AGENCY, ASSOCIATIONS AND CULTURE: A THALE OF STATE AND SOCIETY

The way in which the social subjects take decisions, the interactions established between these, the web of social institutions and rules, the architecture of the power relationships between the various “points of social coagulation” have as a foundation a complex set of determinants, in which the “pure” economic factors have an important, but not unique role. Thus, this paper intends to draft a possible analytical framework, capable of allowing the stress of some existing connections between the cultural variables, the social actions and the role of the public power. Heavy indebted to OLSON and NOZICK, the starting point is made out by a version of the mandate theory, within the way in which society, as a whole, as well as its individual components, delegates a certain set of social responsibilities to the public authorities, based on some social utility functions, which include the characteristics of the dominant cultural model. Part I of the paper deals with the elements of the theoretical foundation, elements resumed by a set of critical postulates and a special definition of state as the dominant agency in a social space and also of the negotiation/parallel associations. Part II is an attempt to examine some empirical evidences in the favor of some results derived from this foundation. The main conclusion of the paper could be resumed by the idea that trying to describe the interactions between state and society without taking into the account the characteristics of the cultural paradigm is equivalent to talk about Hamlet without mentioning the prince of Denmark.agency, negotiation/parallel associations, cultural paradigm

POLITICS AND INTERJURISDICTIONAL TRANSFERS: THE ROMANIAN CASE

this paper represents a continuation of a previous paper where we demonstrated the “abnormal” behavior that local authority from Romania is manifesting regarding the subventions received from the central budget. In accord with public choice theory, exist an “affinity” of a social group - local communities in this case - for a certain political party or political coalition, in which case can expect that the distribution of public funds, having the nature of transfers given by the central budget to local budgets, to be impregnated with a considerable “political color”. This paper is trying to establish, in Romania, quantitative and qualitative, the modality of distributing the central public funds to local authorities under the political impact.politics, regional communities, interjurisdictional transfers

THE FISCAL POLICY AND THE STABILITY OF THE NOMINAL SECTOR: THE ROMANIAN CASE

The fiscal policies in the contemporaneous economic systems heavy influence both the real and nominal sectors. These effects could be located at the primary distribution of the social resources as will as at level their redistribution one. The aims of this paper are: (1) to review the literature of the main conceptual frameworks which link the fiscal policy and the dynamic of real sector, especially on the inflation side (2) to advance an empirical analyze of these link for the Romanian case and (3) to draw some conclusion about desirable framework of the fiscal policy for the current period in the perspective of Romanian access to European Union.Impact, inflation, fiscal policy, econometric analyze, fiscal deficit, budgetary sold

The Fiscal Policy and the Stability of the nominal Sector: The Romanian Case (revisited version)

The fiscal policies in the contemporaneous economic systems heavy influence both the real and nominal sectors. These effects could be located at the primary distribution of the social resources as will as at level their redistribution one. The aims of this paper are: (1) to review the literature of the main conceptual frameworks which link the fiscal policy and the dynamic of real sector, especially on the inflation side (2) to advance an empirical analyze of these link for the Romanian case and (3) to draw some conclusion about desirable framework of the fiscal policy for the current period in the perspective of Romanian access to European Union.Impact, inflation, fiscal policy, econometric analyze, fiscal deficit, budgetary sold

PayPal in Romania

The present paper refers to the usefulness of online payment through PayPal and to the development of this payment manner in Romania. PayPal is an example of a payment intermediary service that facilitates worldwide e-commerce.Comment: 8 pages, exposed on 5th International Conference "Actualities and Perspectives on Hardware and Software" - APHS2009, Timisoara, Romani

A NEW APPROACH OF THE BUDGET DEFICIT: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

Economic policies and, particularly, fiscal policies are not designed and implemented in an “empty space”: the structural characteristics of the economic systems, the institutional architecture of societies, the cultural paradigm and the power relations between different social groups, define the borders of these policies. This paper tries to deal with these borders, to describe their nature and the implications of their existence to the fiscal policies’ quality and impact at a theoretical level as well as at an empirical one. The main results of the proposed analysis support the ideas that the mentioned variables matters both for the social mandate entrusted by the society to the state and thus to role and functions of the state and for the economic growth as a support of the resources collected at distributed by the public authorities.budget deficit, structural characteristics, economic freedom, institutions, cultural paradigm, political freedom

Q-based design equations for resonant metamaterials and experimental validation

Practical design parameters of resonant metamaterials, such as loss tangent, are derived in terms of the quality factor $Q$ of the resonant effective medium permeability or permittivity. Through electromagnetic simulations of loop-based resonant particles, it is also shown that the $Q$ of the effective medium response is essentially equal to the $Q$ of an individual resonant particle. Thus, by measuring the $Q$ of a single fabricated metamaterial particle, the effective permeability or permittivity of a metamaterial can be calculated simply and accurately without requiring complex simulations, fabrication, or measurements. Experimental validation shows that the complex permeability analytically estimated from the measured $Q$ of a single fabricated self-resonant loop agrees with the complex permeability extracted from $S$ parameter measurements of a metamaterial slab to better than 20%. This $Q$ equivalence reduces the design of a metamaterial to meet a given loss constraint to the simpler problem of the design of a resonant particle to meet a specific $Q$ constraint. This analysis also yields simple analytical expressions for estimating the loss tangent of a planar loop magnetic metamaterial due to ohmic losses. It is shown that $\tan \delta \approx 0.001$ is a strong lower bound for magnetic loss tangents for frequencies not too far from 1 GHz. The ohmic loss of the metamaterial varies inversely with the electrical size of the metamaterial particle, indicating that there is a loss penalty for reducing the particle size at a fixed frequency

Empirical Evidencies for the Budget Deficits Co-Integration in the Old European Union Members: Are there any Interlinkages in Fiscal Policies?

In the last years, the fiscal harmonization among the European Union members has become a pillar of economic integration and of fiscal and financial stability in the European area. The institutional changes, the semi-failure of the “old” Stability and Growth Pact as well as the recent waves of enlargements all these were put a greater emphasis on this issue inducing a higher pressure for fiscal discipline. In this context, the objective of the paper is to examines recent empirical evidences for bilateral and multilateral integration between fiscal policies, as this are synthesised by budget deficits, of old European Union members in the framework of the Johansen co-integration procedure with a preliminary appliance of the principal component analysis. The study finds that the dynamic of European fiscal policies takes place under the impact of some common driving forces which leads to a differentiate behaviour of two sub regional-groups individualized by the budget deficit series evolutionary patterns. Overall, it concludes that there could be find empirical evidences to support the thesis that a process of fiscal integration is currently running at least at the level of old European Union countries.Fiscal policies in E.U., budget deficits, co-integration, Johansen Test