The European Union Innovation Performance in View of the Lisbon Strategy

The paper is divided into four parts. First deals with the characteristics of the role of knowledge-based economy and innovativeness of the economic system in Lisbon Strategy. Second is devoted to the issue of innovativeness of the EU economies as compared to the US and Japan. Third presents evaluation of the Lisbon Strategy implementation. Fourth analyses the renewed Lisbon Strategy.Artykuł składa się z wprowadzenia, czterech części i zakończenia. Część pierwsza poświęcona jest prezentacji roli gospodarki opartej na wiedzy i innowacyjności w Strategii Lizbońskiej. Część druga zawiera analizę poziomu innowacyjności gospodarek UE na tle USA i Japonii. W części trzeciej przedstawiono ocenę realizacji głównych celów Strategii Lizbońskiej, a w czwartej założenia nowej wersji owej Strategii

In Search of a Strategy for Innovation Policy of Polish Economy

The paper is divided into three parts. First deals with the characteristics of innovative potential and innovative activity of Polish economy. Second is devoted to the problem of innovation policy in Poland. Considerations presented in this part allow to come to a few conclusions concerning evaluation of innovation policy implemented in Poland. The last part discusses the issue of innovation strategy suitable for development of Polish economy in long run

Robustness of Regularity for the 33D Convective Brinkman-Forchheimer Equations

We prove a robustness of regularity result for the $3$D convective Brinkman-Forchheimer equations \partial_tu -\mu\Delta u + (u \cdot \nabla)u + \nabla p + \alpha u + \beta\abs{u}^{r - 1}u = f, for the range of the absorption exponent $r \in [1, 3]$ (for $r > 3$ there exist global-in-time regular solutions), i.e. we show that strong solutions of these equations remain strong under small enough changes of the initial condition and forcing function. We provide a smallness condition which is similar to the robustness conditions given for the $3$D incompressible Navier-Stokes equations by Chernyshenko et al. (2007) and Dashti & Robinson (2008).Comment: 22 page

Votes and Vetoes: The Political Determinants of Commercial Openness

Societal theories of trade policy stress the importance of domestic interest groups, whereas statist theories focus on the effects of domestic institutions. Debates over the relative merits of these approaches have been fierce, but little systematic empirical research has been brought to bear on the relative merits of these theories. In this paper, we argue that, while societal and statist factors are generally regarded as having independent and competing effects, it is more fruitful to view the influence of each type of factor as conditional on the other. As societal explanations contend, deteriorating macroeconomic conditions are a potent source of protectionist pressures. The extent to which such conditions reduce commercial openness, however, depends centrally on the domestic institutions through which societal pressures must filter to influence policy. Two institutional features stand out. First, in states marked by greater fragmentation and more “veto points,” it is harder to change existing policies because any number of actors can block such change. Consequently, we expect the effects of macroeconomic conditions on trade policy to be weaker in fragmented states than in those characterized by a highly centralized national government. Second, we expect both fragmentation and the societal pressures stemming from the economy to have a more potent impact on trade policy in democracies than in other regimes, since the electoral constraints facing democratic leaders force them to respond to demands made by key segments of society. The results of our statistical tests covering more than one hundred countries during the period from 1980 to 2000 strongly support these arguments.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40098/3/wp712.pd

Kwestia uchodźców/migrantów i bezpieczeństwa granic państwowych w exposé ministrów spraw zagranicznych Polski w latach 2014–2016

The article presents the attitudes of Poland’s foreign ministers towards refugees/migrants and border security in the years 2014–2016 expressed in their annual address. The research problem is to determine whether the ministers presented in their address generally accepted long-term strategies for all directions of foreign policy, or whether their activities in the analysed area were merely adaptive, adjusted to the current political situation in the world. The temporal scope is to determine the response after the annexation of Crimea by Russia in late February 2014 of the ministers of the Civic Platform – Polish People’s Party (PO-PSL) government in 2011–2015, and the Law and Justice (PiS) government, that came into power on 16 November 2015. The content of the address and transcripts of the proceedings of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Polish Parliament during which the ministers discussed the theses of their speeches are the primary sources. Od 2014 roku mieliśmy do czynienia w Europie z “gwałtownym przyspieszeniem”. Rosja zajęła Krym, wybuchł konflikt na Ukrainie. W roku następnym wystąpił kryzys uchodźczy. Cel artykuł to przedstawienie stosunku ministrów spraw zagranicznych Polski w latach 2014–2016 do uchodźców/migrantów i bezpieczeństwa granic państwowych w dorocznych exposé. Ministrowie spraw zagranicznych Polski realizowali w analizowanym okresie generalnie adaptacyjny charakter polityki w odniesieniu do kwestii uchodźców i migrantów, a strategiczny wobec zabezpieczenia granic (wzrost znaczenia NATO, współpraca regionalna)

Distance to the Efficiency Frontier and FDI Spillovers

We establish that domestically owned firms in two alternative models of emerging market economies, the Czech Republic and Russia, have not been converging to the technological frontier set by foreign owned firms. In both countries, the distance of domestic firms to the frontier grew (in all parts of the distribution) from 1992-1994 to 1995-1997 and did not change from 1995-1997 to 1998-2000. However, the distance to the frontier is orders of magnitude greater in Russia than in the Czech Republic throughout 1992-2000. We also find in both countries that domestic firms in industries with a greater share of foreign firms are falling behind more than domestic firms in industries with a smaller foreign presence. However, in the Czech Republic this “negative spillover” effect is diminished over time, whereas in Russia it continues to cause domestic firms to fall further behind. On the other hand, we find in both countries that foreign firms experience positive spillovers from other foreign firms operating in the same product market. This evidence on the dynamics of efficiency is consistent with the view that economies (firms) need to be more technologically advanced and open to competition in order to be able to gain from foreign presence.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40107/3/wp721.pd

Languages in the European Union: The Quest for Equality and its Cost

The European Union has recently expanded from 15 to 25 countries. In line with this enlargement, the list of official EU languages has grown from 11 to 20. Currently, the EU extends equal treatment to all member countries’ official languages by providing translations for documents and interpreting services for meetings and sessions of the European Parliament. This, however, is costly, especially when recognizing that many Europeans speak one of the procedural languages of the EU, English, French or German, either as their native language or as a foreign language. We compute disenfranchisement rates that would result from using only the three procedural languages for all EU business, and marginal costs per disenfranchised person associated with providing translations and interpreting into the remaining 17 languages. The marginal costs are shown to vary substantially across the different languages, raising important questions about the economic efficiency of equal treatment for all languages. We argue that an efficient solution would be to decentralize the provision of translations.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40101/3/wp715.pd

Design of engineering systems in Polish mines in the third quarter of the 20th century

Participation of mathematicians in the implementation of economic projects in Poland, in which mathematics-based methods played an important role, happened sporadically in the past. Usually methods known from publications and verified were adapted to solving related problems. The subject of this paper is the cooperation between mathematicians and engineers in Wroc{\l}aw in the second half of the twentieth century established in the form of an analysis of the effectiveness of engineering systems used in mining. The results of this cooperation showed that at the design stage of technical systems it is necessary to take into account factors that could not have been rationally controlled before. The need to explain various aspects of future exploitation was a strong motivation for the development of mathematical modeling methods. These methods also opened research topics in the theory of stochastic processes and graph theory. The social aspects of this cooperation are also interesting.Comment: 45 pages, 11 figures, 116 reference