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Domestic trade costs are anecdotally high in the Philippines, and yet a systematic and spatially comparable metric of trade costs is unavailable. This paper fills this gap by estimating province border effects, or a province’s tendency to trade with itself rather than with other provinces. Subsequently, the effects of a maritime transport program based on roll-on roll-off (RORO) ships on province border effects are assessed. Using two novel datasets—the starting dates of RORO shipping services by route, and the intraprovince trade of agricultural products—this study finds that province border effects are substantial, with a typical province trading 51 times more with itself than with other provinces. The RORO transport program is associated with an average reduction of 35% of this home province bias. However, the border effect reductions are unevenly distributed, with the largest reductions concentrated in provinces near the biggest demand centers.

In recent years, there has been a lack of empirical work devoted to the explanation of migration patterns into the European Union with the exception of country specific studies. At the same time, migration theories have undergone a considerable renewal, which has led to the development of new variables for explaining migration decisions. Three of them are of particular interest in the EU case, namely welfare magnets, border effects and policy regulations. This paper aims at explaining recent migration trends into the EU. A first contribution is to provide an original eclectic theoretical model from the new developments in migration theories. Second, an empirical panel data model is developed in order to explain the emigration rate into 18 EU countries, from 67 source countries over the past 10 years. Finally, this model simultaneously tests the impact of the traditional and the new variables on migration flows into the EU. From both static and dynamic panel data estimators, the results show that the new variables are of particular significance, compared to traditional ones.

This paper presents an empirical assessment of bilateral migration flows into the EU-15 countries. Using an extended gravity model, it identifies economic, welfare state, geospatial and linguistic variables as the principal determinants of migration flows into the EU-15 countries. As long as its effect is not offset by a high unemployment rate in the host country, the level of social protection expenditure influences migrants' choice of destination. However, albeit acting as a joint force with other economic, cultural and geospatial variables, the welfare state characteristics of the host country need to be reckoned with when studying European migration flows. Our empirical findings lend some support for a more unified or at least better coordinated social policy across the European Union.

This paper describes a novel approach to improve the border effects of Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT). The new method, consisting of artificial neural network (ANN) and mirror extension, is introduced for extending short time series. First, the analytic signal is extended by ANN with back propagation (BP) learning algorithm, and then the extended signal is decomposed by using Empirical Mode Decomposion (EMD) at the same time using mirror extension to extend the signal which is decomposing. To restrain border effects of Hilbert Transform, BP network is adopted again to extend the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) before Hilbert transform (HT) is applied. Hilbert-Huang Transform with the proposed boundary improved method is used to detect harmonic signals in this paper, simulation and comparative results reveal that the method can effectively improve the border effects of HHT method, and obtain accurately harmonic components.