A Budget without a Treasury – a European Challenge

The financial perspective of 2000-2006 has fundamentally changed the relationship between the EU’s budget and its policies. Whereas prior to this perspective, the EU maintained a policy-driven budget; in its aftermath, Community policies became budget-driven. Since then, the latter has been the prevailing tendency. The major factor behind the budget-driven policies is the strong juste retour approach, where Member States, as their primary goal in budgetary debates, attempt to optimise their net position against the Union’s budget. The priority of the net position is rooted in the EU’s failing own resources system. Instead of genuine own resources, three-quarters of the budget is financed by GNI-based resources. The autonomy of the common budget and the reintroduction of policy-driven budget planning could only be ensured by (1) a genuine own resources system based on the resources generated by Community policies, or (2) a specific Community tax, or a combination of the two. This raises significant questions concerning further Member State sovereignty sharing and their overall readiness for fiscal and political integration

Danube Region – Analysis and Long-Term Development Trends of the Macro-Region

The Danube Region, perhaps the most complicated formation of the European continent, is based on physical geographical factors (the Danube, the river’s catchment area). The catchment area as a physical geographical framework forms a kind of water use and pollution unit, a focus, and through man-made transformation, it partially represents a kind of risk community as well. For people living in the area alongside the river itself, the proximity of the Danube represents a certain historical and cultural attitude. With the exception of the close riverbank area, the region’s population has only indirect Danube space consciousness. The region’s relief divides the Danube catchment area into several sub-catchment areas and natural units. The set of basins (Upper, Middle and Lower Danube Basin) potentially carries options for partial integration. Within some basins the intensification of co-operation may resolve the historically developed tensions, still partly existing today. This report is based on a synthesis of a number of sources listed in the bibliography, as well as original research by Institute staff. Its aim is not to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Danube transnational region as such, but well structured information useful enough to take into account the territorial specificities of this region when developing scenarios at the European level. To this end, it presents the most relevant sectoral trends affecting the Danube Region at the present time, as well as domestic and EU policy challenges and development opportunities. On the basis of analysis, development scenarios are outlined, also identifying the key trends which will influence integration and Europeanisation in the forthcoming decades

Equal opportunity for low-degree network nodes: a PageRank-based method for protein target identification in metabolic graphs

Biological network data, such as metabolic-, signaling- or physical interaction graphs of proteins are increasingly available in public repositories for important species. Tools for the quantitative analysis of these networks are being developed today. Protein network-based drug target identification methods usually return protein hubs with large degrees in the networks as potentially important targets. Some known, important protein targets, however, are not hubs at all, and perturbing protein hubs in these networks may have several unwanted physiological effects, due to their interaction with numerous partners. Here, we show a novel method applicable in networks with directed edges (such as metabolic networks) that compensates for the low degree (non-hub) vertices in the network, and identifies important nodes, regardless of their hub properties. Our method computes the PageRank for the nodes of the network, and divides the PageRank by the in-degree (i.e., the number of incoming edges) of the node. This quotient is the same in all nodes in an undirected graph (even for large- and low-degree nodes, that is, for hubs and non-hubs as well), but may differ significantly from node to node in directed graphs. We suggest to assign importance to non-hub nodes with large PageRank/in-degree quotient. Consequently, our method gives high scores to nodes with large PageRank, relative to their degrees: therefore non-hub important nodes can easily be identified in large networks. We demonstrate that these relatively high PageRank scores have biological relevance: the method correctly finds numerous already validated drug targets in distinct organisms (Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Plasmodium falciparum and MRSA Staphylococcus aureus), and consequently, it may suggest new possible protein targets as well. Additionally, our scoring method was not chosen arbitrarily: its value for all nodes of all undirected graphs is constant; therefore its high value captures importance in the directed edge structure of the graph

Being a binding site: Characterizing residue composition of binding sites on proteins

The Protein Data Bank contains the description of more than 45,000 three-dimensional protein and nucleic-acid structures today. Started to exist as the computer-readable depository of crystallographic data complementing printed articles, the proper interpretation of the content of the individual files in the PDB still frequently needs the detailed information found in the citing publication. This fact implies that the fully automatic processing of the whole PDB is a very hard task. We first cleaned and re-structured the PDB data, then analyzed the residue composition of the binding sites in the whole PDB for frequency and for hidden association rules. Main results of the paper: (i) the cleaning and repairing algorithm (ii) redundancy elimination from the data (iii) application of association rule mining to the cleaned non-redundant data set. We have found numerous significant relations of the residue-composition of the ligand binding sites on protein surfaces, summarized in two figures. One of the classical data-mining methods for exploring implication-rules, the association-rule mining, is capable to find previously unknown residue-set preferences of bind ligands on protein surfaces. Since protein-ligand binding is a key step in enzymatic mechanisms and in drug discovery, these uncovered preferences in the study of more than 19,500 binding sites may help in identifying new binding protein-ligand pairs

A Budget without a Treasury – a European Challenge

The financial perspective of 2000-2006 has fundamentally changed the relationship between the EU’s budget and its policies. Whereas prior to this perspective, the EU maintained a policy-driven budget; in its aftermath, Community policies became budget-driven. Since then, the latter has been the prevailing tendency. The major factor behind the budget-driven policies is the strong juste retour approach, where Member States, as their primary goal in budgetary debates, attempt to optimise their net position against the Union’s budget. The priority of the net position is rooted in the EU’s failing own resources system. Instead of genuine own resources, three-quarters of the budget is financed by GNI-based resources. The autonomy of the common budget and the reintroduction of policy-driven budget planning could only be ensured by (1) a genuine own resources system based on the resources generated by Community policies, or (2) a specific Community tax, or a combination of the two. This raises significant questions concerning further Member State sovereignty sharing and their overall readiness for fiscal and political integration

XVII-XVIII. századi barokk kutatások és szövegek kiadása; Zrínyi-kutatások = Textual and philological research on baroque poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries

OTKA támogatásunkat nagy tapasztalatú és fiatal kutatók megbízásokra kívántuk fordítani. Legtöbb műveik az Irodalomismeret számaiban jelentek meg. Gulyás Beáta és Polyák Zsuzsanna összegyűjtötték Mátyási megjelent műveinek lexikoncímszó-értékű összes lábjegyzetét. Erdőkertesi Kun Ágnes, Apáczai Csere János-ról tett közzé tanulmányt. Kiss Farkas Gábor Zrínyi Syrena-kötetének címlap-metszetéről értekezett. Az Akadémiai Kiadó felkérésére elkészült, és 2006-ban megjelent Zrínyi monográfiája (Az író Zrínyi Miklós); szerzője Kovács Sándor Iván professzor, aki ehhez nem használt OTKA támogatást. Horváth Karina a Balassi-tanítvány Rimay János XVII. sz. költő rímszótárát készítette el; Maráczi Géza Bethlen Miklós angliai élményeinek leírását fordította magyarról angolra (Iris, 2005/1. sz.);Kenyó Ildikó, Kiss István, ''Jeruzsálemi utazásá''-nak versbetéteit tette vizsgálat tárgyává (Uo.); Szabó-Törpényi Annamária Ulla és Albert Zsófia Tüskés Gáborral és Knapp Évával folytatott tartalmas szakmai beszélgetéseket (Iris/2. sz); Hagymási Júlia, utrechti kutatásaiból közreadta Utrechti levéltári dokumentumok Aletta van der Maet családjáról (Iris, 2005/3); Dobozy Nóra nagyobb tanulmányt írt Álom és látomás a barokk eposzokban címmel (Uo.). Borián Elréd, Beke József, Nagy Levente, Danyi Gábor, Bíró Ferenc, Imre László, Gömöri György, Kaposi Márton voltak még szerzőink. 2007-ben jelent meg az Irodalomismeret Tasso-összeállítása. amely 17 tanulmányt közöl. 2007-ben megjelent még két szám. | Our OTKA support was meant for young and experienced researchers to help them go on with their researches. The most of their works were published in Irodalomismeret review. Beata Gulyás and Zsuzsanna Polyák collected all the footnotes having a ''vocabulary entry'' value in his works. Ágnes Erdőkertesi Kun divulged a study on János Apáczai Csere. Gábor Farkas Kiss discoursed on the engraving of the front page of Zrínyi's Syrena-volume. The Zrínyi monograph (The Writer Miklós Zrínyi), which was written by Iván Sándor Kovács professor, appeared by the Akadémiai Kiadó in 2006, but he didn't draw on the OTKA financial resources. Karina Horváth prepared the rhyme dictionary of János Rimay; Géza Maráczi translated the adventures of Miklós Bethlen in England from Hungarian into English (Iris, 2005/1. sz.); Ildikó Kenyó examinated the poems in István Kiss' Travel to Jeruzsalem (Id.); vocational talks with Gábor Tüskés and Éva Knapp were illuminating, made by Annamária Ulla Szabó-Törpényi and Zsófia Albert (Iris, 2005/2. sz.); Júlia Hagymási published from her researching in Utrecht the Archives Documents from Utrecht of Aletta van der Maet's Family (Iris, 2005/3); Nóra Dobozy wrote a study entitled Dream and Vision in the Baroque Epics (Id.). Elréd Borián, József Beke, Levente Nagy, Gábor Danyi, Ferenc Bíró, László Imre, György Gömöri, Márton Kaposi. In 2007 was issued the Taaso-compilation of the Irodalomismeret . We issued two more Irodalomismeret publishment

Intragenerációs újraelosztás gyermekszám szerint = Intra-generational redistribution by number of children

A kutatás arra vállalkozott, hogy a jóléti intézményrendszerrel foglalkozó szakirodalom új kutatási programjának egyes kutatási kérdéseire válaszoljon. A szóban forgó kutatási program szerint a jóléti intézményrendszer elsősorban az életpálya-finanszírozás eszköze és nem szegénységenyhítő ill. jövedelemkiegyenlítő feladatokat lát el. Ennek alapján fő kérdései nem a szegénységgel és jövedelemegyenlőtlenségekkel foglalkozó normatív, módszertani vagy empirikus kérdések (pl. az egyenlőtlenséggel szembeni averzió, a hasznosság (utility) személyek közötti összehasonlíthatósága, vagy a szociálpolitikai programok "célzottsága"), hanem a generációk közötti erőforrás-átcsoportosítási rendszer problémái. Ilyen kérdések, egyebek mellett a generációk közötti erőforrás-átcsoportosítást végző rendszer tartós fennmaradásának feltételei, illetve annak következményei, hogy a szóban forgó rendszer a családon belüli generációkról áttevődött a társadalmi generációkra. Az említett következmények közül néhány: az egymást követő generációk közötti újraelosztás (ami az empirikus kérdéseken kívül új etikai kérdéseket is felvet); mesterséges externáliák teremtése az egyéni gyermekvállalási erőfeszítéseken (és ennek következtében újraelosztás generációkon belül gyermekszám szerint illetve a termékenység csökkenése), valamint az erőforrás-átcsoportosítási rendszer hosszú távú fennmaradásának feltételeire gyakorolt hatás (a generációk közötti erőforrás-elosztás "arany-szabályának" megsértése, azáltal, hogy az említett elosztás politikai döntéssé válik). | The project aimed at responding to questions of the new research program of the economics of the welfare state. The research program in question identifies the welfare state as a means of organizing intergenerational resource reallocations rather than alleviating poverty and income inequalities. So, instead of focusing on the normative, methodological or empirical questions regarding poverty and income inequalities (e.g. inequality-aversion, interpersonal comparability of utility, ?targeting? of public programs), it concentrates on problems of the resource reallocation system. Such problems include, among others, the conditions of survival of such a scheme on the long run and the consequences of the historical shift of the system from family generations to generations of society, that is, a larger risk pool. Some of the consequences mentioned: redistribution among subsequent generations (which raises special ethical questions besides the obvious empirical ones); creation of artificial externalities on individual efforts to raise children (which, as a consequence, leads to intra-generational redistribution by number of children raised as well as to declining fertility); and the impact on the conditions of long-term survival of the resource reallocation system (as the various ?golden rules? of resource reallocations are constantly hurt by making the system exposed to frequent political corrections)