Exchange Rate Regimes of CEE Countries on the way to the EMU: Nominal Convergence, Real Convergence and Optimum Currency Area Criteria

The paper addresses some issues which are still open in the process of inclusion of CEE countries in the EMU. First, what are the interests of both parties involved (CEE countries and the EU side) regarding the dynamics of the accession of CEE countries to the EMU, and related to this, what is its likely scenario (early or late inclusion in the EMU), taking into account the balance of powers between the two sides. Second, the paper discusses the criteria for measuring readiness of individual CEE countries for joining the EMU. The analysis is focused on the debate on nominal convergence (represented by the famous maastricht convergence criteria) versus real convergence (catching up in economic development). In short, the discussion concentrates on the question whether monetary integration is possible and desirable among countries at a different level of economic development. Finally, special attention is paid to optimum currency area criteria, not only as a theoretical background for monetary integration, but also as an additional insight into the measurement of relative suitability and readiness of individual candidate countries for joining the EMU. As an illustration, the paper attempts to measure some of the optimum currency area indicators for the case of Slovenia, and finds out that Slovenia is relatively quite suitable for joining monetary integration and relatively well prepared for joining the euro area. In particular, Slovenia is not expected to be exposed to serious asymmetric shocks, once Slovenia joins the EMU.Exchange Rate Regimes for CEEC, Optimum Currency Areas, Slovenia

Private-Sector Credit in Central & Eastern Europe: New (Over) Shooting Stars?

This paper analyzes the equilibrium level of private credit to GDP in 11 Central and Eastern European countries in order to see whether the high credit growth recently observed in some of these countries led to above equilibrium private credit to- GDP levels. We use estimation results obtained for a panel of small open OECD economies (out-of-sample sample) to derive the equilibrium credit level for a panel of transition economies (in-sample panel). We opt for this (out-of-sample) approach because the coefficient estimates for transition economies are fairly unstable. We show that there is a large amount of uncertainty to determine the equilibrium level of private credit. Yet our results indicate that a number of countries are very close or even above the estimated equilibrium levels, whereas others are still well below the equilibrium level.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57232/1/wp852 .pd

Credit growth in Central and Eastern Europe: new (over)shooting stars?

This paper analyzes the equilibrium level of private credit to GDP in 11 Central and Eastern European countries in order to see whether the high credit growth recently observed in some of these countries led to above equilibrium private credit-to-GDP levels. We use estimation results obtained for a panel of small open OECD economies (out-of-sample panel) to derive the equilibrium credit level for a panel of transition economies (in-sample panel). We opt for this (out-of-sample) approach because the coefficient estimates for transition economies are fairly unstable. We show that there is a large amount of uncertainty to determine the equilibrium level of private credit. Yet our results indicate that a number of countries are very close or even above the estimated equilibrium levels, whereas others are still well below the equilibrium level. JEL Classification: C31, C33, E44, G21credit growth, credit to the private sector, equilibrium level of credit, initial undershooting, Transition Economies

Foreign Direct Investment and Productivity Spillovers: Updated Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

The paper discusses the inflows of foreign direct investment into the CEE countries and focuses on analysis of productivity spillovers. An overview of the relevance of foreign firms in the CEE economies is presented. Using firm-level data on manufacturing industries for the period 2000–-2005, the total factor productivity of domestic firms is estimated using the Petrin and Levinsohn (2003) method and subsequently related within a panel data model to foreign presence in the same industry and in industries linked via the production chain. The presence of productivity spillovers is tested for across several sub-samples to detect possible conditionalities.Foreign direct investment, productivity, spillovers.

Relevance of Unsupervised Metrics in Task-Oriented Dialogue for Evaluating Natural Language Generation

Automated metrics such as BLEU are widely used in the machine translation literature. They have also been used recently in the dialogue community for evaluating dialogue response generation. However, previous work in dialogue response generation has shown that these metrics do not correlate strongly with human judgment in the non task-oriented dialogue setting. Task-oriented dialogue responses are expressed on narrower domains and exhibit lower diversity. It is thus reasonable to think that these automated metrics would correlate well with human judgment in the task-oriented setting where the generation task consists of translating dialogue acts into a sentence. We conduct an empirical study to confirm whether this is the case. Our findings indicate that these automated metrics have stronger correlation with human judgments in the task-oriented setting compared to what has been observed in the non task-oriented setting. We also observe that these metrics correlate even better for datasets which provide multiple ground truth reference sentences. In addition, we show that some of the currently available corpora for task-oriented language generation can be solved with simple models and advocate for more challenging datasets

A Frame Tracking Model for Memory-Enhanced Dialogue Systems

Recently, resources and tasks were proposed to go beyond state tracking in dialogue systems. An example is the frame tracking task, which requires recording multiple frames, one for each user goal set during the dialogue. This allows a user, for instance, to compare items corresponding to different goals. This paper proposes a model which takes as input the list of frames created so far during the dialogue, the current user utterance as well as the dialogue acts, slot types, and slot values associated with this utterance. The model then outputs the frame being referenced by each triple of dialogue act, slot type, and slot value. We show that on the recently published Frames dataset, this model significantly outperforms a previously proposed rule-based baseline. In addition, we propose an extensive analysis of the frame tracking task by dividing it into sub-tasks and assessing their difficulty with respect to our model

Partage du risque dans l’Union européenne:Expériences interrégionales et internationales

Quelle pourrait être la portée du partage du risque macroéconomique entre pays, dans l’Union monétaire européenne, face aux chocs asymétriques ? Pour tenter de répondre à cette question, essentielle par ses implications quant à la stabilité de la construction monétaire européenne, on cherche à estimer l’ampleur de la répartition du risque qui prévaut entre les régions d’un même pays, mais également entre différents pays. On en déduit alors plusieurs leçons pour l’Union monétaire. Ce sujet est exploré à partir d’un travail empirique effectué sur des données régionales, pour les États-Unis et le Canada, ainsi que sur des données nationales se rapportant à un échantillon de 23 pays de l’OCDE, qui comprend les 15 membres de l’Union européenne. Nous procédons à l’aide de notre version modifiée du modèle fondateur de Asdrubali, Sørensen et Yosha (1996), dont nous rappelons les principes. Nous mettons alors en évidence plusieurs résultats concordants du modèle révisé, qui prouvent que, même si l’abandon de la politique monétaire réduit la capacité théorique des membres de l’UE de lisser les chocs asymétriques via la politique macroéconomique, le nouveau régime dans lequel nous sommes entrés, qui génère une plus forte intégration économique, pourrait bien favoriser considérablement le lissage des chocs au travers des mécanismes de marché

iSchools in Central and South Europe: Developments and Challenges of Cooperation

The countries of Central and South Europe entered the 2000s with plans to restructure their higher education systems based on Bologna recommendations and some other EU supported guidelines. The Humboldt tradition at the universities in the region, necessity to introduce new academic profiles as well as the use of ICT in higher education, is leading the way towards the restructuring of existing programs or designing new curricula and to cooperation between the LIS and IS departments in the region. This panel will address the special concerns for restructuring curricula in the wider information sciences field (Library and Information Science - LIS, Information Science ??? IS, Records Management ??? RM, education for digital services etc) Panelists will address three questions with respect to i-schools developments and trends in their respective countries: ??? What are the basic concerns in developing new curricula in their respective countries? ??? How do the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary issues influence curricula design in IS? ??? What are the future steps, particularly in regard to regional cooperation? After each of the panelists will have presented his position concerning these three questions, they will discuss especially the issues on inter-/multidisciplinarity and on future regional cooperation. The audience of the panel discussion is invited to join this discussion

Libraries and the library system of Slovenia

This paper provides a brief introduction to the Republic of Slovenia and presents a history of its library system. Although the first “public” library opened in 1569 and the first “public” research library in 1701, the current library system originated in the twentieth century, after World War I. The library system of Slovenia today is an organized network consisting of publicly funded libraries of all types, which have been in continuous development since the end of World War II. Several academic and research libraries started using informationretrieval systems in the early 1970s, while other Slovenian libraries started using automated services during the late 1980s. Slovenian libraries have recently reached a relatively high level of development and are now focused on providing digital resources and other new services to their users. While digital libraries are active these days and several acquisition consortia are currently providing user access to numerous resources after a long period of stable and significant growth, the recent global financial crisis provoked austerity measures that are threatening the continued development of the country’s library system.published or submitted for publicatio