Import demand with product differentiation: disaggregated estimation of italian sectoral elasticities.

This paper focuses on the estimation of sectoral import demand for Italy with European Union Countries, Japan, Canada and the United States. A strong evidence of two-way flows and product differentiation is an accepted regularity of the international trade. Given that, we have tried to include considerations of differentiation in the empirical analysis. Starting from the very disaggregated bilateral trade data (5 digit Sitc Rev. 3) we have classified every and each flow as homogeneous, quality differentiated and non-quality differentiated, using the methodologies developed by Abd-El-Rahman (1986) and Freudenberg and Müller (1992). Then we have included this classification in our econometric estimates of the sectoral import demands. That should increase precision of the estimate, because allow to divide homogeneous from not homogeneous goods in the estimation procedures. Our results suggest a dynamic reaction of italian imports in many sectors, pointing to possible competitive problems for the firms and external balance constraint for the country.

A vocabulary-independent generation framework for DBpedia and beyond

The dbpedia Extraction Framework, the generation framework behind one of the Linked Open Data cloud’s central hubs, has limitations which lead to quality issues with the dbpedia dataset. Therefore, we provide a new take on its Extraction Framework that allows for a sustainable and general-purpose Linked Data generation framework by adapting a semantic-driven approach. The proposed approach decouples, in a declarative manner, the extraction, transformation, and mapping rules execution. This way, among others, interchanging different schema annotations is supported, instead of being coupled to a certain ontology as it is now, because the dbpedia Extraction Framework allows only generating a certain dataset with a single semantic representation. In this paper, we shed more light to the added value that this aspect brings. We provide an extracted dbpedia dataset using a different vocabulary, and give users the opportunity to generate a new dbpedia dataset using a custom combination of vocabularies

The promise of community-based participatory research for health equity: a conceptual model for bridging evidence with policy.

Insufficient attention has been paid to how research can be leveraged to promote health policy or how locality-based research strategies, in particular community-based participatory research (CBPR), influences health policy to eliminate racial and ethnic health inequities. To address this gap, we highlighted the efforts of 2 CBPR partnerships in California to explore how these initiatives made substantial contributions to policymaking for health equity. We presented a new conceptual model and 2 case studies to illustrate the connections among CBPR contexts and processes, policymaking processes and strategies, and outcomes. We extended the critical role of civic engagement by those communities that were most burdened by health inequities by focusing on their political participation as research brokers in bridging evidence and policymaking

Building Huys Hengelo in VRML

In this paper we report about our attempts to rebuild a historical building, ‘Huys Hengelo’, its interior, a farm built next to it and other parts of its environment (including a draw-bridge and a gate) using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). This castle building played an important role in the history of its region. The main issues we deal with in this paper are: the unreliability of available sources − forcing us to show alternatives rather than ‘the building as it was’, the possibility to allow users to make changes and to experiment with different geographies, animations showing how parts of the wooden buildings were constructed during that time, the interface with the user and, as the project started as a student project on the request of some local historians and architects, some of our experiences with the co-operation between them and computer science students and researchers

Product differentiation and intra-industrial trade: Quantitative assessment in the case of Tunisia

In this article we try to analyze the extend of product differentiation in the Tunisian’s context, by relying on an investigation drived at a sufficiently disaggregated level of sectors. In the first section, we tend to expose the relationship between market structure, product differentiation and intra-industrial trade. Then, we reexamine in the second section some operational proxies of products variety that were previously analyzed by the empirical literature. In the third section, we tend to appreciate the strength of products differentiation in the specific case of Tunisia and in 8 different sectors

Horizontal and Vertical Intra-Industry Trade between the Former CEFTA Countries and the European Union

This paper analyses the production structure or intra-industry trade specialization (IIT) of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia in foreign trade with EU member states from 1995 to 2001 at the five-digit level of the SITC. The results confirmed that former CEFTA countries in general showed IIT specialization in the production of vertically differentiated products of lower quality either at the aggregate level of the manufacturing sectors (i.e. SITC 5–8) or at the level of the twenty chosen manufacturing activities (i.e. divisions 17–36 of the ISIC) and that differences also exist between IIT specializations of these countries.intra-industry trade, horizontal and vertical intra-industry trade, CEFTA countries