Multinational Corporations as Catalyst for Industrial Development: The Case of Poland

In a recent model Markusen and Venables (1999) describe the conditions under which foreign direct investments (FDI) can act as a catalyst for local industrial development. We apply this framework to the case of Poland, allowing for the entry of multinationals in both intermediates and consumption goods industry. We check these assumptions against empirical evidence, exploring agglomeration patterns of multinational and domestic firms at the regional level, and constructing an econometric model able to measure the interactions between the two classes of firms. We find evidence going in the direction of both direct spill-overs and backward and forward linkages between domestic and multinational firms.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39752/3/wp368.pd

Learning Object Categories From Internet Image Searches

In this paper, we describe a simple approach to learning models of visual object categories from images gathered from Internet image search engines. The images for a given keyword are typically highly variable, with a large fraction being unrelated to the query term, and thus pose a challenging environment from which to learn. By training our models directly from Internet images, we remove the need to laboriously compile training data sets, required by most other recognition approaches-this opens up the possibility of learning object category models “on-the-fly.” We describe two simple approaches, derived from the probabilistic latent semantic analysis (pLSA) technique for text document analysis, that can be used to automatically learn object models from these data. We show two applications of the learned model: first, to rerank the images returned by the search engine, thus improving the quality of the search engine; and second, to recognize objects in other image data sets

Multinational Corporations as Catalyst for Industrial Development: The Case of Poland

In a recent model Markusen and Venables (1999) describe the conditions under which foreign direct investments (FDI) can act as a catalyst for local industrial development. We apply this framework to the case of Poland, allowing for the entry of multinationals in both intermediates and consumption goods industry. We check these assumptions against empirical evidence, exploring agglomeration patterns of multinational and domestic firms at the regional level, and constructing an econometric model able to measure the interactions between the two classes of firms. We find evidence going in the direction of both direct spill-overs and backward and forward linkages between domestic and multinational firms.economic geography, FDI, transition economies

Rural Development: an Analytical Approach at Different Territorial Levels

The purpose of this work is to contribute with some reflections to the debate that has flourished in recent years around two issues: rural development and systemic reading of the territorial articulation of agricultural development. In the numerous investigations conducted in Italy and elsewhere, the analytical approach adopted (institutional level and investigation units, choice of indicators and of the analytical instruments) has profound repercussions on rural policies, according to its wider or narrower formulation. After a brief reflection on the approaches to rural development, highlighting the contradictions of institutional intervention, the study proposes a critical description of some results of the Italian investigations. The aim is to contribute to the definition of an analytical approach for evaluating the dynamics in progress in the agricultural and rural development at different decisional levels (EU, national, regional). The proposed instruments satisfy some requirements: the repeatability of the investigation at different times and in a variety of contexts, the flexibility for the adaptability to the mosaic of situations in the rural world, the applicability at different territorial levels.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Mapping the Dynamics of European Culture - Pressure and Opportunities from the European Enlargement

This paper develops an analytic framework for the ESPON 1.3.3 project “The Role and Spatial Effects of Cultural Heritage and Identity”, started in December 2004 by a network of 12 European Universities under the leadership of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The conceptual framework of this project lies on the assumption that the cultural heritage of Europe is not just an ensemble of tangible assets to be defended through passive conservation, but rather an element of dynamism of the territory, affecting trajectories of regional development. Thus the proper identification and valorisation of the cultural heritage of Europe is to be considered an integral component of regional planning, with the potential to increase cohesion within an enlarged European Union. The establishment of an “European identity”, gaining from difference and variety, is also part of this vision. In this light, the ESPON 1.3.3 project sets out to highlight the spatial expressions and effects of heritage assets and identify the (existing or potential) elements of territorial coherence at the regional and local scale, mapping the geographical aspects that are actually strengthening regional identities and networks. This paper introduces a list of regional indicators of the European cultural heritage and identity, reflecting elements such as heritage availability, concentration and diversity, spatial patterns at the local and cross-regional level, local embeddedness of intangible heritage assets, pressures on- and potential for the development of heritage, and the governance structure of the heritage management institutions. Parameters are quantitative and qualitative observation allowing the “ordering” of the territory and thus the identification of regional typologies from the elaboration of different ordering criteria. Indicators will cover multiple dimensions regarding the supply, the demand and the spatial organisation of cultural heritage. Data cover the whole NUTS III regional delimitation. The issue of the territorial cohesion of cultural heritage assets is also addressed, considering the following multiple “dimensions” of the interconnection between different “objects” or carriers of meaning: hardware (the infrastructural system), software (images and actual uses), orgware (organizational networks) and shareware (partnerships that support the process of development). These elements are compiled in a framework or model used to analyse the territorial expressions of cultural heritage and identity.

Ecological Modelling with the Calculus of Wrapped Compartments

The Calculus of Wrapped Compartments is a framework based on stochastic multiset rewriting in a compartmentalised setting originally developed for the modelling and analysis of biological interactions. In this paper, we propose to use this calculus for the description of ecological systems and we provide the modelling guidelines to encode within the calculus some of the main interactions leading ecosystems evolution. As a case study, we model the distribution of height of Croton wagneri, a shrub constituting the endemic predominant species of the dry ecosystem in southern Ecuador. In particular, we consider the plant at different altitude gradients (i.e. at different temperature conditions), to study how it adapts under the effects of global climate change.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper has been presented in CMC13 (LNCS 7762, pp 358-377, 2013

How to Measure the Unobservable: A Panel Technique for the Analysis of TFP Convergence

This paper proposes a fixed-effect panel methodology that enables us to simultaneously take into account both TFP convergence and the traditional neoclassical-type of convergence. We analyse a sample of Italian regions between 1963 and 1993 and find strong evidence that both mechanisms were at work during the process of aggregate regional convergence observed in Italy up to the mid-seventies. Finally, we find that our TFP estimates are highly positively correlated with standard human capital measures, where the latter is not statistically significant in growth regressions. This evidence confirms one of the hypotheses of the Nelson and Phelps approach, namely that human capital is the main determinant of technological catch-up. Our results are robust to the use of different estimation procedures such as simple LSDV, Kiviet-corrected LSDV, and GMM à la Arellano and Bond.TFP, Panel data, Regional convergence

Rational ignorance is not bliss: When do lazy voters learn from decentralised policy experiments?

A popular argument about economic policy under uncertainty states that decentralisation offers the possibility to learn from local or regional policy experiments. We argue that such learning processes are not trivial and do not occur frictionlessly: Voters have an inherent tendency to retain a given stock of policy-related knowledge which was costly to accumulate, so that yardstick competition is improbable to function well particularly for complex issues if representatives’ actions are tightly controlled by the electorate. Decentralisation provides improved learning processes compared to unitary systems, but the results we can expect are far from the ideal mechanisms of producing and utilising knowledge often described in the literature.Policy decentralisation; fiscal competition; model uncertainty; collective learning.