Rule of Law in Central and Eastern Europe

Pursuant to the same logic that prevailed when Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman reached out to Germany after the end of World War II, and in keeping with the promise made in the Preamble of the founding treaty, the EU now reached out to Central and Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War and offered integration. In recognition of the difficulties for the EU on the one side of absorbing a large number of countries without jeopardizing the functioning of the institutions, and the difficulties for the Central and Eastern European Countries ( CEECs ) on the other side of transforming themselves into modern democracies with rule of law and functioning market economies, a number of pre-conditions for accession and a number of support schemes for the transformation were established. The present Article analyzes those pre-conditions that were supposed to promote the development of rule of law, as well as those schemes that were intended to support this development. It concludes that first, the concept of “rule of law,” although often quoted, is poorly defined and understood and this is an obstacle for countries aspiring to build a system based on rule of law. Second, Western support for the transformation in Central and Eastern Europe was and continues to be a combination of trial and error with a lack of appreciation of historic precedent and lessons

Introducing EU Competition Law and Policy in Central and Eastern Europe: Requirements in Theory and Problems in Practice

This Article gives an overview of the requirements that must be fulfilled before a Central and Eastern European Country ( CEEC ) can truly claim to be willing and able to apply the acquis communautaire in the field of competition law and policy and thus to be ready for full membership in the European Union ( EU )

Throwing Dirt

Prose by Kate Emmert. Winner of the 2017 Manuscripts Prose Contest with Kelsey Parker Ervick

Multilayer Aggregation with Statistical Validation: Application to Investor Networks

Multilayer networks are attracting growing attention in many fields, including finance. In this paper, we develop a new tractable procedure for multilayer aggregation based on statistical validation, which we apply to investor networks. Moreover, we propose two other improvements to their analysis: transaction bootstrapping and investor categorization. The aggregation procedure can be used to integrate security-wise and time-wise information about investor trading networks, but it is not limited to finance. In fact, it can be used for different applications, such as gene, transportation, and social networks, were they inferred or observable. Additionally, in the investor network inference, we use transaction bootstrapping for better statistical validation. Investor categorization allows for constant size networks and having more observations for each node, which is important in the inference especially for less liquid securities. Furthermore, we observe that the window size used for averaging has a substantial effect on the number of inferred relationships. We apply this procedure by analyzing a unique data set of Finnish shareholders during the period 2004-2009. We find that households in the capital have high centrality in investor networks, which, under the theory of information channels in investor networks suggests that they are well-informed investors

Impact of dietary changes on hepatic homocysteine metabolism in young broilers

Information regarding the impact of sulfur amino acids (SAA) on hepatic homocysteine (Hcy) flux through the various metabolic pathways competing for Hcy in young broilers is lacking. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the impact of varying levels of dietary methionine (Met), choline, and betaine on hepatic Hcy flux in young broiler chickens. A standard starter basal diet was fed to chicks until 8 d of age; 12 experimental diets were given from 8-22 d. The experimental basal diet contained deficient levels of Met and cysteine (Cys); supplemental Met (0, 0.08, 0.16, and 0.24%) was added to the basal diet in combination with isomethyl levels of choline (0 or 0.25%) or betaine (0 or 0.28%). The 12 dietary treatments were replicated with three pens containing five chicks each (15 birds per treatment). Weight gain and feed efficiency increased (P \u3c 0.05) with Met addition and were maximized with the addition of 0.16% digestible Met. No significant interactions (P \u3e 0.05) with choline or betaine addition were noted for weight gain, feed intake, or feed efficiency, but numerical improvements for these variables were observed with the addition of choline and betaine to the Met-deficient basal diet. Analysis of liver tissue indicated that folate-dependent remethylation of Hcy predominated over betaine-dependent remethylation. Further, folate-dependent remethylation of Hcy appeared to be impacted by dietary choline and betaine levels, whereas betaine-dependent remethylation appeared to be more impacted by dietary SAA levels