This paper examines the role of import tariffs and consumption taxes when a product is supplied to a domestic market by a foreign monopoly via a subsidiary. It is assumed that there is no competition in the domestic market from internal suppliers. The home country is able to levy a profits tax on the subsidiary; the objective of our analysis is to determine the levels of tariff or consumption tax which maximise national welfare. Comparisons are made under the two alternative policies from the perspectives of national welfare, total national cost and average national cost. The major policy implication of the analysis is that a consumption tax is the more effective instrument for maximising national welfare provided the profits tax is less than a certain critical value; if the profits tax exceeds this value then a tariff, though in the form of a subsidy, is the most effective instrument. Our results complement, correct and extend an earlier analysis by Katrak (1977) [6].

An investigation is made of the transition from periodic solutions through nearly-periodic solutions to chaotic solutions of the differential equation governing forced coplanar motion of a weakly damped pendulum. The pendulum is driven by horizontal, periodic forcing of the pivot with maximum acceleration Є g and dimensionless frequency ω As the forcing frequency ω is decreased gradually at a sufficiently large forcing amplitude Є, it has been shown previously that the pendulum progresses from symmetric oscillations of period T (= 2 π/ω) into a symmetry-breaking, period-doubling sequence of stable, periodic oscillations. There are two related forms of asymmetric, stable oscillations in the sequence, dependent on the initial conditions. When the frequency is decreased immediately beyond the sequence, the oscillations become unstable but remain in the neighbourhood in (θ,) phase space of one or other of the two forms of periodic oscillations, where θ(t) is the pendulum angle with the downward vertical. As the frequency is decreased further, the oscillations move intermittently between the neighbourhoods in (θ,) phase space of each of the two forms of periodic oscillations, in paired nearly-periodic oscillations. Further decrease of the forcing frequency leads to time intervals in which the motion is strongly unstable, with the pendulum passing intermittently over the pivot, interspersed with time intervals when the motion is nearly-periodic and only weakly unstable. The strongly-unstable intervals dominate in fully chaotic oscillations. Windows of independent, stable, periodic oscillations occur throughout the frequency range investigated. It is shown in an appendix how the Floquet method may be interpreted to describe the linear stability of the periodic and nearly-periodic solutions, and the windows of periodic oscillations in the investigated frequency range are listed in a second appendix.

The new motion of embedding a centre manifold in some higher-dimensional manifold leads to a practical approach to the rational low-dimensional approximation of a wide class of dynamical systems; it also provides a simple geometric picture for these approximations. In particular, I consider the problem of finding an approximate, but accurate, description of the evolution of a two-dimensional planform of convection. Inspired by a simple example, the straightforward adiabatic iteration is proposed to estimate an embedding manifold and arguments are presented for its effectiveness. Upon applying the procedure to a model convective planform problem I find that the resulting approximations perform remarkably well–much better than the traditional Swift-Hohenberg approximation for planform evolution.

A collocation method for Symm's integral equation on an interval (a first-kind integral equation with logarithmic kernel), in which the basis functions are Chebyshev polynomials multiplied by an appropriate singular function and the collocation points are Chebyshev points, is analysed. The novel feature lies in the analysis, which introduces Sobolev norms that respect the singularity structure of the exact solution at the ends of the interval. The rate of convergence is shown to be faster than any negative power of n, the degree of the polynomial space, if the driving term is smooth.

Optimal control problems with switching costs arise in a number of applications, and are particularly important when standard control theory gives “chattering controls”. A numerical method is given for finding optimal controls for linear problems (linear dynamics, linear plus switching cost). This is used to develop an algorithm for finding sub-optimal control functions for nonlinear problems with switching costs. Numerical results are presented for an implementation of this method.

Optimality conditions via subdifferentiability and generalised Charnes-Cooper transformation are obtained for a continuous-time nonlinear fractional programming problem. Perturbation functions play a key role in the development. A dual problem is presented and certain duality results are obtained.

Some comparison theorems and oscillation criteria are established for the neutral difference equation

as well as for certain neutral difference equations with coefficients of arbitrary sign. Neutral difference equations with mixed arguments are also considered.