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The effects of international trade on national sovereignty: the case of the Central American Common Market
textThe globalization of economic activity has caused some to declare that
national borders no longer matter and, therefore, the nation-state has become
irrelevant. Others argue that globalization has weakened the nation-state and has
made it susceptible to the economic interests that control the global economy.
Regardless, countries have become increasingly integrated into the global
economy over the past two decades; they have also organized themselves into
various regional trading blocs. This study contributes to the debate of how
globalization and regionalization have affected the sovereignty of the worldâs
nation-states, by investigating the effects of the Central American Common
Market (CACM) on the national sovereignty of its member countries. To
accomplish this goal, the study employed a battery of empirical and qualitative
analyses to address three primary questions. First, does the existence of the
CACM conflict with the nation-state, resulting in the formation of a de facto,
supra-national boundary? Second, does the CACMâs legal and institutional
framework possess the strength to compete and challenge the authority of the
nation-state? And, third, does regional identity or economic integration
strengthen the CACM in its challenge of the nation state? To determine the
existence of a de facto, supra-national CACM boundary, the study employed a
gravity model to determine its existence and to measure its effect. To understand
the ability of the CACM to successfully challenge the authority of its member
states, the research included interviews of individuals working at Central
Americaâs multinational institutions, national governments and organizations
representing its private-sector. The findings of the empirical analyses did show,
from several geographic perspectives, a supra-national CACM boundary between
1980 and 1997. However, despite these findings, there was significant evidence
gathered during the interviewing process to question whether this border actually
exists. The Central American countries have been unwilling to give up more than
the minimal amount of national sovereignty necessary to make the CACM work.
Therefore, the findings of this research suggest that participation in the Central
American Common Market agreement has not threatened the national sovereignty
of its member nation-states.LBJ School of Public Affair
Maps of open chromatin highlight cell type-restricted patterns of regulatory sequence variation at hematological trait loci
<p>Nearly three-quarters of the 143 genetic signals associated with platelet and erythrocyte phenotypes identified by meta-analyses of genome-wide association (GWA) studies are located at non-protein-coding regions. Here, we assessed the role of candidate regulatory variants associated with cell type-restricted, closely related hematological quantitative traits in biologically relevant hematopoietic cell types. We used formaldehyde-assisted isolation of regulatory elements followed by next-generation sequencing (FAIRE-seq) to map regions of open chromatin in three primary human blood cells of the myeloid lineage. In the precursors of platelets and erythrocytes, as well as in monocytes, we found that open chromatin signatures reflect the corresponding hematopoietic lineages of the studied cell types and associate with the cell type-specific gene expression patterns. Dependent on their signal strength, open chromatin regions showed correlation with promoter and enhancer histone marks, distance to the transcription start site, and ontology classes of nearby genes. Cell type-restricted regions of open chromatin were enriched in sequence variants associated with hematological indices. The majority (63.6%) of such candidate functional variants at platelet quantitative trait loci (QTLs) coincided with binding sites of five transcription factors key in regulating megakaryopoiesis. We experimentally tested 13 candidate regulatory variants at 10 platelet QTLs and found that 10 (76.9%) affected protein binding, suggesting that this is a frequent mechanism by which regulatory variants influence quantitative trait levels. Our findings demonstrate that combining large-scale GWA data with open chromatin profiles of relevant cell types can be a powerful means of dissecting the genetic architecture of closely related quantitative traits.</p>