Structure and performance of the services sector in transition economies

This paper examines the structure and performance of the services sector in Eastern European and Central Asian countries during 1997-2004. Services represent an increasing share of total value added and employment with the major sub-sectors being wholesale trade, retail trade, inland transport, telecommunications, and real estate activities. A clear divide separates EU-5 countries from South Eastern European countries and Ukraine in terms of services labor productivity. Although a large gap in productivity also separates EU-8 countries from EU-15 countries, that gap was reduced from 1997 to 2004 as most services sub-sectors experienced fast productivity growth. High skill intensive sub-sectors and information and communications technology producers and users have exhibited higher productivity levels and growth rates relative to other sub-sectors since 2000. The author finds a positive effect of services liberalization on the productivity growth of services sub-sectors. The author also finds a positive and significant effect of services liberalization in both finance and infrastructure on the productivity of downstream manufacturing.Labor Policies,E-Business,Labor Markets,Economic Theory&Research,Transport Economics Policy&Planning

Scaling of nascent nodes in extended s-wave superconductors

We analyze the low-energy properties of superconductors near the onset of accidental nodes, i.e. zeroes of the gap function not enforced by symmetry. The existence of such nodes has been motivated by recent experiments suggesting a transition between nodeless and nodal superconductivity in iron-based compounds. We find that the low-temperature behavior of the penetration depth, the specific heat, and the NMR spin-lattice relaxation rate are determined by the scaling properties of a quantum critical point associated with the nascent nodes. Although the power-law exponents are insensitive to weak short-range electronic interactions, they can be significantly altered by the curvature of the Fermi surface or by the three-dimensional character of the gap. Consequently, the behavior of macroscopic quantities near the onset of nodes can be used as a criterion to determine the nodal structure of the gap function.Comment: minor changes; version accepted for publicatio

The whole mesh Deformation Model for 2D and 3D image segmentation

In this paper we present a novel approach for image segmentation using Active Nets and Active Volumes. Those solutions are based on the Deformable Models, with slight difference in the method for describing the shapes of interests - instead of using a contour or a surface they represented the segmented objects with a mesh structure, which allows to describe not only the surface of the objects but also to model their interiors. This is obtained by dividing the nodes of the mesh in two categories, namely internal and external ones, which will be responsible for two different tasks. In our new approach we propose to negate this separation and use only one type of nodes. Using that assumption we manage to significantly shorten the time of segmentation while maintaining its quality