Indicators of Currency Crisis: Empirical Analysis of some Emerging and Transition Economies

This paper focuses on the measurement of a contemporaneous currency crisis. The analysis covers 14 "emerging" or "transforming" economies that experienced episodes of currency crises over the last decade. It adds to well-known examples relatively littleknown evidence on the crisis depth in some of the CIS countries. Following the Eichengreen, Rose, and Wyplosz (1994) definition of a currency crisis, the emphasis is primarily put on the examination of changes in relative reserves, exchange rates, and real interest rates during periods of exchange rate pressure. Other measures of the depth of a currency crisis as well as measures of external vulnerability are also discussed. The findings support the adequacy of the Eichengreen, Rose, and Wyplosz (1994) definition in analyzing crisis developments in emerging economies.transition economies, currency crisis

Design and Operation of Existing Currency Board Arrangements

This paper summarizes recent literature on the experience of some existing currency boards. It begins with the definition of the currency board and the description of some existing currency boards. It then discusses advantages and disadvantages of implementing the currency board regime, and concludes with a list of conditions that must be satisfied if a country wants to adopt this monetary framework.currency board

The Motives and Impediments to FDI in the CIS

This paper examines the motives behind foreign direct investment (FDI) in a group of four CIS countries (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan) based on a survey of 120 enterprises. The results indicate that non-oil multi-national enterprises (MNEs) are predominantly oriented at serving local markets. Most MNEs in the CIS operate as 'isolated players', maintaining strong links to their parent companies, while minimally cooperating with local CIS firms. The surveyed firms secure the majority of supplies from international sources. For this reason, the possibility for spillovers arising from cooperation with foreign-owned firms in the CIS is rather low at this time. The lack of efficiency-seeking investment poses further concern regarding the nature of FDI in the region. The most significant problems identified in the daily operations of the surveyed foreign firms are: the volatility of the political and economic environment, the ambiguity of the legal system and the high levels of corruption.FDI, CIS, industrial organization, investment motives

Yusef Komunyakaa: Questioning traditional metaphors of light and darkness

The theory of language promoted by cognitive linguistics points to metaphor as the crucial element of language and thought: a mode of thinking which determines our perception of reality. Stressing the importance of metaphor in our everyday life, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner state that the nature of poetic metaphors is the same as the nature of conventional metaphors which appear in standard language. Creating poetic metaphors, poets simply explore conventional metaphors, using four major strategies: expanding, elaborating, composing, and questioning. Focusing on questioning as the main strategy through which American multicultural literatures can undermine basic Western concepts of the English language, this study examines the ways in which Yusef Komunyakaa questions conventional metaphors of light and darkness in his poetry. Chapter One of this thesis situates the cognitive linguistics\u27 theory of metaphor in the context of African American literary criticism, especially the theory of double-voice. Chapter Two investigates Komunyakaa\u27s treatment of conventional metaphors of outer and inner sight, directly related to the concepts of light and darkness, in Neon Vernacular, and emphasizes the importance of the imagery of seeing in Komunyakaa\u27s definition of power relations in the contemporary world. Chapter Three focuses directly on metaphors of light and darkness in Neon Vernacular: Komunyakaa\u27s attempts to reverse the traditional definitions through criticism of light, as well as his use of the imagery of union between light and darkness as a metaphor of the African-American double-consciousness. Chapter Four analyzes Komunyakaa\u27s use of metaphors of light and darkness in Dien Cai Dau to describe an extreme situation of the Vietnam war, and define the identity of the American nation in liminal circumstances. The final part of this thesis concludes that Komunyakaa\u27s central imagery of light and darkness in union might be treated as a metaphor of the underlining feature of Komunyakaa\u27s work: merging of Western and African traditions

The parliamentarisation of the Moroccan system of government on the basis of the constitution of July 29, 2011

Artykuł dotyczy zjawiska parlamentaryzacji marokańskiego systemu rządów na gruncie konstytucji z 2011 r. Do jej uchwalenia doszło w wyniku niepokojów społecznych znanych jako tzw. Arabska Wiosna. Nowa konstytucja zastąpiła ustawę zasadniczą z 1996 r. Zgodnie z nowymi regulacjami konstytucyjnymi pozycja monarchy została ograniczona, jednak nadal pozostaje on kluczowym elementem systemu rządów. Jednocześnie konstytucja wzmocniła pozycję rządu kierowanego przez premiera. Zmianie uległa ponadto pozycja parlamentu. Przykładowo, król mianuje szefa rządu z łona partii politycznej, która zwycięża w wyborach parlamentarnych, i z uwzględnieniem ich wyników. W porównaniu z poprzednią konstytucją rząd wydaje się silniej powiązany z parlamentem – szczególnie z izbą pierwszą. Ta ostatnia posiada lepsze instrumenty kontroli parlamentarnej. Obecnie marokański system rządów pozostaje bliższy europejskiemu modelowi parlamentarnemu.The paper concerns the phenomenon of parliamentarisation of the Moroccan system of government in the light of the constitution of 2011. The act was adopted as a result of civil unrest known as the so-called Arab Spring. The new constitution replaced the basic law of 1996. According to the new constitutional provisions, the role of the monarch has been limited. At the same time, the constitution has improved the position of the government headed by the prime minister. Moreover, the status of the parliament has been changed. By the way of example, the king appoints the prime minister from within the political party, which wins the parliamentary elections, and with a view to their results. In comparison with the previous constitution, the government seems to be more strongly connected with the parliament – especially with the first chamber. The latter has better tools for parliamentary oversight. Currently, the Moroccan system of government is closer to the European model of parliamentarianism

Wydawnictwo i czasopismo „Droga” jako ośrodek kształtowania ideologii społecznej i wychowawczej sanacji w latach 1922–1937

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Grounds for the dissolution of parliament in the French Fifth Republic’s political practice

The paper discusses the grounds required for the dissolution of the parliament in the political practice of the French Fifth Republic. The Constitution of October 4, 1958 adopted a model of strengthened political power of the head of state, granting them instruments of executive influence on the functioning of other state organs. Paragraph 12 of the Constitution gives the President practically unlimited power to dissolve the National Assembly – the lower chamber of French parliament. The conditions for applying this paragraph are not stipulated in the legal regulations. It is not necessary for the President to respond to a motion of another body, or even to obtain a countersignature. These constitutional factors have led to various political practices. The author of the paper puts forward the thesis that giving freedom to the head of state as regards the application of paragraph 12 on the one hand provides the necessary foundations to exercise a power model with a considerable degree of decisiveness, but on the other may lead to a situation where the dissolution of the National Assembly no longer has a power function in its conventional sense, but serves the purpose of providing the head of state with an instrument for considerably strengthening his own political position. Since the present Constitution of the Fifth Republic has been in force, the National Assembly has been dissolved five times. The author identifies three basic grounds for applying paragraph 12: to defuse a political or social conflict (1962 and 1968), to restore a politically homogenous executive power (1981 and 1988), and to maintain a given political configuration (1997). Since the 1980s the dissolution of parliament has become a tool for the president to avoid cohabitation and, by this token, to provide a political system where the role of the leader of the executive is in the hands of the head of state. On account of the defeat of the formation supporting the president in 1997 this strategy failed to produce the expected outcome. The dissolution of the National Assembly has not taken place since. In 2000, the length of the mandate of the head of state was shortened to five years, which makes it more likely for parliamentary elections to occur directly after presidential elections. This may for a long time to come eliminate the main grounds for the dissolution of the lower chamber, which in the 1980s and 1990s stemmed from the desire to ensure a political system favorable for the head of state. This reason alone may mean that the significance of paragraph 12 in the political practice of the Fifth Republic will continue to be limited.The paper discusses the grounds required for the dissolution of the parliament in the political practice of the French Fifth Republic. The Constitution of October 4, 1958 adopted a model of strengthened political power of the head of state, granting them instruments of executive influence on the functioning of other state organs. Paragraph 12 of the Constitution gives the President practically unlimited power to dissolve the National Assembly – the lower chamber of French parliament. The conditions for applying this paragraph are not stipulated in the legal regulations. It is not necessary for the President to respond to a motion of another body, or even to obtain a countersignature. These constitutional factors have led to various political practices. The author of the paper puts forward the thesis that giving freedom to the head of state as regards the application of paragraph 12 on the one hand provides the necessary foundations to exercise a power model with a considerable degree of decisiveness, but on the other may lead to a situation where the dissolution of the National Assembly no longer has a power function in its conventional sense, but serves the purpose of providing the head of state with an instrument for considerably strengthening his own political position. Since the present Constitution of the Fifth Republic has been in force, the National Assembly has been dissolved five times. The author identifies three basic grounds for applying paragraph 12: to defuse a political or social conflict (1962 and 1968), to restore a politically homogenous executive power (1981 and 1988), and to maintain a given political configuration (1997). Since the 1980s the dissolution of parliament has become a tool for the president to avoid cohabitation and, by this token, to provide a political system where the role of the leader of the executive is in the hands of the head of state. On account of the defeat of the formation supporting the president in 1997 this strategy failed to produce the expected outcome. The dissolution of the National Assembly has not taken place since. In 2000, the length of the mandate of the head of state was shortened to five years, which makes it more likely for parliamentary elections to occur directly after presidential elections. This may for a long time to come eliminate the main grounds for the dissolution of the lower chamber, which in the 1980s and 1990s stemmed from the desire to ensure a political system favorable for the head of state. This reason alone may mean that the significance of paragraph 12 in the political practice of the Fifth Republic will continue to be limited

Analysis of explainable artificial intelligence on time series data

In recent years, the interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has experienced a significant growth, which has contributed to the emergence of new research directions such as Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). The ability to apply AI approaches to solve various problems in many industrial areas has been mainly achieved by increasing model complexity and the use of various black-box models that lack transparency. In particular, deep neural networks are great at dealing with problems that are too difficult for classic machine learning methods, but it is often a big challenge to answer the question why a neural network made such a decision and not another. The answer to this question is extremely important to ensure that ML models are reliable and can be held liable for the decision-making process. Over a relatively short period of time a plethora of methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, but mainly in the area of computer vision and natural language processing. Few publications have been published so far in the context of explainability in time series. This Thesis aims to provide a comprehensive literature review of the research in XAI for time series data as well as to achieve and evaluate local explainability for a model in time series forecasting problem. The solution involved framing a time series forecasting task as a Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prognosis for turbofan engines. We trained two Bi-LSTM models, with and without attention layer, on the C-MAPSS data set. The local explainability was achieved using two post-hoc explainability techniques SHAP and LIME as well as extracting and interpreting the attention weights. The results of explanations were compared and evaluated. We applied the evaluation metric which incorporates the temporal dimension of the data. The obtained results indicate that LIME technique outperforms other methods in terms of the fidelity of local explanations. Moreover, we demonstrated the potential of attention mechanisms to make a deep learning model for time series forecasting task more interpretable. The approach presented in this work can be easily applied to any time series forecasting or classification scenario in which we want to achieve model interpretability and evaluation of generated explanations

Opozycja parlamentarna i senat w V Republice Francuskiej

Artykuł jest poświęcony roli francuskiego Senatu (pod rządami konstytucji V Republiki) jako organu, który może stanowić narzędzie w gestii opozycji antyrządowej. Wskazano, że we francuskiej formule systemu semiprezydenckiego, która została stworzona w efekcie racjonalizacji systemu parlamentarnego, bikameralizm może stanowić obszar szczególnej ekspansji egzekutywy, która dąży do efektywnego wdrożenia swoich własnych zamierzeń legislacyjnych. Autor dowodzi, że ma to szczególnie negatywny wpływ na status opozycji parlamentarnej. Jest tak nawet wtedy, gdy opozycja dysponuje większością w Senacie. Francuska izba druga, choć jest to organ relatywnie silny, może być neutralizowana w procesie ustawodawczym zmierzającym do implementacji programu rządowego. Autor poddaje analizie problem marginalizacji opozycji parlamentarnej w odniesieniu do dwóch podstawowych układów politycznych V Republiki: tak zwanego efektu większościowego (władza wykonawcza jest politycznie jednorodna) oraz koabitacji (władza wykonawcza jest politycznie podzielona).The paper is devoted to the role of the French Senate (under the constitution of the Fifth Republic) as an organ that can remain a tool in the hands of opposition to the government. It has been pointed out that in the French formula of the semi-presidential system, which was created as a result of the rationalisation of a parliamentary model, bicameralism may be the field of special expansion of the executive which aims at the effective implementation of its own legislative activities. The author argues that this has a particularly negative impact on the status of the parliamentary opposition. This is the case even when the opposition has a majority in the Senate. The French second chamber, although the body is relatively strong, can be neutralised in legislative proceedings designed to implement the government’s programme. The author analyses the problem of marginalising the parliamentary opposition in relation to the two major political arrangements of the Fifth Republic: the so-called majority effect (the executive branch is politically homogeneous) and cohabitation (the executive branch is politically divided)

The specificity of presidential systems of government in Francophone African Countries

The paper deals with distinguishing features of presidential systems of government adopted in the current or former constitutions of some Francophone African countries, such as Benin, Djibouti, Ivory Coast or the Republic of Congo. Particular attention has been devoted to the internal structure of the executive branch of government (the existence of the prime minister as a separate body) as well as to the reception of diverse mechanisms of rationalised parliamentarianism created previously in the constitution of the French Fifth Republic. The dynamics of constitutional changes leading to the adoption of presidentialism in place of semi-presidentialism and vice versa in such countries as Niger or Senegal has also been taken into account. In the light of the findings, it can be stated that the specific properties of presidentialism in Francophone Africa prove its apparent distinctness from certain typical assumptions of this model.Artykuł omawia wyróżniające cechy prezydenckich systemów rządów przyjmowanych w obowiązujących lub wcześniejszych konstytucjach niektórych frankofońskich państw afrykańskich, takich jak Benin, Dżibuti, Wybrzeże Kości Słoniowej czy Republika Kongo. Szczególna uwaga została poświęcona wewnętrznej strukturze władzy wykonawczej (występowanie premiera jako odrębnego organu), jak również recepcji różnych mechanizmów parlamentaryzmu zracjonalizowanego ustanowionych uprzednio w konstytucji V Republiki Francuskiej. Uwzględniona została również dynamika zmian konstytucyjnych prowadząca do przyjmowania, w państwach takich jak Niger czy Senegal, prezydencjalizmu w miejsce semiprezydencjalizmu i odwrotnie. Na podstawie dokonanych ustaleń, można stwierdzić, że specyficzne właściwości prezydencjalizmu w Afryce frankofońskiej dowodzą jego ewidentnej odmienności od niektórych typowych założeń tego modelu