Productivity: the impact of privatisation and liberalisation in public services.

This paper analyses the evolution of labour productivity and its sources in Electricity and Gas, Post and Telecommunication, Inland Transport and Health and Social Work sectors of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Sweden and the UK in the presence of privatisation and liberalisation process from 1970 to 2004. The results showed that although some degree of labour productivity growth achieved in all sectors and countries, there has also been significant employment decreases except for Health and Social Work sector. Productivity increase/employment decrease trend is even stronger in the privatisation and liberalisation era for most countries. Decomposition of labour productivity shows that higher productivity, to some extent, was gained at the expense of employment decrease. Although there have been productivity increases in both pre- and post-privatisation periods, the contribution of employment decrease to productivity growth turned out to be quite significant in the post-privatisation period. This brings about the necessity to question the presumption that privatisation brings about higher productivity

An NLP-based approach for improving human-robot interaction

This study aims to explore the possibility of improving human-robot interaction (HRI) by exploiting natural language resources and using natural language processing (NLP) methods. The theoretical basis of the study rests on the claim that effective and efficient human robot interaction requires linguistic and ontological agreement. A further claim is that the required ontology is implicitly present in the lexical and grammatical structure of natural language. The paper offers some NLP techniques to uncover (fragments of) the ontology hidden in natural language and to generate semantic representations of natural language sentences using that ontology. The paper also presents the implementation details of an NLP module capable of parsing English and Turkish along with an overview of the architecture of a robotic interface that makes use of this module for expressing the spatial motions of objects observed by a robot

Determinants of subcontracting and kegional development: An empirical study on Turkish textile and engineering industries

Recent studies on small- and medium-sized Turkish textile and engineering industries, development establishments emphasize the importance of networking and regional clusters for (regional) industrial development. This study is focused on an important form of cooperation between firms: the subcontracting relationship. The aim is to identify the determinants of subcontracting in Turkish textile and engineering industries and to derive policy implications from our empirical analysis. Subcontract offering and subcontract receiving models are estimated for both industries by using panel data on all establishments employing ten or more workers between 1993 and 2000. The findings show that a short-term unequal relationship exists between clients and subcontractors in the textile industry, whereas subcontracting relationships in the engineering industry are established between 'similar', relatively advanced firms with complementary assets and technologies. Moreover, subcontracting flourishes in regions densely populated by firms

Commodification of public services, productivity and employment.

This paper analyses the evolution of labour productivity and employment in Electricity and Gas, Post and Telecommunication and Inland Transport sectors of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and the UK in the presence of commodification process from 1970 to 2004. The results showed that although some degree of labour productivity growth achieved in all sectors and countries, there has also been significant employment decreases. Productivity increase/employment decrease trend is even stronger in the privatisation and liberalisation era for most countries. Decomposition of labour productivity shows that higher productivity, to some extent, was gained at the expense of employment decrease. Although there have been productivity increases in both pre- and post-commodification periods, the contribution of employment decrease to productivity growth turned out to be quite significant in the post-commodification period. This brings about the necessity to question the presumption that commodification of public services brings about higher productivity

hexaazadithia macrobicyclic moieties

The new metal-free and metallo phthalocyanines (4) and (5) bearing four tetrasubstituted hexaazadithia macrobicycles on peripheral positions, have been synthesized. Phthalonitrile (3) has been synthesized from the reaction of (1,3,6,9,11,14 hexaazatricyclo [12.2.1.1(6,9)]) (1) and 1,2-bis(2-iodomercaptoethyl)-4,5-dicyanobenzene (2). The new compounds were characterized by elemental analysis, and IR, H-1, C-13-NMR, UV-Visible and mass spectral data.C1 Karadeniz Tech Univ, Dept Chem, TR-61080 Trabzon, Turkey.Pamukkale Univ, Dept Chem, Denizli, Turkey