The Economic Consequences of the Doha Round for Ireland

This paper provides a quantitative study of the economic effects of a stylised simulation of trade liberalisation for Ireland using the GTAP model. The experiment incorporates the liberalisation of agricultural, manufacturing and services trade as well as measures to improve trade facilitation. The simulation is implemented against a baseline projection of the Irish and world economy over the next decade. Overall, Ireland's welfare will increase as a result of further trade liberalisation, with particularly strong gains from services liberalisation. The industrial liberalisation scenario also generates positive gains to Ireland, while agricultural liberalisation has a slightly negative effect on the overall economy.Note: Ireland, trade liberalisation, WTO Doha Round

The Economic Consequences of the Doha Round for Ireland

This paper provides a quantitative study of the economic effects of a stylised simulation of trade liberalisation for Ireland using the GTAP model. The experiment incorporates the liberalisation of agricultural, manufacturing and services trade as well as measures to improve trade facilitation. The simulation is implemented against a baseline projection of the Irish and world economy over the next decade. Overall, Ireland’s welfare will increase as a result of further trade liberalisation, with particularly strong gains from services liberalisation. The industrial liberalisation scenario also generates positive gains to Ireland, while agricultural liberalisation has a slightly negative effect on the overall economy.

The circular economy: An interdisciplinary exploration of the concept and application in a global context

There have long been calls from industry for guidance in implementing strategies for sustainable development. The Circular Economy represents the most recent attempt to conceptualize the integration of economic activity and environmental wellbeing in a sustainable way. This set of ideas has been adopted by China as the basis of their economic development (included in both the 11th and the 12th ‘Five Year Plan’), escalating the concept in minds of western policymakers and NGOs. This paper traces the conceptualisations and origins of the Circular Economy, tracing its meanings, and exploring its antecedents in economics and ecology, and discusses how the Circular Economy has been operationalized in business and policy. The paper finds that while the Circular Economy places emphasis on the redesign of processes and cycling of materials, which may contribute to more sustainable business models, it also encapsulates tensions and limitations. These include an absence of the social dimension inherent in sustainable development that limits its ethical dimensions, and some unintended consequences. This leads us to propose a revised definition of the Circular Economy as “an economic model wherein planning, resourcing, procurement, production and reprocessing are designed and managed, as both process and output, to maximize ecosystem functioning and human well-being”

ON CHOOSING A BASE COVERAGE LEVEL FOR MULTIPLE PERIL CROP INSURANCE CONTRACTS

For multiple peril crop insurance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture'Â’s Risk Management Agency estimates the premium rate for a base coverage level and then uses multiplicative adjustment factors to recover rates at other coverage levels. Given this methodology, accurate estimation of the base coverage level from 65% to 50%. The purpose of this analysis was to provide some insight into whether such a change should or should not be carried out. Not surprisingly, our findings indicate that the higher coverage level should be maintained as the base.Risk and Uncertainty,

Implications of Domestic Support Disciplines for Further Agricultural Trade Liberalization

This paper employs the GTAP computable general equilibrium model and dataset to analyse the implications of domestic support reductions in the context of agricultural trade liberalisation. Three specific issues are addressed: overhang in domestic support, the accurate distinction of the boxes in the GTAP dataset and the treatment of market price support in the amber box. An extensive domestic support database is used to calculate the change in applied domestic support rates from a specified cut in bound rates, and to identify the impact on the different domestic support boxes and the required reductions in each support category. The GTAP model is extended to incorporate an explicit representation of the market price support element of the AMS. The results from these extensions of the standard database and model support the view that the impact of an agreement to reduce domestic support will be limited and lower than conventionally estimated. Results of simulations combining domestic support cuts with market access and export competition disciplines show that the effect of import tariff reductions dominate the gains from domestic support cuts once full account is taken of the issues addressed in this paper.WTO agricultural negotiations, domestic support, agricultural protection, Aggregate Measure of Support

Species Composition and Diversity of Hawk Populations in Northeastern Arkansas

Species composition and diversity of hawk populations were analyzed for northeastern Arkansas by the use of roadside censuses conducted in September through April from 1974- 1977. Data from 10 years of Jonesboro Christmas Bird Counts were also analyzed. During the roadside survey 20,174 miles were driven and 1819 raptors were counted. Ten species were observed with the Red-tailed Hawk being most abundant followed by the Marsh Hawk and the American Kestrel. Eight species were recorded from the 10 years of Christmas Bird Counts. Annual breeding bird surveys and spot records turned up three additional species making a total of 14 species in 15 years of study. Although hawk populations fluctuate from year to year, the data do not reveal any downward trend in numbers in northeastern Arkansas. Large concentrations of hawks do not appear in this region of the state until after mid-September. Populations reach a peak in December after which they decline in January. A second peak is reached in February followed by a gradual decline such that in April the American Kestrel is the only species consistently seen from the roadside. After April only a few hawks remain to nest. Both Krider\u27s and melanistic Red-tails occur here but from a total of 864 Red-tailed Hawks observed only 26 Krider\u27s and 31 melanistic or Buteo iamaicensis harlanii were recorded

The Doha Development Agenda: Mixed Prospects for Developing Countries

This paper uses the GTAP computable general equilibrium model to assess the impact of a Doha Development Agenda agreement on agricultural trade liberalisation. In particular, we examine the consequences for developing countries. The simulation incorporates further liberalisation in the areas of market access, export competition and domestic support. Most developing regions can expect strong positive results from this liberalisation, however some suffer a decrease in welfare. The magnitude of the welfare effect for these countries depends on measures to be taken by developing countries themselves, and whether they will materialise must be uncertain. The results highlight the importance of the impact of further liberalisation of the erosion of preferential trading arrangements enjoyed by developing regions.Agricultural trade liberalisation, GTAP, developing countries

Quadratic estimates and functional calculi of perturbed Dirac operators

We prove quadratic estimates for complex perturbations of Dirac-type operators, and thereby show that such operators have a bounded functional calculus. As an application we show that spectral projections of the Hodge--Dirac operator on compact manifolds depend analytically on $L_\infty$ changes in the metric. We also recover a unified proof of many results in the Calder\'on program, including the Kato square root problem and the boundedness of the Cauchy operator on Lipschitz curves and surfaces.Comment: To appear in Inventiones Mathematicae. Minor final changes added 4/7 200

Discovering bipartite substructure in directed networks

Bipartivity is an important network concept that can be applied to nodes, edges and communities. Here we focus on directed networks and look for subnetworks made up of two distinct groups of nodes, connected by “one-way” links. We show that a spectral approach can be used to find hidden substructure of this form. Theoretical support is given for the idealised case where there is limited overlap between subnetworks. Numerical experiments show that the approach is robust to spurious and missing edges. A key application of this work is in the analysis of high-throughput gene expression data, and we give an example where a biologically meaningful directed bipartite subnetwork is found from a cancer microarray dataset

Extremely red objects in the fields of high redshift radio galaxies

We are engaged in a program of infrared imaging photometry of high redshift radio galaxies. The observations are being done using NICMOS2 and NICMOS3 arrays on the DuPont 100-inch telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. In addition, Persson and Matthews are measuring the spectral energy distributions of normal cluster galaxies in the redshift range 0 to 1. These measurements are being done with a 58 x 62 InSb array on the Palomar 5-m telescope. During the course of these observations we have imaged roughly 20 square arcminutes of sky to limiting magnitudes greater than 20 in the J, H, and K passbands (3 sigma in 3 square arcseconds). We have detected several relatively bright, extremely red, extended objects during the course of this work. Because the radio galaxy program requires Thuan-Gunn gri photometry, we are able to construct rough photometric energy distributions for many of the objects. A sample of the galaxy magnitudes within 4 arcseconds diameter is given. All the detections are real; either the objects show up at several wavelengths, or in subsets of the data. The reddest object in the table, 9ab'B' was found in a field of galaxies in a rich cluster at z = 0.4; 9ab'A' lies 8 arcseconds from it