Secondary Privatization in Poland (Part II): Evolution of Ownership Structure and Performance in National Investment Funds and their Portfolio Companies

This volume contains the output of country research undertaken in Poland in 2000-2001 by Barbara Blaszczyk, Michal Gorzynski, Tytus Kaminski and Bartlomiej Paczoski under the international comparative project "Secondary Privatization: the Evolution of Ownership Structures of Privatized Enterprises". The project was supported by the European Union's Phare ACE Programme 1997 (project P97-8201 R) and was coordinated by Barbara Blaszczyk of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE) in Warsaw, Poland. The support of the ACE Programme made it possible to organize the cooperation of an international group of scholars (from the Czech Republic, France, Poland, Slovenia and the U.K.). The entire project was devoted to the investigation of secondary ownership changes in enterprises privatized in special privatization schemes (i.e., mass privatization schemes and MEBOs) in three Central European countries - the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia. Through a combination of different research methods, such as secondary analysis of previous research, analysis of legal and other regulatory instruments, original field research, statistical data base research and econometric analysis of individual enterprise data, the project aimed to investigate the scope, pace and trends in secondary ownership changes, the factors and barriers affecting them and the degree of ownership concentration resulting from them. The authors of this report look at ownership changes in the companies owned by the Polish National Investment Funds in the 1995-2000 period. They analyze the numbers of companies in the NIFs' portfolios were sold to what types of investors (i.e., domestic corporate, domestic individual, employee, foreign, other NIFs, public trading) in which years. A great deal of attention is also paid to the issue of changes in the ownership of the funds themselves as well as the issues of corporate governance in the funds (management costs, strategies, etc.) Finally, the economic performance of NIF portfolio companies is compared with other groups of companies in Polish economy, and then the group of NIF companies is broken down with respect to type of owner that acquired (or kept) them, and these groups are compared with each other. We hope that the results of this research will be of great interest for everyone interested in the little-researched question of what has happened to companies after privatization in transition countries.privatization, secondary transactions, corporate governance, transition economies, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Poland

THE ECONOMIC CONTRIBUTION OF AGRICULTURE IN DELAWARE

The decreasing share of production agriculture in the U.S. economy in general and Delaware in particular has raised questions about the amount of government resources being spent on the local agricultural sector. A basic question in the debate is: "What is the real economic contribution of agriculture?" This study looks at the economic role of agriculture in Delaware, presenting different perspectives of what agriculture is and what it contributes to the state economy. Based on three definitions of agriculture, the economic impacts as measured by shares to total employment, output, and value added were estimated using IMPLAN, an input-output modeling software. In each economic impact measure, the share of the local agricultural sector to the total Delaware economy ranged from around 2% to 6% in 1991.Agribusiness,

Reduction of a tetrazolium salt, CTC, by intact HepG2 human hepatoma cells: subcellular localisation of reducing systems

AbstractCell-mediated reduction of tetrazolium salts, including MTT, XTT, MTS, NBT, NTV, INT, in the presence or absence of intermediate electron carriers is used as a convenient test for animal or bacterial cell viability. Bioreduction of tetrazolium is considered an alternative to a clonogenic assay and a thymidine incorporation assay. However, correlation between clonogenic potential and capacity to reduce tetrazolium has not been demonstrated convincingly. Moreover, despite a wide use of tetrazolium viability assays, the mechanism and subcellular localisation of reducing systems or species in viable intact cells have not been fully elucidated. We report evidence indicating that a tetrazolium salt CTC can be reduced in the presence as well as in the absence of an electron carrier by viable HepG2 human hepatoma cells. CTC-formazan is formed within or at the outer surface of plasma membranes. We hypothesise that in the presence of an electron carrier the electron donors active in the reduction of CTC are located in the intracellular compartment, as well as in plasma membranes. However, in the absence of an electron carrier, the reduction occurs primarily via a plasma membrane-associated enzymatic system or species

Cross-linguistic Semantic Transfer in Bilingual Chinese-English Speakers

The semantic structure of animal and emotion terms was here under investigation. In Study one, Chinese ‐ English bilinguals and monolingual English and Chinese speakers provided similarity judgments. Those, once analysed with correspondence analysis, provided a multidimensional representation of the semantic structure of animal terms; with the greatest level of similarity noted between two bilingual structures. In Study two, a within subjects design was employed and the participants evaluated levels of similarity between pairs of emotion terms. The greatest level of similarity was recorded between the bilingual judgments provided in English and the monolingual English ones. The aggregated findings have demonstrated that the bilingual semantic structures are dynamic, possibly due to the constant interaction between two languages, which in consequence may lead to creation of semantic interlanguage

The Conservation of Murals – A New Trend in Protecting Works of Art

In recent years, a trend has emerged in the field of art conservation, the aim of which is to protect street art objects. Attempts to conserve murals face many problems. This is due to various factors – lack of time distance to this type of objects, difficulties in assessing their artistic value, frequent lack of interest of artists in the conservation of their works, material impermanence of murals, their often-occasional nature; also, the fact that most of these objects are not legally protected. The paper discusses the problems faced by an art restorer who wants to save murals. Examples of murals are presented, the conservation of which is not possible, among others, due to the fact that the houses on which they were painted are intended for demolition. There are also examples of murals whose rescue from destruction gained public approval and the conservation of which was carried out.  The paintings are in a very poor condition. This is a feature of most murals, which are usually made on old, unrepaired plasters with low-quality paints. Their maintenance is a very difficult task. The presentation shows the various stages of conservation of works lacated in Warsow. The conservation of the murals is carried out in order to preserve street art facilities. Apart from the involvement of art conservators, social support for this type of activity is also important. However, one should be aware that most of murals have no chance of becoming a permanent part of the city landscape. Their fate will be determined by chance

Prawa Ur-Nammy

Hitherto, there has been no complete Polish translation of the oldest well-preserved Mesopotamian collection of laws, i.e., the laws of Ur-Namma (who reigned between 2110 and 2093 BC). The following article presents a translation from Sumerian into Polish of this collection of laws and it includes the recently published manuscripts of this collection.Do tej pory w języku polskim nie istniało pełne tłumaczenie najstarszego dobrze zachowanego mezopotamskiego zbioru praw, tj. praw Ur-Nammy (panującego w latach 2110-2093 p.n.e.). Niniejszy artykuł prezentuje ten zbiór praw w tłumaczeniu z języka sumeryjskiego, uwzględniając nowo opublikowane manuskrypty tego zbioru

Approximation algorithms for job scheduling with block-type conflict graphs

The problem of scheduling jobs on parallel machines (identical, uniform, or unrelated), under incompatibility relation modeled as a block graph, under the makespan optimality criterion, is considered in this paper. No two jobs that are in the relation (equivalently in the same block) may be scheduled on the same machine in this model. The presented model stems from a well-established line of research combining scheduling theory with methods relevant to graph coloring. Recently, cluster graphs and their extensions like block graphs were given additional attention. We complement hardness results provided by other researchers for block graphs by providing approximation algorithms. In particular, we provide a $2$-approximation algorithm for $P|G = block\ graph|C_{max}$ and a PTAS for the case when the jobs are unit time in addition. In the case of uniform machines, we analyze two cases. The first one is when the number of blocks is bounded, i.e. $Q|G = k-block\ graph|C_{max}$. For this case, we provide a PTAS, improving upon results presented by D. Page and R. Solis-Oba. The improvement is two-fold: we allow richer graph structure, and we allow the number of machine speeds to be part of the input. Due to strong NP-hardness of $Q|G = 2-clique\ graph|C_{max}$, the result establishes the approximation status of $Q|G = k-block\ graph|C_{max}$. The PTAS might be of independent interest because the problem is tightly related to the NUMERICAL k-DIMENSIONAL MATCHING WITH TARGET SUMS problem. The second case that we analyze is when the number of blocks is arbitrary, but the number of cut-vertices is bounded and jobs are of unit time. In this case, we present an exact algorithm. In addition, we present an FPTAS for graphs with bounded treewidth and a bounded number of unrelated machines.Comment: 48 pages, 6 figures, 9 algorithm

Total Completion Time Minimization for Scheduling with Incompatibility Cliques

This paper considers parallel machine scheduling with incompatibilities between jobs. The jobs form a graph and no two jobs connected by an edge are allowed to be assigned to the same machine. In particular, we study the case where the graph is a collection of disjoint cliques. Scheduling with incompatibilities between jobs represents a well-established line of research in scheduling theory and the case of disjoint cliques has received increasing attention in recent years. While the research up to this point has been focused on the makespan objective, we broaden the scope and study the classical total completion time criterion. In the setting without incompatibilities, this objective is well known to admit polynomial time algorithms even for unrelated machines via matching techniques. We show that the introduction of incompatibility cliques results in a richer, more interesting picture. Scheduling on identical machines remains solvable in polynomial time, while scheduling on unrelated machines becomes APX-hard. Furthermore, we study the problem under the paradigm of fixed-parameter tractable algorithms (FPT). In particular, we consider a problem variant with assignment restrictions for the cliques rather than the jobs. We prove that it is NP-hard and can be solved in FPT time with respect to the number of cliques. Moreover, we show that the problem on unrelated machines can be solved in FPT time for reasonable parameters, e.g., the parameter pair: number of machines and maximum processing time. The latter result is a natural extension of known results for the case without incompatibilities and can even be extended to the case of total weighted completion time. All of the FPT results make use of n-fold Integer Programs that recently have received great attention by proving their usefulness for scheduling problems