochemical performance as the positive electrode material for Li-ion capacitors (LICs) with neutral aqueous electrolyte.

LFP-C was prepared by using polyethylene glycol (PEG) as a grain growth inhibitor, and the effects of the calcination temperature and PEG content on the structure and morphology of LFP-C were investigated. LICs using environment-friendly, safe and low-cost LiNO₃ aqueous electrolyte were assembled with LFP-C as the positive electrode and active carbon as the negative electrode. The electrochemical performances of LFP-C and LICs were studied.

The results show that the particle size of LFP-C decreases significantly through the introduction of PEG. Cyclic voltammetry results show that the LFP-C prepared at 550°C with 1.0 g PEG exhibits the highest C_pe of 725 F/g at the scanning rate of 5 mA/s. Compared to LFP prepared without PEG, the electrochemical performance of optimized LFP-C dramatically increases due to the decrease of the particle size. Moreover, the LIC assembled with the optimized LFP-C exhibits excellent electrochemical performances. The LIC maintains about 91.3 per cent of its initial C_ps after 200 cycles which shows a good cycling performance.

The LFP-C is the suitable positive electrode material for LICs with neutral aqueous electrolyte. LICs can be used in the field of automobiles and can solve the problems of energy shortage and environmental pollution.

Both the LFP-C with fine particle size and its optimal LIC using environment-friendly, safe and low-cost LiNO₃ aqueous electrolyte own good electrochemical performances.