Quality food products sector development in the NMS: The supply and demand aspect from Slovenia

Food quality labels, Consumer attitudes, Production, Barriers to entry, Slovenia, Agribusiness, Demand and Price Analysis,

GPS-derived geoid using artificial neural network and least squares collocation

The geoidal undulations are needed for determining the orthometric heights from the Global Positioning System GPS-derived ellipsoidal heights. There ore several methods for geoidal undulation determination. The paper presents a method employing the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approximation together with the Least Squares Collocation (LSC). The surface obtained by the ANN approximation is used as a trend surface in the least squares collocation. In numerical examples four surfaces were compared: the global geopotential model (EGM96), the European gravimetric quasigeoid 1997 (EGG97), the surface approximated with minimum curvature splines in tension algorithm and the ANN surface approximation. The effectiveness of the ANN surface approximation depends on the number of control points. If the number of well-distributed control points is sufficiently large, the results are better than those obtained by the minimum curvature algorithm and comparable to those obtained by the EGG97 model

My Trouble with Queer

Gay Bosnians are struggling with the (US-based) concept of ‘coming out’. Homosexuality here is shameful and is only possible when it is secret, hidden, anonymous. My problem with queer theory and activism is not the theory itself. Indeed queer theory’s most important contribution is to disclose how the gay movement of the 1970s and 1980s only dealt with white gay male experience, thus centralising some identities and marginalising others. However my problem (or, to be more exact, my concern or maybe my own ignorance) is how to translate queer theory into the practice of everyday politics, especially in thepostwar areas of the former Yugoslavia. As yet, it seems that the (radical) US queer model does not translate well into those societies on the doorstep of the European Union (EU). Even so, as someone at the Queer Zagreb conference mentioned, New York and San Francisco are not the USA, which means that ‘queering’ in some other parts of the country would provoke similar hostile reactions, or, to put it differently, one can find Bosnia in many parts of the USA. The million-dollar question, therefore, is how to translate the queer sensibility of identities into policy papers and government resolutions

Mirko D. Grmek Pathological Realities: Essays on Disease, Experiments, and History

Edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Pierre-Olivier Méthot. Foreword by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019

Competitiveness of Slovenian agro-food sector

The main objective of this article is to present an overview of the Slovenian food industry economic development in the period before the Slovenian EU accession and the first five years of the EU membership. The accession to the EU was certainly the most comprehensive change of economic environment since the state gained its independence. Nevertheless, already during the pre-accession period the changes intensified restructuring processes and increased pressures to the business performance of the sector. The agro-food industrial complex, however, is among the sectors of the acceding economies for which EU enlargement traditionally brings the most radical changes. Price level and cost differences, hardly comparable production structures, but mostly disparities in types and comprehension of the economic policies required large adjustments and caused notable economic pressures. Based on a framework of economic indicators the paper tries to answer some of the most recurrent questions related to the restructuring process of Slovenian food industry in the last decade. First we present past sectoral business performance using the appropriate mezzoeconomic accountancy indicators, whereas in the central part of the paper four key restructuring determinants are analysed and commented. The determinants are formulated into the four relevant questions dealing with cost-price developments, relations in the Slovenian agro-food chain, developments of the international trade and trends in the budgetary transfers to support competitiveness. Results confirm that the economic restructuring which had been hindered in the Slovenian food industry during the last decade has been triggered radically after EU accession. This brought to the termination of favourable economic conditions in the highly protected domestic market and deteriorated radically the business performance, and only those food companies which will restructure proactively will sustain in the EU markets