Indonesian Perceptions of China‘s Threat to ASEAN. Will the PRC‘s Influence Split ASEAN?

Rozdział z: The Quandaries and Foreign Development, ed. D. Mierzejewski, “Contemporary Asian Studies Series

Measurement and relevance of the shadow economy in the European Union

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Price indices and unit value indices in German foreign trade statistics

There is presently an international discussion among statistical institutes, reserve banks etc. about the feasibility of replacing true price indices of exports and imports by unit value indices. For the very few countries, such as Germany, providing both indices on a monthly basis this would mean to give up a (costly) compilation of P-indices. The paper shows that this would be unwise. It aims at exploring the still not well understood methodological differences of both types of indices, and it is also reporting some empirical results of a research project in cooperation with the German Bundesbank.unit value indices; foreign trade statistics

The Interpretation of Unit Value Indices - Unit Value Indices as Proxies for Price Indices

The unit value index (UVI) as compiled in Germany for exports and imports is compared with two other indices, viz. an index of Drobisch which unfortunately is likewise known as "unit value index" and the "normal" Laspeyres price index (PI) of exports and imports. The UVI may be viewed as a Paasche index compiled in two stages where unit values instead of prices are used in the low level aggregation stage. Unit values are average prices referring to an ag-gregate of (more or less homogeneous) commodities. The focus of the paper is on the decom-position of the discrepancy between UVIs and PIs (the "unit value bias") into a (well known) Laspeyres (or substitution) effect or "L-effect" and a structural component or "S-effect" due to substituting unit values for prices. It is shown that amount and sign of S depends on the corre-lation between the change of quantities of those goods that are included in the aggregate and their respective base period prices. By contrast to L the correlation between quantity and price movement is not relevant for S. This paper is a revised version of my contribution to the 11th Ottawa Group Meeting in Neuchatel (Switzerland) 27th to 29th May 2009 http://www.ottawagroup2009.ch/Price index, unit value index, unit values, axioms, foreign trade statistics, Bortkiewicz, Drobisch.

Grouping variables in an underdetermined system for invariant object recognition

Poster presentation: Introduction We study the problem of object recognition invariant to transformations, such as translation, rotation and scale. A system is underdetermined if its degrees of freedom (number of possible transformations and potential objects) exceed the available information (image size). The regularization theory solves this problem by adding constraints [1]. It is unclear what constraints biological systems use. We suggest that rather than seeking constraints, an underdetermined system can make decisions based on available information by grouping its variables. We propose a dynamical system as a minimum system for invariant recognition to demonstrate this strategy. ..