The Trade-Climate Nexus: Assessing the European Union’s Institutionalist Approach. College of Europe EU Diplomacy Paper 04/2019

The European Union (EU) is considered a global leader both in trade and climate policies. Nonetheless, trade liberalisation has been widely criticised for its negative effects on the environment and for directly contributing to the rising levels of annual greenhouse gas emissions. This paper addresses the trade-climate nexus by assessing to what extent the EU is effectively integrating its environmental objectives within its trade policies. First, the legal spaces for the EU’s action in this policy nexus are identified. Second, the analysis looks into how effectively the EU is achieving its own set of objectives for trade and climate. The assessment draws on an innovative analytical matrix examining four Trade-Climate Agenda items: (i) international competitiveness, (ii) climate-friendly goods and services, (iii) international aviation and maritime shipping, and (iv) product labelling and standards. The paper then evaluates to what extent the externalisation mechanisms of Manners’ ‘Normative Power Europe’ and Damro’s ‘Market Power Europe’ are deployed in order to achieve the above objectives. The findings show that the EU’s performance in the effective management of the nexus is overall moderate to weak

Electroweak physics at LHCb

Measurements of electroweak boson production provide an important test of the Standard Model at the LHC energies and allow the partonic content of the proton to be constrained. $W$ and $Z$ bosons are reconstructed in several leptonic final states using data samples corresponding to an integrated luminosity of up to about 1 $fb^{-1}$. Inclusive and associated production cross-sections are reported.Comment: Proceedings for the Second Annual Conference on Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP

Why Proximity Matters for the Concept of Supererogation

The concept of supererogation is strictly correlated with duty, since its peculiar value is defined by acts that go beyond our regular obligations. This paper highlights the importance of proximity (relational closeness) in allowing the proper theoretical space to supererogation. As a matter of fact if we broaden our sense of duty, the possibility to perform supererogatory acts correspondingly decreases. Special obligations emphasize how difficult acts of supererogation are to perform if we stand in some morally-relevant special position with the recipient of our acts. Thus, we can conclude that the relationship between the agent and the recipient of the act (proximity) plays an important role both for our sense of duty (generating special obligations) and for the possibility of performing supererogatory acts. Furthermore, this analysis brings attention to the fact that whenever an act is supererogatory, it cannot, at the same time, be a special obligation (and vice versa). As a consequence, if proximity plays such a role, an objection to the possibility of self-regarding supererogation can be made

Computing equilibria of Cournot oligopoly models with mixed-integer quantities

We consider Cournot oligopoly models in which some variables represent indivisible quantities. These models can be addressed by computing equilibria of Nash equilibrium problems in which the players solve mixed-integer nonlinear problems. In the literature there are no methods to compute equilibria of this type of Nash games. We propose a Jacobi-type method for computing solutions of Nash equilibrium problems with mixed-integer variables. This algorithm is a generalization of a recently proposed method for the solution of discrete so-called “2-groups partitionable” Nash equilibrium problems. We prove that our algorithm converges in a finite number of iterations to approximate equilibria under reasonable conditions. Moreover, we give conditions for the existence of approximate equilibria. Finally, we give numerical results to show the effectiveness of the proposed method