It is often suggested that regional integration is good for poverty by increasing trade and investment and creating jobs for the poor. At the same time, the number and scope of regional trade agreements is increasing rapidly. However, there is little about whether and how regional integration provisions affect development and poverty in poor countries. The findings of a multi-country research p...

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Regional integration agreements (RIAs) are examples of second best and have an ambiguous impact on welfare. This paper builds a model where RIAs unambiguously raise welfare by correcting for externalities. It assumes that trade between neighboring countries raises trust between them and reduce the likelihood of conflict. The optimum intervention in that case is a subsidy on imports from the nei...

Short-term wind power forecasting is recognized nowadays as a major requirement for a secure and economic integration of wind power in a power system. In the case of large-scale integration, end users such as transmission system operators focus on the prediction of regional or even national wind power up to 48 hours ahead. At a European level such predictions will be required in the future for ...

RASimAs (Regional Anaesthesia Simulator and Assistant) is a EU FP7 project that aims at increasing the application, the effectiveness and the success rates of regional anaesthesia by developing two independent but complementary systems, one system for training by using patient-specific computer models, and one for guidance in the assistance of nerve’s location during the actual intervention. In...

The current global economic instability and the vulnerability of small nations provide the impetus for greater integration between the countries of the South Pacific region. This exercise is critical for their survival. Past efforts of regional integration in the South Pacific have mostly failed. However, today’s IT collaborative capabilities provide the opportunity to develop a shared IT infra...

A hierarchical framework is proposed to address the issues of modeling different type of words in keyword spotting (KWS). Keyword models are built at various levels according to the availability of training set resources for each individual word. The proposed approach improves the performance of KWS even when no training speech is available for the keywords. It also suggests an easier way to co...