Romania's Exchange Rate Policy towards its European Monetary Union Membership - Prospects and Challenges

This paper has a focus in considering the implications of the European integration for the present and future exchange rate arrangements between the European Union and Romania as an emerging country. The objective of this paper is to examine rather medium-term outlook for exchange rate arrangement involving Romania in its European membership process and the EU in the new single currency environment. The national currency has a managed floating exchange rate regime against the single European currency, compatible with the inflation targeting policy currently promoted in Romania. Romania will also have to register a quite problematic coexistence of inflation targeting with an exchange rate stability after joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism II. An exchange rate arrangement involving the national currency and the single European currency must be quite flexible to the economic conditions of Romanian economy and to the policy commitments of the authorities. The arrangement will also have to be compatible with the price stability objective of the European monetary policy and will need to strengthen the national authorities’ capacity of achieving the structural adjustment. The flexibility within the ERM II will allow all of these ends to be fulfilled. Joining the ERM II and thus registering a formal link to the single European currency, the Romanian economy will enjoy a greater credibility in the context of an anchor for macroeconomic policies. The ERM II has also a few disadvantages. A hard pegging with the euro inside the ERM II wouldn’t be appropriate given the incapacity of the emerging market system of determining an equilibrium level for the exchange rate of the national currency against the euro. A real exchange rate appreciation could also generate tensions as a result of price tendency and differences in productivity growth between the national economy and the Euro Area countries.exchange rate policy, EMU

Exclusion of ethnic groups from the realm of humanity: Prejudice against the gypsies in Britain and in Romania

Copyright @ 2005 PromolibroPrejudice against ethnic minorities is investigated not only as the establishment of difference between social groups on valued dimensions but also as the denial of similarities that would prevent the inclusion of both ingroups and outgroups in the superordinate category of human-beings. The present study sought to explore the two concepts that are advanced to describe the phenomenon of dehumanisation of out-groups: their ontologisation and their infrahumanisation in relation to the Gypsy minority. British and Romanian participants were asked to rate their national ingroup and the Gypsies using characteristics judged typically human and typically animal following the ontologisation and infrahumanisation literature. The results indicated the the ontologisation of the Gypsies occurs in both national samples whereas their infrahumanisation is only verified for the British participants. The implications of these findings are discussed from the perspectives of the infrahumanisation and ontologisation

Inter-organizational fault management: Functional and organizational core aspects of management architectures

Outsourcing -- successful, and sometimes painful -- has become one of the hottest topics in IT service management discussions over the past decade. IT services are outsourced to external service provider in order to reduce the effort required for and overhead of delivering these services within the own organization. More recently also IT services providers themselves started to either outsource service parts or to deliver those services in a non-hierarchical cooperation with other providers. Splitting a service into several service parts is a non-trivial task as they have to be implemented, operated, and maintained by different providers. One key aspect of such inter-organizational cooperation is fault management, because it is crucial to locate and solve problems, which reduce the quality of service, quickly and reliably. In this article we present the results of a thorough use case based requirements analysis for an architecture for inter-organizational fault management (ioFMA). Furthermore, a concept of the organizational respective functional model of the ioFMA is given.Comment: International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC

Induction of Word and Phrase Alignments for Automatic Document Summarization

Current research in automatic single document summarization is dominated by two effective, yet naive approaches: summarization by sentence extraction, and headline generation via bag-of-words models. While successful in some tasks, neither of these models is able to adequately capture the large set of linguistic devices utilized by humans when they produce summaries. One possible explanation for the widespread use of these models is that good techniques have been developed to extract appropriate training data for them from existing document/abstract and document/headline corpora. We believe that future progress in automatic summarization will be driven both by the development of more sophisticated, linguistically informed models, as well as a more effective leveraging of document/abstract corpora. In order to open the doors to simultaneously achieving both of these goals, we have developed techniques for automatically producing word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase alignments between documents and their human-written abstracts. These alignments make explicit the correspondences that exist in such document/abstract pairs, and create a potentially rich data source from which complex summarization algorithms may learn. This paper describes experiments we have carried out to analyze the ability of humans to perform such alignments, and based on these analyses, we describe experiments for creating them automatically. Our model for the alignment task is based on an extension of the standard hidden Markov model, and learns to create alignments in a completely unsupervised fashion. We describe our model in detail and present experimental results that show that our model is able to learn to reliably identify word- and phrase-level alignments in a corpus of pairs