Measuring European Competitiveness at the Sectoral level

This book develops a new approach for estimating the way in which labour costs reflect cost competitiveness. Conventionally, unit labour costs (a standard measure of cost competitiveness) are calculated as indices, without regard to the relative levels of wage costs. To remedy this, the authors develop the concept of the ‘equilibrium wage’, which corresponds to the level of wages when the returns on capital in different regions and sectors are equalised. A wage competitiveness indicator is thus calculated as the ratio of actual to equilibrium wages. The book presents empirical evidence of equilibrium and actual wage developments for country aggregates and for economic sectors. Within the euro area, five countries are above equilibrium levels, three (including Germany) are close to equilibrium, and eleven member states (mainly in central and eastern Europe) have massively undervalued wages. The data for sectoral competitiveness seem to reflect in part sectoral specialisation, but the picture varies between sectors, countries and time periods

Groupwise Multimodal Image Registration using Joint Total Variation

In medical imaging it is common practice to acquire a wide range of modalities (MRI, CT, PET, etc.), to highlight different structures or pathologies. As patient movement between scans or scanning session is unavoidable, registration is often an essential step before any subsequent image analysis. In this paper, we introduce a cost function based on joint total variation for such multimodal image registration. This cost function has the advantage of enabling principled, groupwise alignment of multiple images, whilst being insensitive to strong intensity non-uniformities. We evaluate our algorithm on rigidly aligning both simulated and real 3D brain scans. This validation shows robustness to strong intensity non-uniformities and low registration errors for CT/PET to MRI alignment. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/brudfors/coregistration-njtv

Cilia at the node of mouse embryos sense fluid flow for left-right determination via Pkd2

Unidirectional fluid flow plays an essential role in the breaking of left-right (L-R) symmetry in mouse embryos, but it has remained unclear how the flow is sensed by the embryo. We report that the Ca2+ channel Polycystin-2 (Pkd2) is required specifically in the perinodal crown cells for sensing the nodal flow. Examination of mutant forms of Pkd2 shows that the ciliary localization of Pkd2 is essential for correct L-R patterning. Whereas Kif3a mutant embryos, which lack all cilia, failed to respond to an artificial flow, restoration of primary cilia in crown cells rescued the response to the flow. Our results thus suggest that nodal flow is sensed in a manner dependent on Pkd2 by the cilia of crown cells located at the edge of the node.CREST of the Japan Science and Technology Corporation; NIH [P30 DK090744]; Human Frontier Science Program [ST00246/2003C]; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [PE 853/2]; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; American Heart Association [R10682]info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio