The external trade of the BRICs during 1997-2008. Perspectives

At the beginning of 2001, the experts of the Goldman Sachs Research Group launched a new acronym in the field of world economy: BRIC. This abbreviation represents the group of four countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China and has generated a long list of quantitative, as well as qualitative researches. Among these BRIC researches, only few examine both trade in goods and services, in relation with developed countries. As a result, in order to deepen the analysis in this direction, the present paper focuses on the BRIC’s increasing role in the world trade in goods and services during 1997-2008, in comparison with the G-7, starting from a quantitative analysis. At the level of trade in goods, taking into consideration the export structure, the BRIC countries can be divided into two complementary groups: on the one side, there are China and India, whose exports are dominated by manufactures, on the other side there are Brazil and Russia, with commodities’ share in exports surpassing that of manufactures. From the viewpoint of export propensity, Brazil and India are less inclined to export their goods, while China and Russia are prone to export. These features, among other factors, reflect the evolution of trade balance of the analysed countries: India records trade deficits, while China and Russia, and to a lesser extent Brazil, have trade surpluses. Among the BRIC countries, China recorded the biggest “leap” of its share in world trade: from circa 3% in 1997, to approximately 8% in 2008. BRIC’s share in global trade in goods grew from 6% in 1997, to about 13% in 2008, bringing down the difference between its share and G-7’s share from circa 41 percentage points in 1997 to 24 percentage points in 2008. In the field of services, China is the main exporter and importer among the BRIC countries. Nevertheless, it records large trade deficits, and services continue to have a small share in its trade. This characteristic is valid for Russia and Brazil as well. By contrast, in India’s case, services have a share of about 37% in its total exports (goods plus services) and 24% in its total imports, these shares being even above those recorded by the USA. BRIC’s share in global trade in services grew from 5% in 1997, to about 10% in 2008, bringing down the difference between its share and G-7’s share from circa 45 percentage points in 1997 to 31 percentage points in 2008. Putting face to face the results recorded by the BRIC countries in trade in goods and those recorded in trade in services, it is obvious that China, Brazil and Russia are more competitive in trade in goods than in trade in services, while India is the most competitive emergent country in trade in services. The FDI structure in these countries, determined by their investment attractiveness, has played a major role in this evolution. Concerning the actual economic and financial crisis, its impact on the BRIC countries in terms of trade is not dramatic. Nevertheless, the aid packages adopted by these countries underline a change of strategy and orientation with accent on the internal market. The value-added of this empirical analysis to the existent ones is the comparative approach of trade in goods and trade in services of Brazil, Russia, India and China, at the aggregate level. At the same time, it underlines the BRIC’s increasing role in the world trade in goods and services during 1997-2008, in comparison with the G-7, starting from a quantitative analysis.BRIC; trade in goods; trade in services; normalized trade balance; foreign direct investment (FDI)

Acceleration of stereo-matching on multi-core CPU and GPU

This paper presents an accelerated version of a dense stereo-correspondence algorithm for two different parallelism enabled architectures, multi-core CPU and GPU. The algorithm is part of the vision system developed for a binocular robot-head in the context of the CloPeMa 1 research project. This research project focuses on the conception of a new clothes folding robot with real-time and high resolution requirements for the vision system. The performance analysis shows that the parallelised stereo-matching algorithm has been significantly accelerated, maintaining 12x and 176x speed-up respectively for multi-core CPU and GPU, compared with non-SIMD singlethread CPU. To analyse the origin of the speed-up and gain deeper understanding about the choice of the optimal hardware, the algorithm was broken into key sub-tasks and the performance was tested for four different hardware architectures

Market Transparency and Call Markets

This paper reports the results of 16 experimental asset markets that explore the effects of trade transparency on the price formation process and its results using a more realistic design than related studies. The open orderbook does not improve informational efficiency and does not result in higher liquidity (lower transaction costs). An increase in information intensity leads to both higher trading volume and higher volatility in both orderbook treatments. The comparison shows that they only differ in price volatility which is higher with an open orderbook. The market results mentioned above are confirmed by analyses on the individual level. --Market Microstructure,Experimental Asset Markets,Orderbook Transparency,Individual Behavior in Call Markets

Strengths And Weaknesses Of The New Public Management (NPM)- Cross-Sectional And Longitudinal Analysis

The paradigm of NPM, like its forerunners, has been trying to answer the same question for almost twenty years: how to implement policies, strategies, programs and projects, using the market-type mechanisms, so that the institutions of the state could achieve the desired results. The praises and criticism that have accompanied this paradigm along its evolution are fully justified. Indeed, the NPM has strengths and weaknesses as well, and one purpose of this paper is to identify them and to find answers to the following questions. Which components of the mechanism named NPM generate negative results? Why? What can be done? It is not easy to answer these questions, taking into consideration the multitude of factors influencing the public management, and especially the tremendous impacts of the accelerated process of globalization. The global problems of nowadays make any unilateral action of a government unconceivable, and this brings us to the concept of global public management (GPM). Nevertheless, the way forward will be the subject of another paper. The paper is structured in two main sections, as follows: The first section provides a conceptual framework, examining the multifaceted structure of the NPM and its mechanisms (the “state-of-the-art” of the “art of the state”). The second section suggests a theoretical framework on “measuring” the aggregate attribute of the NPM – the QoG – illustrated by practical cases, in a twofold perspective: longitudinal (variation in time) and cross-sectional (variation among countries).New Public Management, Global Public Management, Governance, New Institutional Economics, Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Corruption Perceptions Index, e-Government Index, Global Competitiveness Index, Human Development Index, Index of Freedom in the World, Transition Indicators, Worldwide Governance Indicators

Puterea Comercială a Asiei

The present paper, based on a detailed analysis of the main statistical foreign trade indicators of the emerging economies of the Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, outlines a series of characteristics of the foreign trade flows of the analyzed economies from the ’50 up to the present. The accent is set on the period 1995-2006, which emphasizes two moments of crisis of the Asian trade: 1997-1998 and 2001. At the level of the analyzed economies, it can be remarked a tendency of continuous growth of the share of the intra-regional trade flows in the total trade flows, mainly due to their participation in regional trade agreements, to the strengthening of the regional production networks, to the role of China as engine of economic growth in the whole region and even at global level. On product category, the manufactures have the greatest share in the merchandise exports of the Asian emerging economies (especially office and telecom equipment, integrated circuits, automotive products, textiles and clothing, etc.). While China surpassed the share of the Asian tigers of the first generation in the world trade in 2001 and that of Japan in 2004, the scenario presented in this paper indicates the surpass in 2007 of the share of Germany (second place in the world trade in 2005), the surpass of the share of the Asian tigers of the first generation in 2009, and the surpass of the share of the group of the 8 Asian tigers and that of the USA as well in 2012. In the following decades, China might become the strongest world economy at the global level, but only if the sustainable development and the eradication of the social inequities will become de facto priorities of the Chinese officials. The actual negative externalities (costs) of the Chinese economic growth, transferred on the environment and the society, will be object to another analysis.economii emergente; tigri asiatici; fluxuri comerciale; balanţă comercială; balanţă comercială normalizată; grad de acoperire a importurilor prin exporturi; deschidere economică; înclinaţie spre export; indicele Grubel-Lloyd; delocalizare / relocalizare a capacităţilor productive; comerţ interregional; comerţ intraregional; avantaj comparativ; competitivitate industrială; investiţii străine directe (ISD); fluxuri de capital; criză financiară; depreciere valutară

Institutional Herding in Bond Markets

Recent research has shown that institutional herding is a relevant phenomenon in stock markets. Do institutional investors also follow each other in bond markets? This paper focuses on the German bond market and uses data from 57 German mutual funds that invest mainly in DM-denominated bonds, which represents 71% of the total market volume. Due to the variety and large number of bonds that exist, we do not expect mutual funds to herd with regard to separate bonds. We believe instead that bonds with the same characteristics such as interest rate, maturity, collateral, or issuer are considered to be equivalent by institutional investors. Consequently, we construct "bond groups" consisting of similar bonds and analyze herding at a "bond group" level. Our results indicate that there is strong evidence of herding, albeit it is weaker than in stock markets. Further analysis suggests that mutual funds do not place an equal weight on different bond characteristics. Nominal interest rates appear to be most important in the bond selection process. --Mutual Funds,Herding,Imitation,Coordination,Behavioral Finance

Do Insiders Contribute to Market Efficiency? Informational Efficiency and Liquidity of Experimental Call Markets with and without Insiders

This paper reports the results of 13 experimental asset markets with 195 subjects that explore the effects of insider behavior on the price formation process and market liquidity. The experimental call markets use a more realistic design than related studies. We introduce infinitely-lived assets instead of periodical liquidation (so-called ?reset? markets) and provide full market transparency to the investors with an open orderbook. Our main findings are that insider trading does not improve informational efficiency at all but depresses market liquidity of the assets significantly. At a first glance, the observed spread widening as an impact of insider behavior leads to the conclusion that our call markets react ?as if? all subjects behave rationally like dealers in a market making environment. At a second glance, a first look into the individual data shows that only a smaller group of investors act as ?endogenous? market makers in the call market regime. --Market Microstructure,Experimental Asset Markets,Insider Behavior,Market Efficiency,Call Markets,Behavioral Finance

Developing a compiler for the XeonPhi (TR-2014-341)

The XeonPhi is a highly parallel x86 architecture chip made by Intel. It has a number of novel features which make it a particularly challenging target for the compiler writer. This paper describes the techniques used to port the Glasgow Vector Pascal Compiler (VPC) to this architecture and assess its performance by comparisons of the XeonPhi with 3 other machines running the same algorithms

Discovering the best: Informational efficiency and liquidity of alternative trading mechanisms in experimental asset markets

This paper reports the results of 18 experimental asset markets with 262 subjects that explore the effects of liquidity and aggregation of information. The main focus lies on the comparison of different trading mechanisms of stock exchanges. Compared to most of financial markets experiments, reality is met by introducing long-living assets and integrating all subjects in a multi-period decision-making process. In accordance with the evidence from the empirical research in real financial markets, our results show that the continuous auction achieves the highest informational efficiency. Dealer markets do the worst; call markets (batch trading) reach an intermediate position. A comparable result is achieved regarding the liquidity of the trading mechanisms. For both success factors of real stock exchanges our results show a strong tendency that continuous trading outperforms the other market structures, at least in the framework of the present measurement and on the chosen abstraction level. This does not exclude for the practice to offer a combination with call markets in certain titles and at certain times, particularly, if the here met assumptions of an open market access and information symmetry between the investors do not apply in full extent. --Market Microstructure,Experimental Asset Markets,Market Efficiency,Informational Efficiency,Liquidity,Call Markets,Continuous Auction