Standardization union effects: the case of EU enlargement

The analysis of trade policy shows growing interest in various types of “standards”. While technical regulations and standards are introduced to protect the interest of consumers, they can also act as technical barriers to trade (TBT), as foreign suppliers complying with national regulations might be required to bear certain costs of adjustment to the new regime. Recent literature focused on the concept of standards and concluded that shared standards promote trade. We instead set our attention to technical regulations of the European Union and concentrate on their effects on trade costs. The analysis is inspired by Gandal and Shy’s (2001) cost reducing standardization union theory. This paper summarizes results of research undertaken within a larger product assessing importance of technical barriers to trade for new EU members. The recent empirical study by Hagemejer (2005), based on detailed trade data of the EU. He has shown that in sectors where the EU technical regulations are most complicated and require costly adaptation, the trade within EU is booming. He argues that the trade between EU members is more concentrated within the high-TBT products, while the imports from outside are focused on the low-TBT or no-TBT products. Thus, EU technical regulations might in fact be trade diverting if the difference in productivity between intra and extra-EU partners is large. In this context we analyze the pattern of new members’ exports to the “old” EU. We calculate the trade coverage of various standardisation approaches and analyze the comparative advantage structure of the new EU members. We demonstrate that the structure of TBT’s affecting exports from new EU members is slowly converging with the one that characterizes intra-EU trade. Therefore, we expect that CEEC’s countries will benefit from applying common technical regulations of the EU after accession. In the last section of our paper we report the results of questionnaire-based research made among Polish companies in December of 2004, i.e. after the Eastern enlargement. It seems that the adjustment costs were moderate and the adaptation process to new technical regulations is already completed. Therefore, one can expected welfare gains for new members of the EU. We perform a CGE simulation using a GTAP model to assess these gains.EU enlargement; technical barriers to trade; international trade

Recurrent DNNs and its Ensembles on the TIMIT Phone Recognition Task

In this paper, we have investigated recurrent deep neural networks (DNNs) in combination with regularization techniques as dropout, zoneout, and regularization post-layer. As a benchmark, we chose the TIMIT phone recognition task due to its popularity and broad availability in the community. It also simulates a low-resource scenario that is helpful in minor languages. Also, we prefer the phone recognition task because it is much more sensitive to an acoustic model quality than a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition task. In recent years, recurrent DNNs pushed the error rates in automatic speech recognition down. But, there was no clear winner in proposed architectures. The dropout was used as the regularization technique in most cases, but combination with other regularization techniques together with model ensembles was omitted. However, just an ensemble of recurrent DNNs performed best and achieved an average phone error rate from 10 experiments 14.84 % (minimum 14.69 %) on core test set that is slightly lower then the best-published PER to date, according to our knowledge. Finally, in contrast of the most papers, we published the open-source scripts to easily replicate the results and to help continue the development.Comment: Submitted to SPECOM 2018, 20th International Conference on Speech and Compute

EU accession and Poland's external trade policy

No description supplie

Anizochronní model metalurgického RH procesu

RH process is a metallurgical process, which serves for vacuum treatment of liquid steel by recirculation method, which enhances quality of steel that was made either in basic oxygen converter (BOF) or in electric arc furnace (EAF). The paper presents a project and verification of appropriate physically adequate cybernetic anisochronous model of this process. This model was obtained on the basis of measured and transformed data of dimensionless concentration of model liquid in the physical model of a pouring ladle with the RH chamber, constructed in the same length (geometric) scale 1:9 to the original objects. Mathematical model will be used for optimisation of RH process under operational conditions.RH proces je metalurgický pochod, který slouží k vakuování tekuté oceli recirkulačním způsobem za účelem zvyšování kvality oceli vyrobené v kyslíkovém konvertoru anebo v elektrické obloukové peci. V příspěvku je prezentován návrh a ověření vhodného fyzikálně adekvátního kybernetického anizochronního modelu tohoto procesu. Uvedený model byl získán na základě naměřených a transformovaných údajů bezrozměrové koncentrace modelové kapaliny ve fyzikálním modelu licí pánve s RH komorou, sestrojených ve stejném délkovém (geometrickém) měřítku 1:9 k dílu. Matematický model bude použit k optimalizaci RH procesu v provozních podmínkách