The Lessons of TPP and the Future of Labor Chapters in Trade Agreements

The agenda to link labor standards to trade agreements, in the hopes of improving working conditions in developing countries and preventing unfair labor competition for workers in rich countries, reached its culmination in TPP. Beginning with NAFTA and over a span of twenty-five years, labor standards became fully included in trade agreements and their violation subject to trade sanctions as means of enforcement. Thus, proponents of TPP offered it as the “gold standard” of globalization. This chapter argues that the debate about TPP, and the US labor movement’s opposition to it, made clear that this was not a story of success but of disenchantment. Unions in the US criticized TPP’s labor chapter for not going far enough, substantially and procedurally. But they also turned the focus to other chapters of TPP that may be just as or more important to workers in the US than the labor chapter: investment, rules of origin, procurement and currency manipulation. These areas have become the new frontier for labor advocates in trade agreements and they highlight the need to rebalance the treatment of capital and labor. The chapter argues that a significant, though overlooked achievement of TPP, was to encourage several TPP parties to enact domestic labor reforms using labor side agreements and US pressure. More than any ideal labor chapter, it was these domestic reforms that held the most promise for improving working conditions in Vietnam and Mexico. The US withdrawal of TPP has set those reforms back. Opposition to TPP has also made clear that the expected losses from trade in the form of job loss and wage decline will not be made palatable in the absence of effective safety nets and compensatory mechanisms at the domestic level. In fact, international trade reputation will continue to suffer and opposition to it harden without them. To the extent that the debate about TPP was a referendum about liberal globalization as we know it, opposition to TPP in the US has given a resounding no. A pressing question is whether there is an alternative to the nationalist retrenchment embraced by the Trump administration. The revival of TPP without the US, unfortunately, does not seem to chart a different path

The Lessons of TPP and the Future of Labor Chapters in Trade Agreements

The agenda to link labor standards to trade agreements, in the hopes of improving working conditions in developing countries and preventing unfair labor competition for workers in rich countries, reached its culmination in TPP. Beginning with NAFTA and over a span of twenty-five years, labor standards became fully included in trade agreements and their violation subject to trade sanctions as means of enforcement. Thus, proponents of TPP offered it as the “gold standard” of globalization. This chapter argues that the debate about TPP, and the US labor movement’s opposition to it, made clear that this was not a story of success but of disenchantment. Unions in the US criticized TPP’s labor chapter for not going far enough, substantially and procedurally. But they also turned the focus to other chapters of TPP that may be just as or more important to workers in the US than the labor chapter: investment, rules of origin, procurement and currency manipulation. These areas have become the new frontier for labor advocates in trade agreements and they highlight the need to rebalance the treatment of capital and labor. The chapter argues that a significant, though overlooked achievement of TPP, was to encourage several TPP parties to enact domestic labor reforms using labor side agreements and US pressure. More than any ideal labor chapter, it was these domestic reforms that held the most promise for improving working conditions in Vietnam and Mexico. The US withdrawal of TPP has set those reforms back. Opposition to TPP has also made clear that the expected losses from trade in the form of job loss and wage decline will not be made palatable in the absence of effective safety nets and compensatory mechanisms at the domestic level. In fact, international trade reputation will continue to suffer and opposition to it harden without them. To the extent that the debate about TPP was a referendum about liberal globalization as we know it, opposition to TPP in the US has given a resounding no. A pressing question is whether there is an alternative to the nationalist retrenchment embraced by the Trump administration. The revival of TPP without the US, unfortunately, does not seem to chart a different path

Coordinating Regional and Multilateral Financial Institutions

Recent crises and the expansion of international financial arrangements have dramatically elevated the importance of cooperation between regional institutions and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While the case for coordination between regional and multilateral institutions is generally accepted, however, the need to organize it on an ex ante is not fully appreciated. The relatively successful cooperation among the European Commission, European Central Bank, and IMF on the European debt crisis is not likely to be easily replicated in joint programs for countries in other regions, moreover, and the costs of coordination failure could be very large. Recent innovations at the IMF, on the other hand, present opportunities for cooperation with regional facilities. Henning reviews (1) the case for organizing cooperation on an ex ante basis, (2) the policy and institutional matters that should be coordinated, (3) how East Asian arrangements in particular and the IMF might cooperate, and (4) an Interinstitutional Agenda of general principles, modalities, and institutional recommendations. The G-20, member states, and institutions themselves should address this agenda proactively.Financial crises, IMF, regional financial institutions, regional integration, Chiang Mai Initiative, European debt crisis, international cooperation

The nature of small-scale farmer managed irrigation systems in North West Province, Sri Lanka and potential for aquaculture

RRAs were carried out in two Small Tank Cascade systems (STCs) of North West Province, Sri Lanka (less than 1000 ha total watershed area). A total of 21 tanks and 7 villages were investigated with primary emphasis on two upper watershed communities. The two systems differ primarily in their resource base; namely rainfall, natural forests and proximity to large scale perennial irrigation resources. [PDF contains 86 pages

Barrier bednets target malaria vectors and expand the range of usable insecticides

Transmission of Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites occurs when nocturnal Anopheles mosquito vectors feed on human blood. In Africa, where malaria burden is highest, bednets treated with pyrethroid insecticide were highly effective in preventing mosquito bites and reducing transmission, and essential to achieving unprecedented reductions in malaria until 2015 (ref. ). Since then, progress has stalled , and with insecticidal bednets losing efficacy against pyrethroid-resistant Anopheles vectors , methods that restore performance are urgently needed to eliminate any risk of malaria returning to the levels seen before their widespread use throughout sub-Saharan Africa . Here, we show that the primary malaria vector Anopheles gambiae is targeted and killed by small insecticidal net barriers positioned above a standard bednet in a spatial region of high mosquito activity but zero contact with sleepers, opening the way for deploying many more insecticides on bednets than is currently possible. Tested against wild pyrethroid-resistant A. gambiae in Burkina Faso, pyrethroid bednets with organophosphate barriers achieved significantly higher killing rates than bednets alone. Treated barriers on untreated bednets were equally effective, without significant loss of personal protection. Mathematical modelling of transmission dynamics predicted reductions in clinical malaria incidence with barrier bednets that matched those of 'next-generation' nets recommended by the World Health Organization against resistant vectors. Mathematical models of mosquito-barrier interactions identified alternative barrier designs to increase performance. Barrier bednets that overcome insecticide resistance are feasible using existing insecticides and production technology, and early implementation of affordable vector control tools is a realistic prospect

Reflectance Adaptive Filtering Improves Intrinsic Image Estimation

Separating an image into reflectance and shading layers poses a challenge for learning approaches because no large corpus of precise and realistic ground truth decompositions exists. The Intrinsic Images in the Wild~(IIW) dataset provides a sparse set of relative human reflectance judgments, which serves as a standard benchmark for intrinsic images. A number of methods use IIW to learn statistical dependencies between the images and their reflectance layer. Although learning plays an important role for high performance, we show that a standard signal processing technique achieves performance on par with current state-of-the-art. We propose a loss function for CNN learning of dense reflectance predictions. Our results show a simple pixel-wise decision, without any context or prior knowledge, is sufficient to provide a strong baseline on IIW. This sets a competitive baseline which only two other approaches surpass. We then develop a joint bilateral filtering method that implements strong prior knowledge about reflectance constancy. This filtering operation can be applied to any intrinsic image algorithm and we improve several previous results achieving a new state-of-the-art on IIW. Our findings suggest that the effect of learning-based approaches may have been over-estimated so far. Explicit prior knowledge is still at least as important to obtain high performance in intrinsic image decompositions.Comment: CVPR 201

Options for Greenhouse Horticulture in Malaysia : trip report March 2008

Protected greenhouse horticulture is a growing activity in Malaysia that has been prioritized by the Malaysian government as an area of cooperation with The Netherlands. Also, the private sector sees business opportunities and initiates modernization. Traditional horticultural production takes place in the highlands, where land is scarce and production competes with tropical rainforest. However, there are opportunities in the lowlands. For example, in Terengganu, greenhouses that are modern to Malaysian standards have been successfully realized in 2007. Most relevant crops are currently cucumber, chillies, sweet pepper and tomato. Consumer’s demand or export opportunities may lead to the introduction of other crops. It is desired that these first developments are taken further, also for the highland regions where the majority of horticultural production is located

Multinational Firms and New Protectionisms

Recent initiatives to hold back cross-border mergers and acquisitions for ‘strategic’ reasons have made headline news. We discuss whether the initiatives may mark the start of a new protectionist era. We argue that standard globalization indicators show no such signs. However, an increasing divergence of incomes and increased insecurity might raise resistance against the globalization process. We discuss the benefits of globalization benefits in terms of lower prices for consumers, a greater variety of available products, lower risks, and higher economic growth. But we also outline the risks in terms of greater inequalities and greater need for flexibility. Protectionism is a double-edged sword. Many historic episodes show that the return to protectionism did significantly more harm in terms of reduced growth than generating benefits in terms of greater stability and smaller income differentials.

FaceShop: Deep Sketch-based Face Image Editing

We present a novel system for sketch-based face image editing, enabling users to edit images intuitively by sketching a few strokes on a region of interest. Our interface features tools to express a desired image manipulation by providing both geometry and color constraints as user-drawn strokes. As an alternative to the direct user input, our proposed system naturally supports a copy-paste mode, which allows users to edit a given image region by using parts of another exemplar image without the need of hand-drawn sketching at all. The proposed interface runs in real-time and facilitates an interactive and iterative workflow to quickly express the intended edits. Our system is based on a novel sketch domain and a convolutional neural network trained end-to-end to automatically learn to render image regions corresponding to the input strokes. To achieve high quality and semantically consistent results we train our neural network on two simultaneous tasks, namely image completion and image translation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to combine these two tasks in a unified framework for interactive image editing. Our results show that the proposed sketch domain, network architecture, and training procedure generalize well to real user input and enable high quality synthesis results without additional post-processing.Comment: 13 pages, 20 figure