Do Foreign Direct Investments Increase the Economic Growth of Southeastern European Transition Economies?

There are two important effects of foreign direct investments (FDI) on a host economy: the effect on economic growth and the effect on export performances. Both economic features are important for the transition economies' prospects of European Union (EU) accession. After a short review of relevant research, this paper examines the statistical relationship between FDI inflow and economic growth. Results do not reveal any positive correlation between these two variables. Lack of correlation between FDI inflows and economic development is rather the consequence of methodological imperfections, than the real absence of positive influences of FDI. The problem arises from the fact that the observed countries are in the transition process. Due to structural reforms, there is production and employment decrease in inefficient domestic firms. This can neutralize or even outweigh the positive effect of FDI on economic growth of host sectors.Foreign Direct Investments; Economic Growth; Transition Economies; Southeast Europe

Platform independent profiling of a QCD code

The supercomputing platforms available for high performance computing based research evolve at a great rate. However, this rapid development of novel technologies requires constant adaptations and optimizations of the existing codes for each new machine architecture. In such context, minimizing time of efficiently porting the code on a new platform is of crucial importance. A possible solution for this common challenge is to use simulations of the application that can assist in detecting performance bottlenecks. Due to prohibitive costs of classical cycle-accurate simulators, coarse-grain simulations are more suitable for large parallel and distributed systems. We present a procedure of implementing the profiling for openQCD code [1] through simulation, which will enable the global reduction of the cost of profiling and optimizing this code commonly used in the lattice QCD community. Our approach is based on well-known SimGrid simulator [2], which allows for fast and accurate performance predictions of HPC codes. Additionally, accurate estimations of the program behavior on some future machines, not yet accessible to us, are anticipated

Attraction of Foreign Direct Investments as a Challenge in Accession Process to European Union

When we speak about the significance of foreign direct investments (FDI) for the transition economies of Southeastern Europe, we mainly think of two important effects of FDI: effect on economic growth and effect on export performances. Both economic features (growth and export performance) are important for the transition economies in sense of European Union (EU) accession prospect. The experience of Central European countries, now members of European Union, shows that FDI inflows from EU countries were indicator of country’s reform progress. After short review of relevant researches, we analyzed the statistical relationship between FDI inflow and economic growth. Results don’t reveal any positive correlation between these two variables. However, FDI play important role in technology transfer and improve technological development level in transition economies. On the other hand, our research shows that FDI are correlated with improving of export’s structure of transition countries. FDI inflows in Central European countries were followed by changes of factorial intensity of export goods, as by sectoral structure of export, in positive manner. Compared with Central European transition countries, region of Southeastern Europe has less success in attracting FDI, which consequently results in weaker economic and export performances. FDI have an important role in export’s structure convergence between EU and transition countries.foreign direct investments; economic growth; export performance; transition economies

Public Opinion and Terrorist Acts

The paper explores the dimensions of public opinion relevant for supporting terrorism and their relationship with terrorist attacks. We link the 2007 PEW survey data on justification of suicide terrorism and opinions in 16 countries of the Middle East, Africa and Asia on nine regional powers to the NCTC data on international terrorist incidents between 2004 and 2008. We find that justification of suicide terrorism and unfavorable opinion on regional powers are correlated with the occurrence of terrorism and the effect of each of these dimensions of public opinion varies with the level of the other. In addition, we find a robust positive relationship between the share of people in a country who at the same time justify suicide bombings and have an unfavorable opinion of a regional power and the occurrence of terrorism originating from that country.support for terrorism, public opinion, international terrorism