Determination of exchange rates has been of great concern for policy makers in today’s liberalized and integrated world economies. Examining the course of exchange rates would help researchers conduct empirical investigations for testing the coherence of international macroeconomic theories such as purchasing power parity (PPP) and uncovered interest parity (UIP) as well as theories explaining the determination of exchange rates assuming open economy conditions. Such researches would reveal the extent to which discretionary economic policies can succeed in attaining the ex-ante policy targets and provide knowledge of forecasting performances of different modeling approaches following the developments in estimation techniques as for the future courses of economic variables. Especially, for a small and open developing country such as Turkey policy design process by the policy makers should be inclusive of the stylized facts based on these researches. Kesriyeli (1994), Metin (1994), Telatar and Kazdagli (1998), Bahmani-Oskooee and Kara (2000), Gokcan and Ozmen (2001), Dulger and Cin (2002), Civcir (2003a), Civcir (2003b), Civcir (2003c), Yazgan (2003), Erlat (2003), Ozdemir (2004) and a recent paper by Saatcioglu et al. (2007) give some empirical findings upon these issues of interest for the Turkish economy.
Of all these contemporaneous theoretical developments, a vast literature has been attributed to modeling the behavior of exchange rates so as to see whether monetary fundamentals are able to explain long-run course and short-run dynamics of exchange rates. What is of considerable interest in the economics literature is also to examine how well the out-of-sample forecasts fit to the actual data when assessing various estimation methods for forecasting purposes. Following the seminal paper by Meese and Rogoff (1983) indicating that fundamental based structural models of exchange rate do not beat the performance of the naïve random walk models in out-of-sample forecasts, there has been an extensive controversy upon these issues of interest. Researchers tend to explore whether the models based on structural relations or driven by naïve-random walks or considering more recent multivariate co-integration techniques, both assuming non-stationarity of data in the level form and preserving long-run knowledge of economic relations, must be of special interest and to the extent that they produce more accurate estimates models have been accepted to be superior when compared with the others.
Was it not the great philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz who said that the more knowledge advances the more it becomes possible to condense it into little books? Now this "Outline of Science" is certainly not a little book, and yet it illustrates part of the meaning of Leibnitz's wise saying. For here within reasonable compass there is a library of little books—an outline of many sciences.
The epidemic of obesity is no longer restricted to affluent western nations. Indeed, data from every region of the world clearly indicates that we are in the midst of a global obesity epidemic. The World Health Organization has estimated that over one billion adults worldwide are overweight, of which at least 300 million are obese. Current prevalence statistics are alarming and appear to be worsening in virtually every nation.
In the US, age-adjusted obesity prevalence among adults increased from 14.5% in 1971-74 to 22.9% in 1988-94 to 30.5% in 1999-2000. This trend stems from an increase in body mass index (BMI) in all age-gender-race groups. Similar trends are evident in other industrialized countries, where prevalence estimates currently range between 14 and 20%. For example, in the majority of European countries, obesity prevalence has increased by 10-40% in the past 10 years.
