The Asian Logic Conference (ALC) is a major international event in mathematical logic. It features the latest scientific developments in the fields of mathematical logic and its applications, logic in computer science, and philosophical logic. The ALC series also aims to promote mathematical logic in the Asia-Pacific region and to bring logicians together both from within Asia and elsewhere for an exchange of information and ideas. This combined proceedings volume represents works presented or arising from the 14th and 15th ALCs.

This year marks a milestone in the history of FST&TCS, which ?rst took place in 1981. We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation of the foresight and commitment to excellence shown by the early organizersof the conference. The conference is now organized by IARCS (Indian Association for Researchin Computing Science), and the conference has been the foundation on which the IARCS community has been built. To commemorate the Silver Jubilee of FST&TCS, we had an extra day to accommodate special sessions and a larger number of invited speakers. As in previousyears, wewerefortunatetohaveanumberofhighlyeminentresearchers giving plenary talks. It gives us great pleasure to thank Manindra Agrawal, Tom Henzinger, Russell Impagliazzo, Raimund Seidel, Natarajan Shankar, Joel Spencer and Igor Walukiewicz for agreeing to give talks and for contributing to this volume. This year'sconference attracted 167 submissions with authors from 29 co- tries. Except for some papers which were deemed to be out of scope by the ProgramCommittee (PC), eachsubmissionwasreviewedby atleastthreem- bers of the PC, with help from many external reviewers. With 466 reviews at hand, the PC deliberated for more than two weeks before ?nally selecting the 38 papers included in this volume. We thank all the reviewers for their inva- able help. The PC members put in a great deal of hard work to select the best papers from the submissions. We express our gratitude to all PC members for doing an excellent job. Special thanks are due to Kamal Lodaya for managing the conference software as well.

th This volume contains the proceedings of the 19 FST&TCS conference (Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science), - ganized under the auspices of the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (http: //www. imsc. ernet. in/ iarcs). This year s conference attracted 84 submissions from as many as 25 dieren t countries. Each submission was reviewed by at least three independent referees. th After a week-long e-mail discussion, the program committee met on the 7 th and 8 of August, 1999, in Chennai and selected 30 papers for inclusion in the conference program. We thank the program committee members and the reviewers for their sincere eorts. We are fortunate to have ve invited speakers this year, providing for a very attractive program: Mart n Abadi (Bell Labs - Lucent Technologies, Palo Alto, USA), Lila Kari (Univ. Western Ontario, Canada), Jean-Jacques L evy (INRIA, Paris, France), Micha Sharir, (Univ. TelAviv, Israel), andSeinosuke Toda (IEC, Tokyo, Japan). Moreover, theconferenceisprecededbyatwo-dayworkshop(- cember 11{12, 1999) on Data Structures and succeeded by a two-day workshop (December 16-17, 1999) on Foundations of Mobile Computation. The conference also features two joint sessions with the International Symposium on - tomata, Algorithms and Computation (December 16{18, 1999, Chennai): Monika Henzinger (Compaq Systems Research, Palo Alto, USA) is presenting a tutorial on Web algorithmics as the last event of FST&TCS and Kurt Mehlhorn (Max-Planck-Institut, Saarbru ]cken, Germany) is giving a talk on algorithm - gineering as the rst event of ISAAC."

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the 5th volume of the FoLLI LNAI subline. It contains the refereed proceedings of the Third Indian Conference on Logic and Its Applications, ICLA 2009, held in Chennai, India, in January 2009.

The 12 revised full papers presented together with 7 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers present current research in all aspects of formal logic. They address in detail: algebraic logic and set theory, combinatorics and philosophical logic, modal logics with applications to computer science and game theory, and connections between ancient logic systems and modern systems.

Bilateral and multilateral development agencies use guarantees in order to reduce investors' exposure to risks and to attract private capital to developing countries. A guarantee is a legally-binding agreement under which the guarantor agrees to pay part or all of the amount due on a loan, or other financial instrument, in the event of non-payment. Across the developing world, there are places where having access to the right guarantee product will enable investments that would otherwise have been blocked-where the returns are there, but the risks involved simply exceed market tolerances, or where regulations limit investors' ability to bear risk. These opportunities are waiting to be seized by bilateral development agencies and development finance institutions (DFIs), who have the flexibility to innovate. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) are the dominant providers of guarantees in certain market segments, where their ability to influence government behavior and to reduce (rather than merely reallocate) risks on the ground gives them a natural advantage. That said, their accounting practices, treatment by regulators, and business models can also constrain them. In other market segments, specialized guarantee providers or DFIs can create tailored guarantees, pricing them in a way that creates a commercially appealing proposition whilst still earning market rates of return on their capital. This report sets out to present the virtues and shortcomings of scaling the use of guarantees, with a special focus on opportunities for innovation by actors that operate outside the established MDB business model. Since guarantees are not a form of financial flow (unless circumstances require calling the guarantee, with the guarantor assuming the debt of the borrower), they differ from other development finance instruments in terms of structuring, costs, and objectives.