Disintegration and Trade

The gravity model of trade is utilized to assess the impact of disintegration on trade. The analysis is based on three recent disintegration episodes involving the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The results point to a very strong home bias around the time of disintegration, with intra-union trade exceeding normal trade approximately 43 times in the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, and 24 times in the former Yugoslavia. Disintegration was followed by a sharp fall in trade intensity. Nevertheless, there is a considerable hysteresis in economic relations, with trade flows among the former constituent Republics still between two and 30 times greater than normal trade in 1998.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39737/3/wp353.pd

Disintegration

The silver lining behind the Supreme Court\u27s decision to disintegrate the Seattle and Louisville public schools is that the decision also runs the risk of disintegrating judicial review. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 holds that the Constitution bars voluntary, race-conscious efforts by two local school boards to retain the racial integration that they worked so hard to achieve after Brown. In so holding, the Court curiously reads the Equal Protection Clause as preventing the use of race to pursue actual equality, and instead insists on a type of formal equality that has historically been associated with thinly veiled efforts to disguise racial oppression--the type of oppression that the Court authorized in upholding the separate-but-equal regime of Plessy. By using the Constitution to protect passive resegregation from active integration, the current Court ends up constitutionalizing the culture\u27s regression to the days of greater racial separation--a separation that Brown found to be inherently unequal. As a result, the new Resegregation decision has not only realigned the current Court with its own racially oppressive past, but it has also distanced the Court from the nation\u27s hope for a racially progressive future. Once the decision is understood in this way, the question becomes whether the case will begin to undermine the legitimacy needed for the Court to continue its activist conception of judicial review. Because the views of the Justices seem so transparently political, the threat to judicial legitimacy that emanates from the Resegregation case may end up exceeding the nation\u27s patience for continued Supreme Court interference in the nation\u27s racial policymaking process. There can be no assurance that the case will prompt such a reconsideration of judicial review. Part I of this article describes the manner in which the Resegregation decision has marginalized the importance of racial integration. Part I.A. describes the Seattle and Louisville integration plans under consideration in the case. Part I.B. describes the various Supreme Court opinions issued in the decision invalidating those plans. Part II discusses the impact that the Resegregation decision is likely to have on the nation\u27s ever-evolving conception of equality. Part II.A. explains how the decision effectively overrules Brown--by protecting the interests of disappointed white parents at the cost of advancing racial resegregation--despite the fact that it is doctrinally difficult to support such a result. Part lI.B. argues that the plurality opinion of Chief Justice Roberts now gives official recognition to an updated form of racism, in which supposed equality is used as a tool of racial oppression. Part III discusses the effect that the decision is likely to have on the future of judicial review. Part III.A. illustrates that the decision to invalidate the integration plans at issue can best be understood as political rather than doctrinal in nature. Part III.B. expresses the hope that such transparent judicial politics will cause the Supreme Court to lose the perceived legitimacy that it needs to continue supplanting the racial policy preferences adopted by the representative branches of government. The conclusion suggests that, while one may hope for the disintegration of undemocratically activist judicial review, the long persistence of racial oppression in the United States does not afford much basis for optimism in achieving that end

An abstract disintegration theorem

A Strassen-type disintegration theorem for convex cones with localized order structure is proved. As an example a flow theorem for infinite networks is given

Spin asymmetry and GDH sum rule for real and virtual photons for the deuteron

An explicit evaluation of the spin asymmetry of the deuteron and the associated GDH sum rule is presented which includes disintegration, single and double pion and eta production. For the GDH integral a large cancellation is found between the disintegration channel and the meson production channels. Furthermore, first results for the contribution of the disintegration channel to the generalized GDH integral at constant four-momentum transfer reveal a dominance of the isovector M1 transition to the $^1$S$_0$-state near threshold resulting in a negative contribution with a minimum around $Q^2\approx 0.2$ fm$^{-2}$ which is driven by the nucleon anomalous isovector magnetic moment.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, World Scientific style, invited talk at GDH 2004 Symposiu

Vertical Disintegration in Marshallian Industrial Districts

This paper uses a novel measure and detailed plant-level Portuguese data to reexamine the Marshallian hypothesis that specialization and the vertical disintegration of firms should be greater in areas where an industry concentrates. Our measure of firm specialization and vertical disintegration employs a Herfindhal index constructed with occupational shares for all workers within the firm. Controlling for firm size and sector of activity, we find that vertical disintegration is around three percent higher in areas where industries agglomerate. Sensitivity tests reveal that this positive relation is remarkably robust across different specifications.Vertical Disintegration of Firms; Agglomeration; Localization Economies

Disintegration and Trade

The gravity model of trade is utilized to assess the impact of disintegration on trade. The analysis is based on three recent disintegration episodes involving the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The results point to a very strong home bias around the time of disintegration, with intra-union trade exceeding normal trade approximately 43 times in the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, and 24 times in the former Yugoslavia. Disintegration was followed by a sharp fall in trade intensity. Nevertheless, there is a considerable hysteresis in economic relations, with trade flows among the former constituent Republics still between two and 30 times greater than normal trade in 1998.Gravity model, international trade, disintigration