Key issues in trade facilitation : summary of World Bank/European Union workshops in Dhaka and Shanghai in 2004

Trade facilitation is the ability of countries to deliver goods and services on time at the lowest possible cost. It has emerged as an important issue in unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral trade liberalization. Most countries have embarked on heroic reforms aimed at reducing transaction costs of trade. Thus, among the four new Singapore issues, there was least resistance from World Trade Organization (WTO) member countries to include trade facilitation in the Doha Round discussions. However, all countries are not equally placed in initiating reforms in the complex areas of customs procedures, transport and port logistics, harmonization of standards, and simplification of procedures. Trade facilitation reforms require a large volume of technical assistance for national capacity building. To facilitate what these reforms entail and what can be learned from cross-country experiences, the EU and the World Bank organized two workshops in Dhaka (South Asian countries) and Shanghai (East Asian countries) in 2004. Jointly they succeeded in bringing together renowned experts from multilateral organizations, selected bilateral donor community, the private sector, ex civil servants, and scholars. The participants were largely drawn from the relevant government departments and chambers of commerce and industry. This paper summarizes the main presentations in the workshops. It also indicates the areas that need more focus in future events. The paper should serve as a reference document for national policymakers and for future seminars and workshops on trade facilitation. It has also linked the presentations to the ongoing research work on trade facilitation.Common Carriers Industry,Transport and Trade Logistics,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Policy

The data chase : what's out there on trade costs and nontariff barriers ?

Trade costs and nontariff barriers are at the forefront of discussions on competitiveness and expanding trade opportunities for developing countries. This paper provides a summary overview of data and indicators relevant to these issues and has been informed by work underway at the World Bank on trade facilitation over the past several years to catalogue data sets and indicators. Although there has been progress in expanding data sets and developing policy-relevant indicators on trade costs and barriers, much more is needed. In order to assess progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals, evaluating the impact of development projects, and whether meeting Aid for Trade goals will be met, for example, a dedicated and expansive new effort to collect and assess data is needed. This paper attempts to highlight gaps in data on trade costs and provides insight into the type of new data that might be developed in the future.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Law,Free Trade,Trade Policy

Geochemical and geochronological investigations of the vumba granite-greenstone terrain of NE Botswana

U-Pb SHRIMP ages were determined for five samples representative of various granitoid groups from the Vumba granite-greenstone terrain, south western margin of the Zimbabwe craton in NE Botswana. These age data range from 2733 ± 5 Ma or 2696 ± 3.5 Ma (if the age for the protolith of an orthogenesis xenolith is excluded) to 2647 ± 4 Ma; they are in the range of published U-Pb zircon ages of 2710 ± 19 to 2639 ± 2 Ma for the Matsitama granite-greenstone terrain in NE Botswana. Precise crystallisation ages for granitoids from these two granite-greenstone terrains are compared with published U-Pb zircon ages of Archaean rocks exposed in the Zimbabwe craton. This comparison suggests that the Neoarchaean granitoids from NE Botswana are correlatives of the Sesombi granitoids/upper Bulawayan volcanic sequence of the Zimbabwe craton. Data from this study support diachronous growth of the craton. The granitoids and spatially associated felsic metavolcanics, amphibolites and ultramafic intrusives all possess volcanic arc geochemical signatures. There are three granitoid types recognised based on petrographic and geochemical analyses: (i) granodiorite-tonalite (gneissic), (ii) biotite-homblende quartz monzonite (gneissic) and (iii) monzogranite (post-kinematic). All the granitoids are medium- to high-K calc- alkaline and they possess I-type characteristics. The felsic metavolcanics are rhyodacite/dacite in composition with variable contents of biotite, muscovite and hornblende. They are calc-alkaline and metaluminous to weakly peraluminous. They are interpreted as a volcanic arc sequence that formed from and melting of hydrated oceanic crust during subduction probably along a volcanic arc which represented the nucleus of felsic continental crust. Some of the associated granitoids are plutonic equivalents of these felsic rocks. There are two types of amphibolite, namely metabasaltic and metagabbroic. They are characterised by flat REE pattern, high Th/Nb ratio and calc-alkaline affinity. The amphibolites are interpreted as volcanic arc basalts formed from mantle wedge as a result of subducting oceanic slab. The ultramafic intrusives of the Vumba granite-greenstone terrain are characterised by Nb depletion and high Th/Nb ratios. A subduction-related genesis is preferred for these rocks

India Australia Relations: Retrospect and Prospect

It is under-appreciated that Perth and Chennai are closer to each other than Sydney is to Seoul to Shanghai or to Tokyo As the world sees the potential of an Asian Pacific century unfold Australia sees India at the heart of this historic shif

Effect of temperature dependent viscosity on natural convective boundary layer flow over a horizontal plate embedded in a nanofluid saturated porous medium

The effect of temperature dependent viscosity on natural convective boundary-layer flow of a nano-fluid over an isothermal horizontal plate is investigated numerically. The viscosity of the fluid is assumed to have an exponentially decaying dependence on temperature ν=ν0e−b(T−T∞). A similarity analysis is presented for field equations embodying conservation of total mass, momentum, thermal energy and nano-particles. The analysis shows that velocity, temperature and nano-particle volume fraction profiles in the respective boundary layers depend on the viscosity parameter γ besides the pertinent parameters such as buoyancy ratio Nr, Brownian motion Nb, thermophoresis Nt and Lewis number Le. From physical considerations one expects that an increase in the viscosity must result in lower heat transfer rates. Results in accordance with the physical considerations are obtained in this study. The study also investigates the effect of the presence of an internal heat source in the porous medium by considering the internal heat generation term in the energy equation. In the presence of the heat source the heat transfer rate is lower whereas the nanoparticle volume fraction rate is higher than those obtained in the absence of the source term

Improved Learning Scheme for Cognitive Radio using Artificial Neural Networks

The future of wireless system is facing the problem of spectrum scarcity. Number of users is increasing rapidly but available spectrum is limited. The Cognitive Radio (CR) network technology can enable the unlicensed users to share the frequency spectrum with the licensed users on a dynamic basis without creating any interference to primary user. Whenever secondary user finds that primary user is not transmitting and channel is free then it uses channel opportunistically. In this paper cognitive radio with predictive capability using artificial neural network has been proposed. The advantage of such cognitive user is saving of time and energy for spectrum sensing. Proposed radio will sense only that channel which is predicted to be free and channel is selected on the basis of maximum vacant time. Performance has been evaluated in the term of mean square error. The results show that this learning capability can be embedded in secondary users for better performance of future wireless technologies. 

UP-DOWN ROUTING BASED DEADLOCK FREE DYNAMIC RECONFIGURATION IN HIGH SPEED LOCAL AREA NETWORKS

Dynamic reconfiguration of high speed switched network is the process of changing from one routing function to another while the network remains in running mode Current distributed switch-based interconnected systems require high performance reliability and availability These systems changes their topologies due to hot expansion of components link or node activation and deactivation Therefore in order to support hard real-time and distributed multimedia applications over a high speed network we need to avoid discarding packets when the topology changes Thus a dynamic reconfiguration algorithm updates the routing tables of these interconnected switches according to new changed topology without stopping the traffic Here we propose an improved deadlock-free partial progressive reconfiguration PPR technique based on UP DOWN routing algorithm that assigns the directions to various links of high-speed switched networks based on pre-order traversal of computed spanning tree This improved technique gives better performance as compared to traditional PPR by minimizing the path length of packets to be transmitted Moreover the proposed reconfiguration strategy makes the optimize use of all operational links and reduces the traffic congestion in the network The simulated results are compared with traditional PP

Area efficient parallel lfsr for cyclic redundancy check

Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), code for error detection finds many applications in the field of digital communication, data storage, control system and data compression. CRC encoding operation is carried out by using a Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR). Serial implementation of CRC requires more clock cycles which is equal to data message length plus generator polynomial degree but in parallel implementation of CRC one clock cycle is required if a whole data message is applied at a time. In previous work related to parallel LFSR, hardware complexity of the architecture reduced using a technique named state space transformation. This paper presents detailed explaination of search algorithm implementation and technique to find number of XOR gates required for different CRC algorithms. This paper presents a searching algorithm and new technique to find the number of XOR gates required for different CRC algorithms. The comparison between proposed and previous architectures shows that the number of XOR gates are reduced for CRC algorithms which improve the hardware efficiency. Searching algorithm and all the matrix computations have been performed using MATLAB simulations