Woman’s Position in Statutes and Canons

The position of women and its historical evolution has been extensively discussed, and perhaps in many cases, due to the absence of facts, analyzes and documents, there have been many speculations. This issue requires a more comprehensive analysis, taking into account many factors, such as the very low level of economic and social development, high levels of poverty, political instability, the fact that the issue of the Albanian identity and territorial integrity dominated the life of the country and its political movement, lack of a democratic culture, low level of education, lack of social emancipating movements, etc. This article just aims to realize an analysis probably, not exhaustive, in order to identify the advantages and disadvantages of Albanian women‟s position at different stages of socio-economic and cultural development.Keywords: canon, woman, statute, family, heritage, rights, blood feud

An examination of Japanese import markets

There have been debates on the trade issue between the U.S. and Japan. It is claimed that Japan exports too much and imports too little. Economic activities by Japanese firms in U.S. markets have been discussed in several articles. This dissertation investigates the economic decision rules for imports by Japanese firms;Japanese visible import restrictions such as tariff or quota are minimal among industrialized countries. One of our interests is in the governmental role in the trade. Several possible regulations for imports by the public and private sectors are introduced in the model presented. The model clarifies how import price and domestic cost affect domestic economic variables in each hypothetical environment. The predictions from the model are shown to be subject to the market structure. A presence of quantitative restrictions is empirically tested using data for sixteen commodities. While two of them show competitive evidences, the others are unfitted to the model because cost changes in domestic production do not actually affect domestic variables. The model also predicts that the more competitive the market is, the larger pass-through should be. This is tested using the production concentration ratios. The data do not support that the concentration decreases the degree of transmission;The other findings are as follows. The pass-through coefficients vary across industries. The symmetry of tariff and exchange rates are supported for most of the data. Exogeneity of import prides are rejected for five commodities;Soybeans are one of the sixteen commodities in the above testing. The trade environment seems fairly competitive. Bresnahan\u27s idea to measure the market power coefficient is applied for this market. The empirical testing assures the competitiveness over the whole period by the statistically insignificant market power coefficient. For several years after the U.S. embargo in 1973, the data show unusual high wholesale prices and the coefficient is statistically significant. The welfare loss and exchange rate transmission are reported. The reason of the statistically significant coefficient for the sub-period remained to be argued. The marketing risks under uncertainty enlarged by the embargo and speculative activities by importers during the unusual inflational period are possible explanations

AN OVERVIEW OF THE ALBANIAN PRIVATIZATION PROCESS

In the process of transformation of the economy the emphasis is on structural reforms, where one of the supporting pillars of these reforms is the privatization process. Given that, the privatization process in Albania for more than two decades has been the "Achilles heel" of government programs and its impact has been extraordinary in our economy. This paper will provide an overview of the development of this process in Albania, based on the hypothesis that "privatization positively affects the country's economy". What went well and what did not function properly, who can intervene this process in order to improve? Besides tremendous impact on the economy, privatization requires extensive changes in the legislation and urges the creation of institutions that will make this process possible. Privatization is a process based on the political changing role of the government in the economy, but this process in Albania is associated with social consequences such as high unemployment and moderate wages, holidays and layoffs for employees more older and unskilled, retraining, etc

Bayesian analysis of multifidelity computer models with local features and non-nested experimental designs: Application to the WRF model

Motivated by a multi-fidelity Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) climate model application where the available simulations are not generated based on hierarchically nested experimental design, we develop a new co-kriging procedure called Augmented Bayesian Treed Co-Kriging. The proposed procedure extends the scope of co-kriging in two major ways. We introduce a binary treed partition latent process in the multifidelity setting to account for non-stationary and potential discontinuities in the model outputs at different fidelity levels. Moreover, we introduce an efficient imputation mechanism which allows the practical implementation of co-kriging when the experimental design is non-hierarchically nested by enabling the specification of semi-conjugate priors. Our imputation strategy allows the design of an efficient RJ-MCMC implementation that involves collapsed blocks and direct simulation from conditional distributions. We develop the Monte Carlo recursive emulator which provides a Monte Carlo proxy for the full predictive distribution of the model output at each fidelity level, in a computationally feasible manner. The performance of our method is demonstrated on benchmark examples and used for the analysis of a large-scale climate modeling application which involves the WRF model

Intangible Investment in Japan: New Estimates and Contribution to Economic Growth

The purpose of this paper is to measure intangible assets, to construct the capital stock of intangible assets, and to examine the contribution of intangible capital to economic growth in Japan. We follow the approach of Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel (2005, 2006) to measure intangible investment using the 2008 version of the Japan Industrial Productivity (JIP) Database. We find that the ratio of intangible investment to GDP in Japan has risen during the past 20 years and now stands at 11.6%, which is lower than the ratio estimated for the United States in the early 2000s. The ratio of intangible to tangible investment in Japan is also lower than equivalent values estimated for the United States. In addition, we find that, in stark contrast with the United States, where intangible capital grew rapidly in the late 1990s, the growth rate of intangible capital in Japan declined from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. In order to examine the robustness of our results, we also conducted a sensitivity analysis and found that the slowdown of the contribution of intangible capital deepening to economic growth and the recovery in Multi-Factor Productivity (MFP) growth from the second half of the 1990s observed in our base case remain unchanged even if we take on-the-job training and Japanese data with respect to investment in firm-specific resources into account.intangible investment, labor productivity, growth accounting

The anti-competitive agreements in the prospective of the law on competition protection - An inside in the Albanian practices and legal framework

In Albania legislation on competition was developed only after the 90s and this is natural depending on the economic development and market model, which before the 90s had spaces of a free and competitive development. Competition is an economic phenomenon that refers to such a state of a free market economy, where companies compete independently in order to benefit as many buyers so as to meet the objectives to increase profits and expansion of markets. In this way free competition is both beneficial for business development and profitable for consumers themselves, who should benefit from the prices set based on the demand–offer ratio. Competition should be perceived as a necessary mechanism that promotes increase of welfare in general, by providing enterprises with greater opportunities for profit and therefore better quality for consumers, a major benefit in the range of choices lower prices. Encouraged by the existence of competition, enterprises as market players should be motivated to be always on the alert and perhaps in uncertainty in order to be as much active in the way they compete with their competitors by providing investments and aggressive strategies as a reply to their, but also potential rivals. In competitive markets, the companies are motivated to gain market power in order to strengthen their positions in the markets where they operate and thereby they have an impact in the fulfillment of the growing needs of the consumer, which brings increase of welfare. Nevertheless, quite often companies have such an attitude that they may cause limitation of competition, such as the agreements, whose object or consequence is price fixing, market shares or the establishment of a market structure where competitors join (in case of concentrations). Price fixing is a classic element to all cases of cartels. By means of such behavior competitors try to avoid price competition between them to the detriment of the consumer, by applying higher prices. This may happen at horizontal level, but also at vertical level. What do we perceive with prohibited agreements under Albanian law of competition? What are the forms of agreements that are prohibited and which are excluded? These are some of the questions that this article adresses

Ion beam sputtering of silicon: Energy distributions of sputtered and scattered ions

The properties of sputtered and scattered ions are studied for ion beam sputtering of Si by bombardment with noble gas ions. The energy distributions in dependence on ion beam parameters (ion energy: 0.5-1 keV; ion species: Ne, Ar, Xe) and geometrical parameters (ion incidence angle, polar emission angle, and scattering angle) are measured by means of energy-selective mass spectrometry. The presence of anisotropic effects due to direct sputtering and scattering is discussed and correlated with process parameters. The experimental results are compared to calculations based on a simple elastic binary collision model and to simulations using the Monte-Carlo code sdtrimsp. The influence of the contribution of implanted primary ions on energy distributions of sputtered and scattered particles is studied in simulations. It is found that a 10% variation of the target composition leads to detectable but small differences in the energy distributions of scattered ions. Comparison with previously reported data for other ion/target configurations confirms the presence of similar trends and anisotropic effects: The number of high-energy sputtered ions increases with increasing energy of incident ions and decreasing scattering angle. The effect of the ion/target mass ratio is additionally investigated. Small differences are observed with the change of the primary ion species: The closer the mass ratio to unity, the higher the average energy of sputtered ions. The presence of peaks, assigned to different mechanisms of direct scattering, strongly depends on the ion/target mass ratio