Privatisation Effects: Some Evidence from Serbia

This paper analyses basic outcome and effects of the privatisation process in Serbia. The first two parts of the paper deal with general achievements of the newest privatisation plan adopted in 2001. We present a brief background of the results of the privatisation process, analysing changes in the structure of enterprises by ownership status, the number of privatised firms, revenues earned through privatisation, the rate of successful transactions, and other relevant privatisation indicators. The paper continues with an analysis of a survey conducted within a sample of Serbian enterprises offering some evidence about performance, competition, and restructuring within different types of firms: socially owned, privatised, and new private. Contrary to the broadly accepted statement that new private firms are leading in transition economies, according to our estimation of the effects of the ownership type on firm performance, it appears that the privatised sector seems to be more active. A comparison of the survey results with findings for three neighbouring countries indicates that there is no general conclusion about the way how ownership status of a firm affects its performance in a transition economy. Although conclusions drawn from our survey analysis should be regarded as preliminary and limited by the quality of survey data and could not be generalised for the privatisation process in other transition countries, the findings we present, including the comparison made with other economies, could contribute to the understanding of both privatisation effects in general and effects remarkable for the Serbian economy.      

Serbian Judiciary and Transition: Recent Jurisprudence

This article examines the role and position of national courts during transitional periods with focus on and case study of the judiciary in Serbia. Courts in Serbia, as any other judiciary in transition, have undergone a staggering transformative process as illustrated by a chronology of human rights cases. On the other hand, courts in Serbia, as their counterparts worldwide, have also been the transformation force, as evidenced by recent jurisprudence in cases dealing more or less successfully with political assassinations, organized crime, corruption, war crimes, and international courts.     

近代史中的共和国工业长子

与前两次全国文物普查有所不同。第三次全国文物普查（简称“三普”）在类别范围上有了更进一步的扩展。工业遗产、乡土建筑、文化线路等曾被忽略了的项目都进入了普查之列。这既说明中国的文物保护范围正在不断扩展。保护对象日益广泛。也让我们清楚地认识到：文化遗产是一个内涵十分深刻并且还在不断发展丰富的概念。     

Diathesis stress or differential susceptibility? testing longitudinal associations between parenting,temperament, and children's problem behavior

In this study we investigated longitudinal associations among parenting, children's temperamental negative affectivity, and internalizing and externalizing behavior. Second, we tested whether findings confirmed the diathesis‐stress model or differential susceptibility theory when conducting stringent interaction tests. The sample included 129 children and their families. Parenting quality (age 5) was measured by parent–child interaction observations. Parents evaluated child negative affectivity (age 7) and teachers reported on problem behavior (age 12). Multiple regression analyses revealed an interaction effect of negative affectivity and parenting on externalizing behavior. Visual inspection suggested ‘for better and for worse’ effects of parenting for children with negative affectivity. However, more stringent tests failed to show convincing evidence for differential susceptibility theory. For internalizing behavior, negative affectivity may render children vulnerable regardless of parenting. Our results point at the importance of further testing interaction effects to distinguish between differential susceptibility theory and the diathesis‐stress model.     

Stochastic approximation methods in linear regression models (with consideration of errors in the regressors) 1

Usually, the dependence in stationary processes is described by a set of coefficients. In this paper, a measure of dependence is proposed which can be used instead of the autocorrelation function, and another measure for the dependence between two processes instead of cross-correlation function and coherence coefficients. In the end, an improvement of extrapolation of a process is investigated which is caused by the knowledge of another related process.     

家庭农场发展的影响因素及对策——基于SWOT模型的实证研究

在对河南省舞钢市21个家庭农场进行实证调查的基础上,以SWOT为分析模型,分别对影响家庭农场发展的内部优势、内部劣势、外部机遇和外部威胁进行统筹分析,认为家庭农场发展目前仍处在"幼年"阶段,面临诸多"成长的烦恼",探索合理的发展策略尤为重要。并在此基础上提出包括:土地流转、多元化服务、信贷扶持、保险引导、建立健全农业社会化服务体系以及创优品牌诸方面在内的提升家庭农场发展的6项战略对策。     

Post-Communist Transition: The Case of Two Lithuanian Capital Cities

Even though officially Lithuania has but one capital, Vilnius, it is often thought and spoken as if there were two important capitals for the Lithuanian consciousness. Vilnius is the official capital, but in modern Lithuanian history Kaunas, the country's second-largest city, from 1920 to 1990 played a symbolic role as the temporary capital. This resulted from the fact that for a part of this period Lithuania had lost Vilnius due to a conflict with Poland.

The 15 years after the fall of communism brought to Lithuania not only the fruits of independence but also a host of identity problems. Intense discussions were aroused by the fortunes of sites in Vilnius and Kaunas that had symbolic importance for the national consciousness. The current urbanistic-architectural development of Vilnius first of all reflects the desire to implement the projects that the Lithuanians could not realize during the long decades of war and occupation. An extreme expression of these sentiments is embodied in the much-disputed endeavor to reconstruct the Renaissance Ducal Palace.

Though contemporary Lithuania and its national identity are more or less products of the twentieth century, the current state policy has given priority to the romantic symbols of the old Lithuanian Grand Duchy. The memorial sites in the temporary capital, especially the Resurrection Church, once a symbol of the nation's vital tenacity, were accorded a merely local significance. On the other hand, after 1990 Kaunas lost the real significance it once had in the Lithuanian consciousness as the temporary capital. Slowly but inevitably it is becoming a normal and free university city in a maturing civil society.     

Estimating parameters of a selected Pareto population

Let Π₁,…,Π_k be k populations with Π_i being Pareto with unknown scale parameter α_i and known shape parameter β_i;i=1,…,k. Suppose independent random samples (X_i1,…,X_in), i=1,…,k of equal size are drawn from each of k populations and let X_i denote the smallest observation of the ith sample. The population corresponding to the largest X_i is selected. We consider the problem of estimating the scale parameter of the selected population and obtain the uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimator (UMVUE) when the shape parameters are assumed to be equal. An admissible class of linear estimators is derived. Further, a general inadmissibility result for the scale equivariant estimators is proved.