DEVELOPMENT THROUGH INFRASTRUCTURAL CONNECTIVITY: CHINA’S BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE AND POLICY OPTIONS FOR THE STATES INVOLVED

Belt and Road initiative (BRI) is the revival of the ancient Silk Road. From the historical analysis of the ancient Silk Road, it could be easily understood that nations around the Silk Road have cultural assimilation fostering mutual cohesion. In this context, BRI was proposed by the Xi Jinping administration, which provides a ground for a very old idea of bringing Eurasians under the development phenomenon for achieving common economic growth goals. Indeed, BRI is not only initiated to promote trade, but it will also increase multidimensional cooperation among nations, such as a cultural and educational exchange. It will bring closer not only the regional countries but even the continents to each other. Moreover, BRI will bring new enthusiasm to the old idea, and provides grounds for development and achieving common goals between the states. BRI is deemed to be a game changer for the states involved and China itself.

Estimation of Covariance Matrix and Inference About Regression Coefficients and Autocorrelation in Heteroskedastic Regression Models

Beta Exponentiated Weibull distribution (BEWD) is an extension of the exponentiated Weibull distribution which involves two additional shape parameters. Interestingly, the additional parameters control the tails weights of the distribution and affect skewness and kurtosis of the distribution. The five-parameter BEWD is a generalized distribution in modelling lifetimes of various industrial products. Its density and hazard curves are widely heterogeneous in their shapes. Three subfamilies of the BEWD family emerge under three parameter subspaces with the property that the members of each subfamily display similar density curves. It is found that some members of the BEWD family in one of the parameter subspaces approximately behave like a normal distribution. BEWD assumes decreasing, increasing or a bathtub behaviour. Using a sample hazard curve, and so a prior understanding of restrictions on the BEWD parameters we find estimates of parameters for fitting BEWD. These estimates based on maximum likelihood are essentially more efficient than when no such knowledge about the sample hazard curve is used. Characterizations based on truncated moments and hazard rate function are obtained. Simulation study of BEWD is performed in both ways; without the knowledge of parametric conditions and using parametric constraints and compare the results. Real data applications of the proposed approach support the better fitting of BEWD than other models. A generalization of BEWD is introduced in which a transmuted parameter is added and its behaviour is studied, named as Transmuted Beta Exponentiated Weibull Distribution (TBEWD). Different mathematical properties including moments, characteristic function, skewness, kurtosis and mode are being discussed. The transmuted parameter affects the basic characteristics, shape of density function and other properties of BEWD. Characterizations of TBEWD based on truncated moments and hazard rate function are also derived. The maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to estimate the model parameters. Simulation Study is performed to test the efficiency of MLEs. Various aspects of this distribution are explored in the context of its applications, which include its subfamilies displaying reasonable similarity with regard to their hazard curves. The parametric restrictions so discovered are found useful in fitting this distribution. A number of applications of TBEWD model are also given.