Global Advantage Research Articles

How did rising labor costs erode China’s global advantage?

Abstract Labor costs in China have been increasing dramatically in recent years, spurring worries that the country may lose its comparative advantage in manufacturing and its role as the “World’s Factory”. This paper aims to evaluate the effects of rising labor costs on China’s attractiveness to multinationals and its competitiveness in exports, by using regional variations in minimum wage distortion as possibly exogenous shocks to unskilled-labor costs. We first develop a two-sector model by introducing the minimum wage into a general equilibrium model which integrates production and trade in a multi-regional setting. Consistent with model predictions, we find that rising minimum wage distortion reduces more of the exports in unskilled-labor intensive industries. Moreover, exports by foreign invested firms are more sensitive to changes in minimum wage distortion than exports by domestic firms, and both intensive and extensive margins matter for this distinction.

Bank ownership, institutional quality and financial stability: evidence from the GCC region

This paper empirically investigates the effects of bank ownership and institutional factors on the banking sector financial stability for a sample of 76 banks in the GCC markets. We used the GMM estimator and Merton’s DD and PD as our main dependent variables on annual data of 14 years in order to assess the financial stability. The analysis sub-sampled considering private vs state, domestic vs foreign owned, Islamic vs conventional and small vs large vs all banks in the GCC markets. We found all state-owned banks to be more stable than privately-owned banks. However, after controlling for size this finding is true for small but not large state-owned banks. This means as state-owned banks grow in size, they appear to lose their previously held stability advantage and privatisation might be pondered to preserve their financial stability. We also found, in line with the global advantage hypothesis, that foreign-owned banks to be more stable and have a lower probability of default than the domestically- owned banks. In addition, even though our analysis shows that the Islamic banking model did not change the stability level, Islamic banks were found to register a higher probability of default than their conventional counterparts. Finally, with the exception of the rule of law variable, the other three institutional variables were found to positively affect the financial stability the GCC banking sector.

SAR Image Classification Using Fully Connected Conditional Random Fields Combined with Deep Learning and Superpixel Boundary Constraint

As one of the most important active remote sensing technologies, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides advanced advantages of all-day, all-weather, and strong penetration capabilities. Due to its unique electromagnetic spectrum and imaging mechanism, the dimensions of remote sensing data have been considerably expanded. Important for fundamental research in microwave remote sensing, SAR image classification has been proven to have great value in many remote sensing applications. Many widely used SAR image classification algorithms rely on the combination of hand-designed features and machine learning classifiers, which still experience many issues that remain to be resolved and overcome, including optimized feature representation, the fuzzy confusion of speckle noise, the widespread applicability, and so on. To mitigate some of the issues and to improve the pattern recognition of high-resolution SAR images, a ConvCRF model combined with superpixel boundary constraint is developed. The proposed algorithm can successfully combine the local and global advantages of fully connected conditional random fields and deep models. An optimizing strategy using a superpixel boundary constraint in the inference iterations more efficiently preserves structure details. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides competitive advantages over other widely used models. In the land cover classification experiments using the MSTAR, E-SAR and GF-3 datasets, the overall accuracy of our proposed method achieves 90.18 ± 0.37, 91.63 ± 0.27, and 90.91 ± 0.31, respectively. Regarding the issues of SAR image classification, a novel integrated learning containing local and global image features can bring practical implications.

КИТАЙСКО-РОССИЙСКИЕ ДИПЛОМАТИЧЕСКИЕ ОТНОШЕНИЯ В ОБЛАСТИ ЗДРАВООХРАНЕНИЯ В ПЕРИОД НОВОЙ КОРОНАВИРУСНОЙ ИНФЕКЦИИ (COVID-2019)

This article analyzes Chinese-Russian healthcare diplomacy. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that with the advent of globalization, cooperation between countries is increasing, and the strengthening of diplomatic relations becomes especially important. The status of diplomacy in state strategy is growing and the integration of different social spheres is gradually taking place. Thus, various forms of diplomacy, such as cultural, economic, and military ones, are emerging. At first, global healthcare diplomacy was not a priority for research in the field of diplomacy. Nevertheless, since the 21st century, SARS, Ebola virus, avian influenza, and the new coronavirus pneumonia have brought public health issues to the top of the political agenda in various countries, making the international community invest considerable effort and resources in providing medical treatment. And it brought global healthcare diplomacy to people's attention. The article shows the relationship between the concepts of “diplomacy” and “healthcare”, gives a brief overview of the main definitions of “healthcare diplomacy”, reviews the history of healthcare diplomacy in China and in Russia, its features and the main international treaties. The article substantiates the need for healthcare diplomacy between China and Russia, examines the implementation of medical diplomacy between the two countries and the particular measures taken by the governments before and after the outbreak of coronavirus pneumonia, describes the process of the struggle with the epidemic in the two countries, defines the prospects for cooperation between China and Russia in the field of healthcare diplomacy, notes that both countries can reveal their potential in such relations as basic norms, effective early warning and joint emergency response mechanisms, traditional Chinese medicine, scientific technology and medical education.

Anti-caste Aesthet(h)ics in Contemporary Dalit Cinema: The Case of Asuran (2019)

Mainstream Indian cinema has failed to denounce the social realities of casteism, depict diversity and vindicate inclusion. However, the advent of globalisation and new modern media and social platforms have contributed, not only to reinventing the very dynamics of cinema production and consumption, but also to developing new film genres that dare to question and counter hegemonic ideologies and aesthetics. This is the case of Dalit cinema, a movement of visual creative art made by Dalit film-makers with a view to embodying and dignifying Dalit subjectivities and inspiring socio-cultural criticism and resistance. The main aim of this paper will be to show how Dalit films like Vetrimaaran’s Asuran strive to oppose the dominant aesthetics of stereotypical representation, thus denouncing casteist images and even developing innovative or subversive anti-caste aesthetics which prompt spectators to get involved in the ethical issues put forward and can in turn be labelled as anti-caste aesthet(h)ics.

Proces globalizacije - dobre i loše strane

The purpose of the paper is to point out the factual state of the globalization process, the positive and negative aspects of this process, which relate to the aspirations of world powers to shape the world in technological, economic, informational, political and cultural terms. Globalization encourages the spread of integration, market openness, capital transfer, but at the same time the emergence of spiritual and material superficialities and gaps. Therefore, many point out the downsides of this process. On the other hand, globalization has a multiple impact on the economy of all countries, and it concerns foreign direct investment and the movement of people and capital from country to country. As production at the global level is rationalized and new technologies spread, countries can increase production, and thus the level of wages and living standards, and due to the unification of various regulations between countries, trade becomes easier and more useful for all participating countries. For this and similar reasons, some authors point out the advantages of globalization over disadvantages. The aim of the paper is to point out that the advantages should not be denied, but the greater presence of disadvantages should be noticed.

Digital economic development strategy of Russian Federation and the Republic of Korea

The article is devoted to the adopted strategies of digital economic development of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Korea. The main attention is focused on the fact that the world economy is currently undergoing transformation and the digital economy is developing rapidly in many countries around the world. Russia and the Republic of Korea are developing and implementing strategies for digital economic development in their countries. In order to ensure a competitive position in the global market, the Russian government adopted the program "Digital economy" in 2017, and the Republic of Korea, with the arrival of the new government in 2017, developed and implements the strategy "I-Korea 4.0". The article analyzes the strategy of development of the digital economy of Russia and the Republic of Korea, highlights the main basic directions, goals, digital technologies in innovation policy, and considers the prospects for digital economic cooperation. The study examined various aspects of regulatory policy related to the future development of the digital economy in both countries and a comparative analysis of the adopted economic development strategies of Russia and the Republic of Korea is carried out. The analysis revealed common features and distinctive features of the implementation of strategies that ensure the accelerated development of the digital economy of the two countries. Both countries are currently focused on developing digital infrastructure. Since Russia has a need for technological renewal and use of innovative technologies, it has plans to implement large-scale projects, and the Republic of Korea has a global advantage in the fi eld of ICT, it is expected that both countries will be able to implement promising areas of mutually benefi cial cooperation in various areas of the economy.

Explaining global imbalances: the role of central-bank intervention and the rise of sovereign wealth funds*

Neoclassical economic theory views current-account imbalances as the result of (individual) decisions to save more than to invest domestically. Monetary analysis in the Keynesian tradition rejects such approaches and emphasizes that a country's net savings are the result, not the cause, of net selling of goods and services to foreigners. The latter, in turn, depends on global demand patterns and absolute advantages between countries. We complement this Keynesian approach, taking a closer look at the financial account of the balance of payments: a necessary condition for countries to net-sell goods and services to foreigners is the willingness of domestic sector(s) to accumulate net foreign assets. While previous analysis of global imbalances has partially discussed the role of central banks' reserve accumulation it has failed to incorporate the macroeconomic role of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). We analyse eight surplus countries' external positions and find that the public sector typically purchases and manages significant amounts of foreign assets via both central banks and SWFs. This, in turn, supports current-account surpluses. We then consider the particular case of Switzerland where, contrary to other surplus countries, public-sector purchases of foreign assets had been absent for a long time, yet set in massively after 2008.

Экономика промышленности в условиях глобализации: научно-практические основы и приоритеты развития

The relevance of the publication topic is argued by the need for an in-depth study of the globalization process, which is global financial, political and cultural integration, unification, the global division of labour, the planetary migration of capital, human and productive resources, standardization of legislation, and interference of cultures of the world community. The theoretical and practical goals of the publication are to study causal algorithms for the formation of a negative scientific and production balance of the Russian Federation and an increase in disproportions between the import and export of high-tech products, as well as a comparative description of global development as a symbiosis of contradictory trends in the subordination of the world economy to the interests of transnational capital. The theoretical and methodological basis of the publication was the scientific works of domestic and foreign scientists studying the globalization of the industrial economy due to the intensification of international scientific and technological competition and the expansion of the innovation market, deepening of specialization and division of labour, and the increase in the risks of producing high-tech products at the national and world levels. Scientific novelty lies in the authors’ interpretation of such socio-economic advantages of globalization as economies of scale, stimulation of labour productivity, rationalization of production at the interstate level and the spread of innovative technologies, cost reduction, price regression, achieving sustainable growth in the well-being of society, on the basis of which the development is confirmed global industrial economy on a research basis characterized by such attributes interdependence, asymmetry, regionalization and diversification, regression efficiency, inclusiveness, resource and raw material demarcation, a high degree of uncertainty and of the economic risk. The practical significance of the results obtained is determined by an in-depth analysis of the American (based on differentiation of labor and specialization of personnel, demarcation of labor duties, concentration of scientific and production efforts on a purely economic result) and Eurasian (characterized by mobility and compactness of production processes, saving transaction costs, adaptability to market conditions and availability of labour-tolerant staff) strategies for innovative development of industrial economics. Based on a critical rethinking of the American and Eurasian strategies, proposals and recommendations are formulated on the formation of the scientific and technical policy of the Russian Federation

Social orientations as a factor in the accelerating differentiation of the information society

In this article, a sociological analysis of the “social orientations” category is presented as a methodological principle of separation of external (social attitudes) and internal (value orientations) incentives of communication. External incentives, drawing a person into technological dependence on the NBIC-technologies used, cause a break in humanitarian relations, hinder the development of self-identity, and lead to a decline in social differentiation. In opposite, human capital, as the main element of the novelty of production relations in the information age, enters into a deep hidden contradiction with the power of management and the alienation of the individual abilities and needs. Subjective factors, expressed by the human value orientations, in the conditions of new opportunities opened up by informatization and digitalization of all social institutions, receive global advantages for maintaining harmony and progress in the society development, despite the objective instability of irreconcilable contradictions between large social groups. For empirical identification of qualitatively new subjective factors of social differentiation multiplication, the author’s typology of personalities is used, which unites actors into typological groups distinguished by social orientations. Terminal type, distinguished by the dominance of terminal (ultimate semantic) values and motives in the personality structure; inert type, the core of the “information poor”; instrumental type, occupying an intermediate position. Primary and secondary research made it possible to predict new opportunities for using the institution of education, in addition to the objective potentials of society self-development in the case of multidirectional differentiation.

The Role of Organizations like IVUmed in Developing Centers of Excellence

As healthcare disparity gaps continue to grow across the globe, so too are the efforts aimed at addressing them. Here we review the most common platforms currently used in global health and advantages and disadvantages of each. We highlight international organizations that have prioritized health system strengthening and long-term sustainability and apply the lessons learned from these endeavors to propose mechanisms for developing centers of excellence in low- and middle-income countries. Health system strengthening must be prioritized in international urologic endeavors. Without recognizing this as a fundamental goal, well-intentioned efforts are bound to have only short-term benefit and suboptimal use of valuable resources and will neglect a critical opportunity to promote local self-sufficiency and sustainable improvement in patient outcomes.

An Ode to Altruism: How Indian Courts Value Unpaid Domestic Work

Unpaid domestic and care work (UDCW) have long captured the imagination of feminist theorists. Marxist, socialist and autonomous feminists have debated domestic labor and wages for housework in the 1970s, chronicled the international sexual division of labour and housewifisation in the global south in the 1980s and studied global care chains with the advent of globalization in the 1990s. Poststructuralist feminists have rendered visible ‘life’s work’ while liberal feminists have grappled with workplace equality and the intractable messiness of the ‘work-life balance.’ Indian feminist economists have meanwhile recast the debates on women’s falling labour force participation rates in terms of a crisis in social reproduction while also demonstrating the need for better measurement of the high levels of both paid and unpaid work (including economic activity and domestic duties) that women are in fact doing. The original focus on UDCW performed at home has now received a new lease of life with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 5.4. In these discussions on social reproduction however, little attention has been paid to the role of the law in the recognition and redistribution of UDCW. Discussions of the law, where evident, are confined to the recognition of UDCW within family law through a community property regime at divorce. I examine the recognition of UDCW at another point of rupture, namely the death of a housewife through the lens of the laws of personal injury (or tort law). In particular, I focus on the amount of compensation awarded to the dependents of housewives in around 200 cases under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 between 1968 and 2019, tracing the growing recognition of women’s UDCW by Indian appellate courts culminating in an influential Supreme Court decision in 2010 which has been widely followed by Indian High Courts, underlining judicial willingness to recognise the range of UDCW performed by women within the home. I ask how the unpaid labour of housewives, homeworkers and mothers is recognised by tort law? What is the architecture of private law that allows for this? How can we understand the role of tort law in particular, in redistributing resources between men and women and amongst women themselves? Does tort law hold the potential for effecting egalitarian outcomes and if so, under what circumstances? Ultimately, can legal analysis inform the larger debate amongst feminists on social reproduction or does the law simply mirror, even produce iniquitous social realities? Engaging in the minutiae of how damages are valued and monetised I argue, also has normative and methodological pay-offs for feminists. Quantification goes to the very heart of feminist debates on UDCW, making visible the feasibility of recognition by the state, a task that the legal system already manages to do in the realm of tort law. Examining the archive of the law thus throws light on key concepts that feminists and social theorists have long worked with in attempting to have women’s UDCW recognized, to examine how recognition is made possible and at what cost.

Battle for the boot: trademarks and competitiveness in the global UGG boot industry, 1979-2019

Purpose Despite its Australian birthplace, the ugg boot industry is now fully dominated by one American company, and the Australian ugg boot industry has been frozen out of global trade. This study aims to consider the impact on the competitive advantage of culturally distinctive but not new, intellectual property (IP) through the historic lens of the Australia–USA battle over the UGG boot trademark. Design/methodology/approach This study uses trademark applications, court documents, annual reports and brand reports to trace the history of the change and growth of the ugg boot industry from a small cottage industry in Australia to a billion-dollar monopoly controlled by an American company. Findings Court documents and trademark applications from 1979 to 2019 indicate that Australian firms underestimated the cultural differences between the USA and Australia and thus failed to adequately protect the generic word “ugg” in foreign markets where it was considered to be distinctive, rather than generic. Practical implications The paper highlights the importance of the first-mover advantage that can be conferred upon a firm by IP that is not new. Trademarks must be distinctive, rather than new, but properly used, they can offer substantial global competitive advantages to firms. Originality/value The in-depth analysis of the development of the UGG brand highlights the importance of intangible barriers in global business. The impact on the competitive advantage these intangible barriers gave US firms over Australian firms in the worldwide sheepskin boot market is discussed.

Functional involvement of subcortical structures in global-local processing

The present study examined the involvement of subcortical structures in the processing of global and local information. To this end, we used a stereoscope to present hierarchical stimuli (global shapes composed of local elements) in a dichoptic or a monocular fashion, such that global and local information was either presented to the same eye (same-eye condition) or segregated between the eyes (different-eyes condition). In Experiment 1, the typical global advantage and global-to-local interference were observed for the same-eye presentation condition. On the other hand, no indication of a global advantage or of global-to-local interference emerged in the different-eyes presentation condition. In Experiment 2 we replicated these results, ruling out a possible alternative explanation that the pattern of results observed for the different-eyes presentation condition resulted merely from segregation of the stimulus between the eyes. Rather, the experiment demonstrated that the global-to-local interference was eliminated only when global and local information was segregated between the eyes. Taken together, these findings suggest that processing the global aspect of hierarchical stimuli involves subcortical regions indexed by monocular portions of the visual system.

Walkability as the key element of urban planning within the Healthy Cities concept (systematic review)

The purpose of the study. The purpose of this work is the exploration and generalization of scientific researches on walkability to determine its advantages as an element of public policy in human-centered cities. Over the past fifty years, the world community has actively discussed the issue of healthy and sustainable urban development planning, which has gained particular relevance with the recent World Health Organization publication of the “Healthy Cities: An Effective Approach to a Rapidly Changing World” concept (2020). One of the Healthy Cities approach goals is to promote healthy urban planning and design centered on human well-being (unlike prevalent in the past vehicle orientation), and the main component of such planning is pedestrianization or walkability. The systematic reviews and meta-analyses reporting method (PRISMA) were used in the review. The search was carried out in the bibliographic databases Elibrary, PubMed, MEDLINE, Scopus, Google Scholar. The study of the structure, types, and relationship between pedestrianization and the type of urban planning revealed the global advantages of creating walkable areas, such as maintaining the physical, mental and social health of citizens, increasing social capital, and improving the city’s ecological and economic atmosphere. Conclusion. Thus the promoting walkability was concluded to be a public policy as a relatively simple and highly effective way to benefit in the short, medium, and long term. This fact ultimately makes pedestrianization one of the most important tools for healthy urban planning and design.

How the forest interacts with the trees: Multiscale shape integration explains global and local processing.

Hierarchical stimuli have been widely used to study global and local processing. Two classic phenomena have been observed using these stimuli: the global advantage effect (we identify the global shape faster) and an interference effect (we identify shape slower when the global and local shapes are different). Because these phenomena have been observed during shape categorization tasks, it is unclear whether they reflect the categorical judgment or the underlying shape representation. Understanding the underlying shape representation is also critical because both global and local processing are modulated by stimulus properties.We performed two experiments to investigate these issues. In Experiment 1, we show that these phenomena can be observed in a same-different task, and that participants show systematic variation in response times across image pairs. We show that the response times to any pair of images can be accurately predicted using two factors: their dissimilarity and their distinctiveness relative to other images. In Experiment 2, we show that these phenomena can also be observed in a visual search task where participant did not have to make any categorical shape judgments. Here too, participants showed highly systematic variations in response time that could be explained as a linear sum of shape comparisons across global and local scales. Finally, the dissimilarity and distinctiveness factors estimated from the same-different task were systematically related to the search dissimilarities observed during visual search.In sum, our results show that global and local processing phenomena are properties of a systematic shape representation governed by simple rules.

We Are All Victims: Questionable Content and Collective Victimisation in the Digital Age.

Traditionally, the idea of being a victim is associated with a crime, accident, trickery or being duped. With the advent of globalisation and rapid growth in the information technology sector, the world has opened itself to numerous vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities range from individual-centric privacy issues to collective interests in the form of a nation’s political and economic interests. While we have victims who can identify themselves as victims, there are also victims who can barely identify themselves as victims, and there are those who do not realise that they have become victims. Misinformation, disinformation, fake news and other methods of spreading questionable content can be regarded as a new and increasingly widespread type of collective victimisation. This paper, drawing on recent examples from India, examines and analyses the rationale and modus operandi—both methods and types—that lead us to regard questionable content as a new form of collective victimisation.

Auditory local\u2013global temporal processing: evidence for perceptual reorganization with musical expertise

The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Recent studies addressing how the auditory system deals with local–global temporal information suggest a comparable processing scheme, but little is known about how this organization is modulated by long-term musical training, in particular regarding musical sequences. Here, we investigate how non-musicians and expert musicians detect local and global pitch changes in short hierarchical tone sequences structured across temporally-segregated triplets made of musical intervals (local scale) forming a melodic contour (global scale) varying either in one direction (monotonic) or both (non-monotonic). Our data reveal a clearly distinct organization between both groups. Non-musicians show global advantage (enhanced performance to detect global over local modifications) and global-to-local interference effects (interference of global over local processing) only for monotonic sequences, while musicians exhibit the reversed pattern for non-monotonic sequences. These results suggest that the local–global processing scheme depends on the complexity of the melodic contour, and that long-term musical training induces a prominent perceptual reorganization that reshapes its initial global dominance to favour local information processing. This latter result supports the theory of “analytic” processing acquisition in musicians.

DMRlib: Easy-Coding and Efficient Resource Management for Job Malleability

Process malleability has proved to have a highly positive impact on the resource utilization and global productivity in data centers compared with the conventional static resource allocation policy. However, the non-negligible additional development effort this solution imposes has constrained its adoption by the scientific programming community. In this work, we present DMRlib, a library designed to offer the global advantages of process malleability while providing a minimalist MPI-like syntax. The library includes a series of predefined communication patterns that greatly ease the development of malleable applications. In addition, we deploy several scenarios to demonstrate the positive impact of process malleability featuring different scalability patterns. Concretely, we study two job submission modes (rigid and moldable) in order to identify the best-case scenarios for malleability using metrics such as resource allocation rate, completed jobs per second, and energy consumption. The experiments prove that our elastic approach may improve global throughput by a factor higher than 3x compared to the traditional workloads of non-malleable jobs.

"Our Beauty Is in Our Breasts": A Culture-Centered Approach to Understanding Cancer Perceptions in Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa.

Breast cancer is an incapacitating physical illness. It was once reported predominantly by patients in developed countries. With the advent of globalization, it is increasingly becoming a major health concern in developing countries such as South Africa. Breast cancer researchers have continuously advocated for original studies that address this condition from a sociocultural perspective. Consequently, in this article I examine the perceptions of breast cancer patients from underprivileged parts of Kwa Zulu Natal (KZN). Thirty semi-structured interviews were conducted with Zulu women at a tertiary hospital in the region. A culture-centered approach was utilized to gauge their perceptions of life as breast cancer patients within the conservative Zulu community. The findings revealed that this ailment is generally misunderstood, which has adverse implications for the patients. Furthermore, there is a dire need for breast cancer communication interventions that can acquaint the Zulu community with this condition.