Production networks in the wind turbine industry, which place for developing countries in East Asia?

International audienceMy doctoral research intersects two recent developments of the global economy. The first is the emergence of the wind turbine industry, to provide the machines for climate-friendly electricity generation. The second is the increasing importance of production networks in East Asia. Production networks are defined by the cross-border dispersion of component production/assembly within vertically integrated production processes. In industries where a production network pattern is in place, each country specializes in a particular stage of the production sequence. The ultimate goal of my research is to understand which factors determine the participation of East Asia developing countries in wind turbine industry’s production network. The findings from this research will broaden our understanding on production networks and its policy implications for developing countries in East Asia, Vietnam in particular. This first-year poster presents four preliminary trade data analysis results. A) Except for a unique decline in 2009, the extent of the wind turbine network had been expanding during the period 2007-2014. B) The network was intra-regional rather than inter-regional. C) Europe was the largest one followed by Asia. D) Developing countries in East Asia only account for minor share of the network. Next, these findings will be confronted to the existing theoretical concept models based on neo-classical trade theory; industrial organization theory and global value chain theory. In the following years, such quantitative international trade analysis will be completed by qualitative sector surveys, most likely in Europe

On the Interference Alignment Designs for Secure Multiuser MIMO Systems

In this paper, we propose two secure multiuser multiple-input multiple-output transmission approaches based on interference alignment (IA) in the presence of an eavesdropper. To deal with the information leakage to the eavesdropper as well as the interference signals from undesired transmitters (Txs) at desired receivers (Rxs), our approaches aim to design the transmit precoding and receive subspace matrices to minimize both the total inter-main-link interference and the wiretapped signals (WSs). The first proposed IA scheme focuses on aligning the WSs into proper subspaces while the second one imposes a new structure on the precoding matrices to force the WSs to zero. When the channel state information is perfectly known at all Txs, in each proposed IA scheme, the precoding matrices at Txs and the receive subspaces at Rxs or the eavesdropper are alternatively selected to minimize the cost function of an convex optimization problem for every iteration. We provide the feasible conditions and the proofs of convergence for both IA approaches. The simulation results indicate that our two IA approaches outperform the conventional IA algorithm in terms of average secrecy sum rate.Comment: Updated version, updated author list, accepted to be appear in IEICE Transaction

The measured variation of the Debye-Waller factor of aluminum from 295K to 815K by using the energy dispersive x-ray diffraction technique

The Energy Dispersive X-ray Diffraction System at Brock University has been used to measure the intensities of the diffraction lines of aluminum powder sample as a function of temperature. At first, intensity measurements at high temperature were not reproducible. After some modifications have been made, we were able to measure the intensities of the diffraction lines to 815K, with good accuracy and reproducibility. Therefore the changes of the Debye-Waller factor from room temperature up to 815K for aluminum were determined with precision. Our results are in good agreement with those previously published

Relative Positional Encoding for Speech Recognition and Direct Translation

Transformer models are powerful sequence-to-sequence architectures that are capable of directly mapping speech inputs to transcriptions or translations. However, the mechanism for modeling positions in this model was tailored for text modeling, and thus is less ideal for acoustic inputs. In this work, we adapt the relative position encoding scheme to the Speech Transformer, where the key addition is relative distance between input states in the self-attention network. As a result, the network can better adapt to the variable distributions present in speech data. Our experiments show that our resulting model achieves the best recognition result on the Switchboard benchmark in the non-augmentation condition, and the best published result in the MuST-C speech translation benchmark. We also show that this model is able to better utilize synthetic data than the Transformer, and adapts better to variable sentence segmentation quality for speech translation.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 202

Managerial Recommendations Improving the Competitive Capability of Firms Based on Total Quality Management during Covid-19 Pandemic

In 2021, the COVID-19 epidemic affected many aspects of the provinces' socio-economic fields, especially deeply affecting businesses at enterprises. The task of ensuring social security continues with the management agencies, who need appropriate solutions and support policies to encourage and help enterprises return to production and trade after the quarantine society quickly. The basis for management theory has contributed to improving the competitive capability based on improving Total Quality Management (TQM), such as the "just in time" system. TQM aims to enhance the quality of products and satisfy customers to the best extent possible. The distinguishing feature of TQM from previous quality management methods is that it provides a comprehensive system for managing and improving all aspects related to quality and involves the participation of the public, every department, and every individual to achieve the set quality goals. The article's novelty identifies factors influencing total quality management and competitive capability of firms in Vietnam with one percent significance. Methods: The authors surveyed 650 managers at many enterprises in Vietnam. And the authors used a convenient sampling method. SPSS tools processed 589 samples to measure Cronbach's alpha, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmation factor analysis (CFA), and test structural equation modeling (SEM). The authors proposed several recommendations to enhance the total quality management and competitive capability of firms. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2022-06-03-010 Full Text: PD

Level of Factors impact on the Buyers’ Intention in Buying Private Health Insurance with the Case of Vietnam Non-Life Insurance Companies

The study aims to determine the influence of factors affecting the intention to purchase private health insurance at non-life insurance companies in Vietnam. The samples were surveyed from 500 people from many areas but mostly in Hanoi. The study identified and clarified 5 independent factors affecting the intention to buy private health insurance at non-life health insurance companies in Vietnam. The analysis results show 5 variables: "Past experience", "Perception of service quality of insurance companies", "Perceived behavioral control", "Attitude towards risks and private health insurance ", and the variable "Subjective norms on private health insurance" affect people's intention to buy private health insurance. Several policies have been proposed to increase customers' intention to buy private health insurance at non-life insurance companies from the analysis. To raise customer's intention to purchase private health insurance, the research team recommends non-life insurance company to improve service quality, especially after-sales service, the quality and expertise of staff, and the government to complete policies and legal framework on private health insurance. Moreover, the research team also recommend to renovate the quality of organizing the private health insurance regime and form the basis of the entire population pathology record. Keywords: private health insurance, intention to purchase, non-life insurance company. DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-27-06 Publication date:September 30th 202

The Efficiency of Australian Schools: Evidence from the NAPLAN Data 2009-2011

This study examines the technical efficiency of schools in Australia and its determinants using NAPLAN test results of about 6,800 schools in 2009-2011 and other information from the “My School” website. For each school, we use the average growth of test scores for the same students between 2009 and 2011 as the measure of the school's output and four input measures: the student-teacher ratios, student-non-teaching staff ratios, recurrent income per student and (averaged) capital expenditure per student. We are also able to compare schools by type: including whether or not the school is a public school or a private school, a single sex or co-educational schools, a primary or secondary school, or a school that provides both primary and secondary schooling. In addition we control for several other environmental indicators for each school including: an index of social and educational advantage, the proportion of school children who identify as an Aborigine or Torres Strait Islander, the proportion of students from a non English-speaking background, the proportion of students female, as well as the region, state and territory in which the school is located. We estimate that the average technical efficiency score of Australian schools is 59 per cent and find evidence of input congestion for all of the inputs studied. On average, the growth target for schools in the sample to reach the efficiency frontier is 100 NAPLAN points. Our results suggest that eliminating inputs congestion could, in theory, reduce expenditure per school student by A$2,000. At the primary level, Catholic and independent schools are less efficient than public schools, but this story is reversed at the secondary level. We also find that schools with students from more advantageous social and economic backgrounds and schools with higher ratios of students from non-English speaking backgrounds tend to be more efficient. The results are robust to the choices about how to construct the frontier (e.g., in aggregate or for disaggregates by school type) and to our treatments of output and super-efficiency

The Efficiency of Australian Schools: Evidence from the NAPLAN Data 2009-2011

This study examines the technical efficiency of schools in Australia and its determinants using NAPLAN test results of about 6,800 schools in 2009-2011 and other information from the “My School” website. For each school, we use the average growth of test scores for the same students between 2009 and 2011 as the measure of the school's output and four input measures: the student-teacher ratios, student-non-teaching staff ratios, recurrent income per student and (averaged) capital expenditure per student. We are also able to compare schools by type: including whether or not the school is a public school or a private school, a single sex or co-educational schools, a primary or secondary school, or a school that provides both primary and secondary schooling. In addition we control for several other environmental indicators for each school including: an index of social and educational advantage, the proportion of school children who identify as an Aborigine or Torres Strait Islander, the proportion of students from a non English-speaking background, the proportion of students female, as well as the region, state and territory in which the school is located. We estimate that the average technical efficiency score of Australian schools is 59 per cent and find evidence of input congestion for all of the inputs studied. On average, the growth target for schools in the sample to reach the efficiency frontier is 100 NAPLAN points. Our results suggest that eliminating inputs congestion could, in theory, reduce expenditure per school student by A$2,000. At the primary level, Catholic and independent schools are less efficient than public schools, but this story is reversed at the secondary level. We also find that schools with students from more advantageous social and economic backgrounds and schools with higher ratios of students from non-English speaking backgrounds tend to be more efficient. The results are robust to the choices about how to construct the frontier (e.g., in aggregate or for disaggregates by school type) and to our treatments of output and super-efficiency