Testing Global Sectoral Industry Approaches to Address Climate Change: Interim report of a CEPS Task Force. CEPS Task Force Reports, 4 December 2007

Successful global sectoral industry approaches could become an effective means of broadening the range of contributions by all parties to greenhouse gas reductions, and of addressing competitiveness concerns in trade-exposed industries. This report puts these two hypotheses to the test and identifies the key requirements for global sectoral industry approaches to work. The analysis is based on ongoing work within a CEPS multi-stakeholder Task Force on “Sectoral industry approaches to address climate change”, supported by the Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI) of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The Final Report will be published in spring 2008

DIMENSIONS OF POST-CRISIS COMPETITIVE MONETARY POLICY

This communication wants to highlight, synthetically, the need to reconsider the monetary policy pursued in post-crisis period, driven by the imperatives of necessity, the requirements increase its competitiveness in a global economy, integrated, computerized, subject, becoming more global governance multiform. In this respect, communication and defining attributes are revealed circumscribed managing corporate governance dimensions of competitive monetary policy, promoted by the central bank in post-crisis period, finally giving it a summary schedule determined relations between attributes and dimensions of size co-determinative scheme could offer possible opening for formalization and modeling. Dimensions listed in the paper confined field improvement and adaptation potential of monetary policy in a period of rebuilding and restructuring the global economy, world of regionalism and integration, the polarization of the world economy, the assertion of national economies in a new perspective, that of network economies networked and distributed market.monetary policy; competitiveness; attribute; coordinated dimensional size; decision; tool

A Current Assessment of Some Extraterritorial Impacts of the Dodd-Frank Act with Special Focus on the Volcker Rule and Derivatives Regulation

As the world struggles to emerge from the Global Financial Crisis the vision of a harmonious framework of global financial regulation seems as distant as ever. Important progress made by international committees such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the Financial Stability Board notwithstanding, there seem to be increasing signs of unilateral, extraterritorial action by major jurisdictions, including the United States. This paper reviews the framework created by the US financial reforms, in particular anti money laundering provisions, the Volcker Rule and the proposed OTC derivatives margin requirements, and considers some of the dilemmas presented by modern global banking and its concomitant regulation. The conclusion is that we are likely to see more regional reforms that are not necessarily uniform, and that this might not be a bad result, given the complexity of the financial markets and the need to respond flexibly to evolving circumstances

WOULD THERE BE ONE STANDARD ENGLISH AS THE GLOBAL LANGUAGE?

Article intends to investigate whether there is the possibility of having English as a global language used all over the world with one variety only. One variety of English will reduce the miscommunication among people speaking English. The research was conducted by library research by looking at the requirements of a global language, its spread in the world, and the related problems. The results show that English has fulfilled the requirements of a global language looking from its history and the spread of its speakers. However, it has a lot of varieties in either English speaking countries or in the developing countries where English functions as a second and foreign language. The varieties are found not only in the pronunciation, but in the vocabulary and grammar as well. Usually the native languages play an important role in these varieties. All these facts indicate that English might become a global language. However, having one variety of English still needs a long time to go

The transformation of earth-system observations into information of socio-economic value in GEOSS

The Group on Earth Observations System of Systems, GEOSS, is a co-ordinated initiative by many nations to address the needs for earth-system information expressed by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. We discuss the role of earth-system modelling and data assimilation in transforming earth-system observations into the predictive and status-assessment products required by GEOSS, across many areas of socio-economic interest. First we review recent gains in the predictive skill of operational global earth-system models, on time-scales of days to several seasons. We then discuss recent work to develop from the global predictions a diverse set of end-user applications which can meet GEOSS requirements for information of socio-economic benefit; examples include forecasts of coastal storm surges, floods in large river basins, seasonal crop yield forecasts and seasonal lead-time alerts for malaria epidemics. We note ongoing efforts to extend operational earth-system modelling and assimilation capabilities to atmospheric composition, in support of improved services for air-quality forecasts and for treaty assessment. We next sketch likely GEOSS observational requirements in the coming decades. In concluding, we reflect on the cost of earth observations relative to the modest cost of transforming the observations into information of socio-economic value

Convex Relaxations for Gas Expansion Planning

Expansion of natural gas networks is a critical process involving substantial capital expenditures with complex decision-support requirements. Given the non-convex nature of gas transmission constraints, global optimality and infeasibility guarantees can only be offered by global optimisation approaches. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art global optimisation solvers are unable to scale up to real-world size instances. In this study, we present a convex mixed-integer second-order cone relaxation for the gas expansion planning problem under steady-state conditions. The underlying model offers tight lower bounds with high computational efficiency. In addition, the optimal solution of the relaxation can often be used to derive high-quality solutions to the original problem, leading to provably tight optimality gaps and, in some cases, global optimal soluutions. The convex relaxation is based on a few key ideas, including the introduction of flux direction variables, exact McCormick relaxations, on/off constraints, and integer cuts. Numerical experiments are conducted on the traditional Belgian gas network, as well as other real larger networks. The results demonstrate both the accuracy and computational speed of the relaxation and its ability to produce high-quality solutions

Fine-grained acceleration control for autonomous intersection management using deep reinforcement learning

Recent advances in combining deep learning and Reinforcement Learning have shown a promising path for designing new control agents that can learn optimal policies for challenging control tasks. These new methods address the main limitations of conventional Reinforcement Learning methods such as customized feature engineering and small action/state space dimension requirements. In this paper, we leverage one of the state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning methods, known as Trust Region Policy Optimization, to tackle intersection management for autonomous vehicles. We show that using this method, we can perform fine-grained acceleration control of autonomous vehicles in a grid street plan to achieve a global design objective.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Smart World Congress 201

How Sustainable are Benefits from Global Production Networks? Malaysia's Upgrading Prospects in the Electronics Industry

The paper introduces an operational definition of industrial upgrading (IU and documents the emergence of complex, multi-tier "networks of networks" which provide new opportunities for IU, but which also raise threshold requirements for participating in these networks. I highlight structural weaknesses of the Malaysian electronics industry that constrain its upgrading prospects; assess current policies that try to link cluster development and global network integration; discuss adjustments in linkages with global brand leaders (OEMs); and ask to what degree linkages with contract manufacturers (CMs) can broaden network benefits. The paper concludes, by exploring new opportunities for international knowledge sourcing that could complement Malaysia's linkages with GPNs. A completely revised and updated version has been published as: "Global Production Networks and Industrial Upgrading -Malaysia's Electronics Industry", in: J. Kidd and F.J. Richter, eds., Trust and Anti-Trust in Cross-Cultural Alliances, published for the World Economic Forum, Palgrave, London, 2003.