Aiding Balkans

Conceptual and theoretical issues of foreign aid in post-conflict, transition region are discussed. Two examples are presented in an informal manner. The first is about the incoherence of aid for reconstruction and policies of transition. The second is about the role of expected institutional change that the process of European Union integration provides and the comparative role of aid for institution building. Hypothesis are developed that will be considered in the further work on aid in the Balkans.

Time dependent measurements of the CKM angle Gamma at LHCb

The startup of the LHC opens many new frontiers in precision flavour physics, in particular expanding the field of precision time-dependent CP violation measurements to the $B^0_s$ system. This contribution reviews the status of time-dependent measurements of the CKM angle $\gamma$ at the LHC's dedicated flavour physics experiment, LHCb. Particular attention is given to the measurement of $\gamma$ from the decay mode \DsK, a theoretically clean and precise method which is unique to LHCb. The performance of the LHCb detector for this and related modes is reviewed in light of early data taking and found to be close to the nominal simulation performance, and the outlook for these measurements in 2011 is briefly touched on.Comment: Proceedings of CKM2010, the 6th International Workshop on the CKM Unitarity Triangle, University of Warwick, UK, 6-10 September 201

Southeast Europe: Regional Cooperation with Multiple Equilibria

It is argued in this paper that the lack of regional cooperation can be remedied by the speed up of the process of EU integration. That is reinforced by the considerations based on the theory of optimal currency areas. Though the current Stabilisation and Association process (SAP) may produce the same results though that process is riskier and requires more time.

Real-time data analysis at the LHC: present and future

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which collides protons at an energy of 14 TeV, produces hundreds of exabytes of data per year, making it one of the largest sources of data in the world today. At present it is not possible to even transfer most of this data from the four main particle detectors at the LHC to "offline" data facilities, much less to permanently store it for future processing. For this reason the LHC detectors are equipped with real-time analysis systems, called triggers, which process this volume of data and select the most interesting proton-proton collisions. The LHC experiment triggers reduce the data produced by the LHC by between 1/1000 and 1/100000, to tens of petabytes per year, allowing its economical storage and further analysis. The bulk of the data-reduction is performed by custom electronics which ignores most of the data in its decision making, and is therefore unable to exploit the most powerful known data analysis strategies. I cover the present status of real-time data analysis at the LHC, before explaining why the future upgrades of the LHC experiments will increase the volume of data which can be sent off the detector and into off-the-shelf data processing facilities (such as CPU or GPU farms) to tens of exabytes per year. This development will simultaneously enable a vast expansion of the physics programme of the LHC's detectors, and make it mandatory to develop and implement a new generation of real-time multivariate analysis tools in order to fully exploit this new potential of the LHC. I explain what work is ongoing in this direction and motivate why more effort is needed in the coming years.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of the HEPML workshop NIPS 2014. 20 pages, 5 figure

Illegal Trade in South East Europe

Based on the theoretical foundations as described in Bhagwati (1974), illegal trade can be defined to consist of faked invoicing on the one hand and smuggling on the other hand. While in the first case at least one of the trading partner countries has recorded a trade flow either as an export or as an import, in the latter case no official customs data is available. Smuggling is bypassing legal trade channels altogether. Therefore it is difficult to estimate the full magnitude of illegal trade with the help of one single method. In this paper we rather tried to detect faked invoicing and smuggling in the Balkans separately. Therefore we first tried to measure illegal cross-border trade in South East Europe (SEE) in order to have at least some impressions about the magnitude of this phenomenon and second we analysed illegal trade from a more theoretical perspective and provided an overview of possible policy relevant aspects. The paper ends with some discussion on the impact of illegal trade on security and of some soft security instruments that could be used to address it.Illegal Trade, Faked Invoicing, Smuggling, South East Europe

Efficient, reliable and fast high-level triggering using a bonsai boosted decision tree

High-level triggering is a vital component in many modern particle physics experiments. This paper describes a modification to the standard boosted decision tree (BDT) classifier, the so-called "bonsai" BDT, that has the following important properties: it is more efficient than traditional cut-based approaches; it is robust against detector instabilities, and it is very fast. Thus, it is fit-for-purpose for the online running conditions faced by any large-scale data acquisition system.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

TRANZICIJA, INTEGRACIJA I RAZVOJ U JUGOISTOČNOJ EUROPI

Theoretical and methodological issues that have been raised by the Global Research Project (GRP) on the “Impact of rich countries policies on poor countries” (the Impact Project) of the Global Development Network (GDN) and the wiiw contribution to it are discussed. The difference between policy impact in the context of transition and integration as compared with development is highlighted. The characteristics of the SEE region in this respect are described. Research topics and results are summarised and set in the context of the overall GRP and the existing literature. In the conclusions the connection with the next round of work within the GDN is outlined.Članak obrađuje teorijska i metodološka pitanja koja je pokrenuo projekt o globalnom istraživanju pod nazivom «Utjecaj politika bogatih zemalja na siromašne zemlje» (projekt utjecaja) pod vodstvom mreže globalnog razvoja, kao i doprinos Bečkog instituta za međunarodne ekonomske studije (wiiw). Istaknuta je razlika između utjecaja politika u kontekstu tranzicije i integracije u usporedbi s razvojem. S tim u vezi opisuju se značajke regije Jugoistočne Europe. Teme i rezultati istraživanja ukratko su prikazani i poredani u kontekstu ukupnog projekta o globalnom istraživanju i u kontekstu postojeće literature. Zaključak prikazuje u glavnim crtama predstojeći rad unutar mreže globalnog razvoja

Prospects for Further (South) Eastern EU Enlargement: Form Divergence to Convergence?

This paper looks at the experience of South East Europe which – for the purposes of this paper – includes the former states of Yugoslavia except for Slovenia (i.e. Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia), Albania, and the two EU candidate countries, Bulgaria and Romania. For all these economies, accession to the EU will be the overriding driving force of the policy-making agenda for the foreseeable future, albeit with widely different time horizons in the individual economies. In Part One we describe the South East European (SEE) ‘region’ as one which has over the 1990s significantly ‘fallen behind’ in the process of economic development relative to the group of Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies which will join the EU in 2004. While developments are somewhat heterogeneous, there is, in particular, an abysmal employment record which has not even started to turn around, as well as an extremely bad productivity and export performance. In Part Two, we discuss in greater detail the conditions required to move towards a sustained growth and catching-up process. We analyse the problematic states of transition in some of the SEE economies as well as the basic disequilibria (fiscal, external, labour markets) which need to be resolved for sustained development to take place. The prospects of making up for the lost decade and dealing with the unresolved disequilibria will be a crucial issue in evaluating the prospects of EU accession some time in the future. We discuss the stumbling blocks both from the SEE side and the EU side in developing a clear perspective of integration with the EU.South East Europe, Balkan economies, convergence, EU enlargement