The Optimal Rate of Decline of an Inefficient Industry

This paper considers the problem of the optimal time path of contraction of an industry which has been hit by foreign competition, and shows that in general, along the optimal path, a production subsidy is warranted. The optimal subsidy trades off the benefit of unemployment in speeding up the approach to the new long-run equilibrium against the cost of lost output in the ‘inefficient’ industry. The dynamic shadow price of labour in this industry is also derived and shown to be always positive, though below the industry wage rate

Family Effects in Youth Employment

The authors begin with the hypothesis that parental contacts play a major role in finding jobs for youth. This hypothesis is tested with a model of youth employment that includes characteristics of other family members in addition to a large set of control variables. Particular attention is paid to parental characteristics that might indicate a parent's ability to assist the youth in finding a job, including occupation, industry and education. The effects of such variables are generally not significant and do not support the initial hypothesis. However, the employment probability of a youth is significantly affected by the presence of employed siblings, indicating the presence of some intrafamily effects.

Internal Migration and Regional Population Dynamics in Europe: France Case Study

The paper examines the patterns of internal migration and population change in France over the recent decades at departément and commune scales. Regional population change is controlled by both natural increase and internal migration. There are two differing patterns of natural increase: north and east France has higher natural increase and south and east has lower. The geographic pattern of internal migration has changed substantially over the last 50 years, most dramatically in the Île-de-France, which showed the highest gains between 1954 and 1962 but the highest losses between 1975 and 1982. Urban growth, which was strong in the 1950s and 1960s, reversed in the 1970s favouring small towns but recovered slightly in the last 20 years. Migration gains and losses show a quite complicated pattern of depopulation of city centres combined with slow suburbanisation and advanced periurbanisation. Periurbanisation is evident in Paris region and in nearly all large urban agglomerations. Most other cities show suburbanisation or periurbanisation at various stages of development. Out-migration shows a clear division of the country into a northern part with higher rates, and a central and southern part of the country with lower out-migration. This simple pattern is modified by higher out-migration from some cities such as Lyon or Clermont-Ferrand and from isolated rural communes scattered all over the country. Out-migration also has a regional dimension: there are shifts towards more attractive areas, in particular Alpine region and Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. Analysis of migration between size bands of rural and urban units shows a significant deconcentration process, and a similar pattern characterises migration between population density bands. The general movement is down the urban/density band hierarchy, from higher to lower urban/density bands. Deep rural areas are not attractive and excluded from the process of counterurbanisation. In addition, unemployment was found to have a strong and very efficient impact on migration behaviour. Analysis for 1990-1999 leads to slight modification of this picture: a slow recovery of central parts of the largest urban agglomerations and less differentiated patterns than in the 1980s. Deconcentration of the French population continues but is less powerful

Encoding of temporal probabilities in the human brain

Anticipating the timing of future events is a necessary precursor to preparing actions and allocating resources to sensory processing. This requires elapsed time to be represented in the brain and used to predict the temporal probability of upcoming events. While neuropsychological, imaging, magnetic stimulation studies, and single-unit recordings implicate the role of higher parietal and motor-related areas in temporal estimation, the role of earlier, purely sensory structures remains more controversial. Here we demonstrate that the temporal probability of expected visual events is encoded not by a single area but by a wide network that importantly includes neuronal populations at the very earliest cortical stages of visual processing. Moreover, we show that activity in those areas changes dynamically in a manner that closely accords with temporal expectations

The importance of incorporating technological advancements into the artificial eye process: a perspective commentary

Application of technology into healthcare has typically been targeted to high demand illnesses and treatments. However, with an increasing need to meet patient’s expectations combined with increased accessibility and reduced costs, smaller healthcare fields are starting to investigate its function and usability. Services have historically been led by skills and expertise, and recent developments are being seen by ocularists in the field of prosthetic eyes who acknowledge the potential benefit from technological advancement. Utilising the technologies recently investigated in maxillofacial prosthesis can start the evolutionary process where products are continually re-designed and re-developed to achieve excellent patient outcome and satisfaction levels

The Transformation of Educational Processes in Hungary: Fragmentation or Integration

The Hungarian education system is experiencing a period of major change. The number of students studying at universities and colleges has doubled in the past ten years; last year 96 universities and colleges were amalgamated into 23; and there is also an influx of foreign students into the technical and medical universities. Economically and socially, it is considered that Hungary has successfully completed changes that will take her into the European Union. Many of the educational changes have been driven by the forces of having to change to a market economy. Are the changes likely to enhance the learning experience for Hungarian individuals? By ‘learning’ we understand a fundamental change of view that is likely to impact on an individual’s thinking and behaviour. Firstly, drawing on an earlier theoretical framework that argues for an in-depth historical understanding of culture and change, we analyse the evolution of education in the Hungarian system over the past century. Drawing on a series of interviews with those involved with the changes, particularly at the Budapest Business School, and through a combination of narrative methods and analyses of changes in curricula, we will track the initial responses to these changes and the problems experienced by those responsible for implementing the change. The methodology employed is that of action research. Action research changes focus as it develops, and does not aim to be an accurate picture of a single situation at one point in time. The method has been chosen since it fits in with our views of the world and change, and also to address some of the important methodological problems of carrying out research in the transitional economies ( Michailova and Liuthto, 2000). It draws on our personal interpretations and values and aims at objectivity not through being impersonal or replicable, but through a critical analysis of what is being assumed. The presentation of results will take the form of a reflexive account of our involvement and perceptions of the change process, and will therefore reflect a deepening connection between ourselves as we cross our own personal and cultural barriers. Our chosen method also reflects an understanding that research as it has been traditionally carried out in the West is hierarchical: in this form researchers have power to determine the project and what meanings shall be attached to the lives and words of others, creating a separate culture for researchers: a culture of detachment and power. We want to move away from this, and using action research to expand the meanings so that in our work we can have a ’dialogue’ about the change process which promotes an integration of ideas and meanings between the West and the emerging economies

Take- up of HR Practices in Hungary: Illusion and Disillusion

Hungary will be one of the first of the transition economies to join the EU. Researchers claim that, whilst there are still changes to make, the transition has been made from a planned economy to that of a market economy. ( Agenda 2000, 1998). However, there is claimed to be a lack of enterprising managers as Hungary struggles to come to terms with its new identity, leading to a focus on the way in which organisations manage people. It is not surprising, that Human Resource Management ( HRM), with its focus on management development, is seen as the new magic which can create these managers. In this paper, we seek to challenge the view that what Hungary needs in transition is the wholesale adoption of HR practices. Rather, we would argue that what is required is a deeper understanding of both what we understand by HR practices, and of the cultural context in which such practices are being implemented. We would question the rather simplistic assumption that HR practices will be necessarily helpful on two grounds. Firstly, we examine the notion of HR itself, and suggest that its conceptualisation is complex and problematic. We would argue that ‘managing people’ is a process that emerges from specific historical and cultural contexts, and therefore needs to be examined in this light before prescribing ‘best practice’ models. Further, we suggest that recent work in the UK and elsewhere on discipline in management practices may suggest that we need to be cautious in advocating or adopting such practices without sufficient reflection on the way in which such practices are adopted or implemented. To illustrate this thesis, we first examine our current understandings of HR management, tracing its evolution from the formal management models of the USA into the UK, basing our discussion on Lawrence’s analysis ( 1993). We then chart the discussions and debate around the take-up of HR in the UK, noting that our conceptualisations and paradigms can be confused and contradictory. We argue, however, with Lawrence ( 1993) that the reasons that the HR rhetoric ( if not the practices) has been welcomed in the UK is due to a series of historical events which have created a particular set of conditions where the need for clear communication and motivation created through management development is seen to be particularly important. Here the promises of HR practices are particularly appealing ( see for example, Zimmerman, 1993). We then show the evolution of ‘people management’ in the Hungarian context, tracing its emergence from planned to market economy. Drawing on history and past and contemporary literature, we trace the ways in which organisations have developed in the Hungarian context. We then suggest that, whilst there is a radically different history and set of attitudes to work in Hungary and the UK, there are some similarities in terms of the need for communication and motivation of the workforce which may lead to the take-up of HR rhetoric, if not practices. These conditions are such where management control is of the utmost importance, thus the disciplinary potential of such practices may well be actualised. Before such practices are implemented wholesale, we would argue, there needs to be more critical reflection on the nature of HR and the context in which it is implemented if Hungarian organisations are to evolve creatively from its dramatic process of change

The Optimal Rate of Decline of an Inefficient Industry

This paper considers the problem of the optimal time path of contraction of an industry which has been hit by foreign competition, and shows that in general, along the optimal path, a production subsidy is warranted. The optimal subsidy trades off the benefit of unemployment in speeding up the approach to the new long-run equilibrium against the cost of lost output in the ‘inefficient’ industry. The dynamic shadow price of labour in this industry is also derived and shown to be always positive, though below the industry wage rat

How many metals does it take to fix N2? A mechanistic overview of biological nitrogen fixation

During the process of biological nitrogen fixation, the enzyme nitrogenase catalyzes the ATP-dependent reduction of dinitrogen to ammonia. Nitrogenase consists of two component metalloproteins, the iron (Fe) protein and the molybdenum-iron (MoFe) protein; the Fe protein mediates the coupling of ATP hydrolysis to interprotein electron transfer, whereas the active site of the MoFe protein contains the polynuclear FeMo cofactor, a species composed of seven iron atoms, one molybdenum atom, nine sulfur atoms, an interstitial light atom, and one homocitrate molecule. This Perspective provides an overview of biological nitrogen fixation and introduces three contributions to this special feature that address central aspects of the mechanism and assembly of nitrogenase

Alignment of the Angular Momentum Vectors of Planetary Nebulae in the Galactic Bulge

We use high-resolution H {\alpha} images of 130 planetary nebulae (PNe) to investigate whether there is a preferred orientation for PNe within the Galactic Bulge. The orientations of the full sample have an uniform distribution. However, at a significance level of 0.01, there is evidence for a non-uniform distribution for those planetary nebulae with evident bipolar morphology. If we assume that the bipolar PNe have an unimodal distribution of the polar axis in Galactic coordinates, the mean Galactic position angle is consistent with 90{\deg}, i.e. along the Galactic plane, and the significance level is better than 0.001 (the equivalent of a 3.7{\sigma} significance level for a Gaussian distribution). The shapes of PNe are related to angular momentum of the original star or stellar system, where the long axis of the nebula measures the angular momentum vector. In old, low-mass stars, the angular momentum is largely in binary orbital motion. Consequently, the alignment of bipolar nebulae that we have found indicates that the orbital planes of the binary systems are oriented perpendicular to the Galactic plane. We propose that strong magnetic fields aligned along the Galactic plane acted during the original star formation process to slow the contraction of the star forming cloud in the direction perpendicular to the plane. This would have produced a propensity for wider binaries with higher angular momentum with orbital axes parallel to the Galactic plane. Our findings provide the first indication of a strong, organized magnetic field along the Galactic plane that impacted on the angular momentum vectors of the resulting stellar population.Comment: There are two effective parts. The main paper consists of the first 17 pages and includes 8 figures and 7 tables. The remaining 10 pages will be published as an online supplement that is made up of 4 multi-part figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS Main Journa