Abstract

Abstract
This paper compares the export promotion system of advanced and emerging economies in fifty countries. Results show that advanced economies offer, on average, more complete export promotion system, i.e. a greater variety of Export Promotion Programs (EPPs) than emerging economies. Advanced countries offer more financial support, informational services, facilitating activities and education and training services. The specific services that contribute most to these differences are also identified, which is important for national export promotion agencies and policy makers to upgrade their offer to firms in order for them to be better prepared for international trade interactions, especially emerging economies.

Abstract
The subprime crisis was a global financial crisis that affected a large number of countries and, in particular, the European economies. In this paper we considered fourteen variables associated to the public, private and financial sectors, in order to analyze the main vulnerabilities, differences and similarities observed in twenty-seven European countries. The statistical analysis was performed with the STATIS methodology, with data collected in the period 2002-2011, including some years before and some after the historical crisis of 2007-2008. The study led us to conclude that European countries are different in which concerns to investment, savings, sustainability of public accounts and public investment.

Abstract
The Von Mises-Fisher distribution defined on the hypersphere is one of the most used distributions for modelling vectorial data. If we reject the uniform distribution as a model for vectorial data, then the Von Mises-Fisher distribution is an alternative model. So we use this distribution as an alternative hypothesis in the study of the power of some tests of uniformity for some dimensions of the sphere.

Abstract
The von Mises-Fisher distribution is widely used for modeling directional data. In this article, we derive the discriminant rules based on this distribution to assign objects into pre-existing classes. We determine a distance between two von Mises-Fisher populations and we calculate estimates of the misclassification probabilities. We also analyze the behavior of the distance between two von Mises-Fisher populations and of the estimates of the misclassification probabilities when we modify the parameters of the populations or the samples size or the dimension of the sphere. Finally, we present an example with real spherical data available in the literature.

Abstract
The von Mises-Fisher distribution is widely used for modelling directional data. In this paper we propose goodness-of-fit methods for a concentrated von Mises-Fisher distribution and we analyse by simulation some questions concerning the application of these tests. We analyse the empirical power of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for several dimensions of the sphere, supposing as alternative hypothesis a mixture of two von Mises-Fisher distributions with known parameters. We also compare the empirical power of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test with the Rao's score test for data on the sphere, supposing as alternative hypothesis, a mixture of two Fisher distributions with unknown parameters replaced by their maximum likelihood estimates or a 5-parameter Fisher-Bingham distribution. Finally, we give an example with real spherical data.