Search results for "Resizing"

EU Cohesion Policy after Enlargement - Edited by M. Baun and D. Marek

2009

A Neofunctionalist Perspective on the ‘European Refugee Crisis’: The Case of the European Border and Coast Guard

2017

Initial literature on the ‘European refugee crisis’ discerned intergovernmental tendencies in its management. This paper examines whether neofunctionalism may be able to explain a major case of ‘European refugee crisis’ policy-making, the negotiations on the European Border and Coast Guard regulation. We argue, somewhat counterintuitively, that the theory considerably furthers our respective understanding. The crisis acted as a catalyst exposing the weaknesses of a system that pitted a supranational Schengen against a largely intergovernmental external border regime, notwithstanding a developing Frontex. These dysfunctionalities have been widely fostered by both national and supranational d…

Urban Governance in Latvia: Feeling Urban and Thinking Rural

2019

Urbanisation is affecting not only countries with high number of residents but also with small number. The aim of the research is to explore urbanisation and shrinking city tendencies in a country with small number of residents in the context of globalization and urbanisation. The “donut effect” will be explored in the capital city Riga and ten municipalities nearby. The main research question is to what extent can the classical understanding and perception of urbanisation be applied to small societies and countries, and what kind of effects does the urbanisation create in such dynamically developing countries. There are several interdependent problems, such as the new patterns of urban–rur…

The Nordic difference: Job quality in Europe 1995–2010

2012

Previous empirical research has pointed out that Nordic countries are distinguished from the rest of Europe in terms of job quality. On the other hand, it has been debated whether, in the longer run, the Nordic welfare state is able to insulate workers from globalization effects. This article investigates whether Nordic countries have retained their advantageous position concerning job quality compared with other EU countries. Empirical analyses are based on the European Working Conditions Survey collected in 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010. We use data on employees in the 15 member states of the EU prior to enlargement in 2004 (n = 61,457). The results partly confirm previous findings of high j…

Post-Enlargement Return Migrants' Earnings Premium: Evidence from Latvia

2008

The paper exploits a recent survey of over ten thousand economically active residents of Latvia; about 5% of respondents have worked abroad over the last three years, while 12% have family members with such experience. Post-enlargement labor migration from Latvia has been predominantly low-skilled, yet return migrants when compared to stayers are, on average, more educated and less likely to work as unskilled manuals. We combine instrumental variable and propensity score matching methods to study the effect of foreign experience on earnings. Results suggest that return migrants are neither positively nor negatively selected in terms of earnings. However, after controlling for worker demogra…

EMU enlargement, stabilization costs and insurance mechanisms

2008

This paper considers the determinants of the macroeconomic costs of joining EMU for the new EU Member Sates, and compares them with those of the EMU members. Specifically, we investigate the business cycle correlation between the candidate's economy and that of the euro area as a whole, and the ability of insurance mechanisms and fiscal policies to smooth income fluctuations. The results suggest that EMU membership would not be costly for some countries (Cyprus, Hungary and Malta) but for other countries it could have relevant costs, at least in the short-run. For some of these countries, business cycles are not yet well synchronized with the euro area's business cycle, and risk-sharing mec…

Seniority rules, worker mobility and wages : evidence from multi-country linked employer-employee data

2018

We construct multi-country employer-employee data to examine the consequences of last-in, first-out rules. We identify the effects by comparing worker exit rates between different units of the same firms operating in Sweden and Finland, two countries that have different seniority rules. We observe a relatively lower exit rate for more senior workers in Sweden in the shrinking firms and among the low-wage workers. These empirical patterns are consistent with last-in, first-out rules in Sweden providing protection from dismissals for the more senior workers among the worker groups to whom the rules are most relevant. Similarly, we observe a steeper seniority-wage profile in Sweden, suggesting…

The dark side of European immigration policy

2011

More than ten years after the Treaty of Amsterdam came into force and after the programmes of Tampere and Aia, the Stockholm Programme , adopted last December 2009 for the period 2010-2014, has settled for the third time the area of "justice, freedom and security" with which EU presents itself. In relation to the Immigration policy the Stockholm Programme seals the term of security. Now Europe considers its area as a territory that withdraws into itself, through a security logic that caused the disappearance of the traces of the "freedom area". In fact, as it was affirmed in Tampere, this area can't be considered as a mere prerogative of the European citizens. In the name of security, prote…

Browser independent content based image resizing for liquid web layouts

2010

A typical problem for webdesigners is to realize pages that can be potentially accessed from a number of display devices with different screen sizes and resolutions. Liquid layouts can help for this purpose. However, they can not typically be applied to images, which need to be rescaled or deformed. In both cases usability could be deteriorated. Content-aware image resizing techniques can help for this goal by rescaling the images to the desired width while preserving important image structures. This paper presents a content-aware resizing technique which can be seamlessly integrated into web pages without any effort from the user. The results from the system application prove its effective…

Monte-Carlo image retargeting

2014

In this paper an efficient method for image retargeting is proposed. It relies on a monte-carlo model that makes use of image saliency. Each random sample is extracted from deformation probability mass function defined properly, and shrinks or enlarges the image by a fixed size. The shape of the function, determining which regions of the image are affected by the deformations, depends on the image saliency. High informative regions are less likely to be chosen, while low saliency regions are more probable. Such a model does not require any optimization, since its solution is obtained by extracting repeatedly random samples, and allows real-time application even for large images. Computation…