Integration and Growth in East Asia

This paper empirically analyzes the experience of East Asiaf s economic growth with data both at aggregate-economy and micro-firm levels, focusing on the role of international integration through trade and direct investment. The analysis within a framework of cross-country panel regression shows that trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows have a positive effect on GDP growth -particularly in the 1970s and 1980s- while FDI outflows appear to have a negative effect on GDP growth. Micro-level evidence based on manufacturing data in the Republic of Korea (Korea) confirms the positive effect of trade and investment integration on plant-level productivity growth. It also suggests that the relationship between FDI outflows and productivity growth depends on the characteristics of a recipient economy. We find that FDI to the Peoplefs Republic of China tends to reduce productivity growth of firms in Korea, while FDI to the United States or Japan works in favor of productivity growth.Integration; Growth; Trade; Foreign direct investment; East Asia

Economies of density versus natural advantage: crop choice on the back forty

We estimate the factors determining specialization of crop choice at the level of individual fields, distinguishing between the role of natural advantage (soil characteristics) and economies of density (scale economies achieved when farmers plant neighboring fields with the same crop). Using rich geographic data from North Dakota, including new data on crop choice collected by satellite, we estimate the analog of a social interactions econometric model for the planting decisions on neighboring fields. We find that planting decisions on a field are heavily dependent on the soil characteristics of the neighboring fields. Through this relationship, we back out the structural parameters of economies of density. Setting an Ellison-Glaeser dartboard level of specialization as a benchmark, we find that of the actual level of specialization achieved beyond this benchmark, approximately two-thirds can be attributed to natural advantage and one-third to density economies.

Multi Domain Semantic Information Retrieval Based on Topic Model

Over the last decades, there have been remarkable shifts in the area of Information Retrieval (IR) as huge amount of information is increasingly accumulated on the Web. The gigantic information explosion increases the need for discovering new tools that retrieve meaningful knowledge from various complex information sources. Thus, techniques primarily used to search and extract important information from numerous database sources have been a key challenge in current IR systems. Topic modeling is one of the most recent techniquesthat discover hidden thematic structures from large data collections without human supervision. Several topic models have been proposed in various fields of study and have been utilized extensively for many applications. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is the most well-known topic model that generates topics from large corpus of resources, such as text, images, and audio.It has been widely used in many areas in information retrieval and data mining, providing efficient way of identifying latent topics among document collections. However, LDA has a drawback that topic cohesion within a concept is attenuated when estimating infrequently occurring words. Moreover, LDAseems not to consider the meaning of words, but rather to infer hidden topics based on a statisticalapproach. However, LDA can cause either reduction in the quality of topic words or increase in loose relations between topics. In order to solve the previous problems, we propose a domain specific topic model that combines domain concepts with LDA. Two domain specific algorithms are suggested for solving the difficulties associated with LDA. The main strength of our proposed model comes from the fact that it narrows semantic concepts from broad domain knowledge to a specific one which solves the unknown domain problem. Our proposed model is extensively tested on various applications, query expansion, classification, and summarization, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model. Experimental results show that the proposed model significantly increasesthe performance of applications

Integration and Growth in East Asia

This paper empirically analyzes the experience of East Asiafs economic growth with data both at aggregate-economy and micro-firm levels, focusing on the role of international integration through trade and direct investment. The analysis within a framework of cross-country panel regression shows that trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows have a positive effect on gross domestic product (GDP) growth? particularly in the 1970 and 1980s?while FDI outflows appear to have a negative effect on GDP growth. Micro-level evidence based on manufacturing data in the Republic of Korea (Korea) confirms the positive effect of trade and investment integration on plant-level productivity growth. It also suggests the relationship between FDI outflows and productivity growth depends on the characteristics of a recipient economy. We find that FDI to the Peoplefs Republic of China tends to reduce productivity growth of firms in Korea while FDI to the United States or Japan works in favor of productivity growth.integration, growth, trade, foreign direct investment, East Asia

Improved energy decay estimate for Dir-stationary QQ-valued functions and its applications

In this paper, we establish an improved decay estimate for the Dirichlet energy of Dir-stationary $Q$-valued functions. As a direct application of this estimate, we derive a Liouville-type theorem for bounded Dir-stationary $Q$-valued functions defined on $\mathbb{R}^m$. Additionally, in an attempt to establish the continuity of Dir-stationary $Q$-valued functions, we confirm that such functions exhibit the Lebesgue property at every point within their domain. Finally, we observe that the improved decay estimate implicates that Dir-stationary $Q$-valued functions reside within a generalized Campanato-Morrey space.Comment: All comments welcome

Back to Air in Disarray?: Disparity in Practices and Interpretations on ADIZs Disrupting the Safety of Civil Aviation

The interconnectivity of civil aviation has been long praised with the success of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in harmonizing navigation standards and procedures, along with the utilization of Flight Information Regions (FIRs). However, continuing geopolitical tensions with different implementations of Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZs) have belittled the technical achievement. Among different State practices, some ADIZs have expanded beyond territorial airspace and even overlapped with other FIRs, requiring overflying air- craft to submit flight plans and abide by procedures separate or in addition to air traffic control obligations. The purpose of this Article is to review the ongoing political tensions that are common in issues with ADIZs beyond territorial airspace and to explore different legal schemes put forth by States. While there is no prevailing rule of law that defines the scope and procedure of ADIZs, this Article further revisits the due regard principle under international law and State practices beyond territorial airspace. Due to its reciprocal characteristic, this principle does not solely advocate for the coastal State to arbitrarily put limitations on the freedom of flight beyond its territorial airspace. Rather, the established FIRs have already given considerable certainty and accountability to the overflown State, where the principle also directs both the overflying and overflown States to actively engage in communication and practices involving liaisons. This principle envisions regional confidence-building measures on aerial communication and the technical leadership of ICAO to support these States in reducing the relational gap and facilitating civil–military cooperation