Shaping globalization for poverty alleviation and food security:

CONTENTS: Brief 1. Introduction / Eugenio Díaz-Bonilla and Sherman Robinson Brief 2. The Nature of Disagreements / Ravi Kanbur Brief 3. Growth and Poverty / Manohar Sharma, Sam Morley, and Eugenio Díaz-Bonilla Brief 4. Trade and Food Security / Eugenio Díaz-Bonilla and Marcelle Thomas Brief 5. Nutrition / Julie Babinard and Per Pinstrup-Andersen Brief 6. High-Value Agriculture / Christopher Delgado, Nicholas Minot, and Nikolas Wada Brief 7. Food Safety and Food Quality / Laurian J. Unnevehr Brief 8. Technological Change / Peter B. R. Hazell Brief 9. Intellectual Property Rights and Agricultural R&D / Philip G. Pardey and Brian D. Wright Brief 10. Environment / Stanley Wood Brief 11. Democracy and Civil Society / Marzia Fontana and Yukitsugu Yanoma Brief 12. Conflict and Food Insecurity / Ellen Messer and Marc J. Cohen Brief 13. Governments and Public Policy / Eugenio Díaz-Bonilla and Sherman RobinsonNutrition., Intellectual property., Conflict management., Food security., Poverty alleviation., Afghanistan., Globalization,

Getting ready for the millennium round trade negotiations:

Contents: 1. Overview / Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla and Sherman Robinson 2. Latin American perspective / Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla and Lucio Reca 3. Asian perspective / Marcus Noland 4. African perspective / Natasha Mukherjee and Rebecca Lee Harris 5. Transition Economies' perspective / Ulrike Grote and Peter Wehrheim 6. European Union perspective / Stefan Tangermann 7. United States of America perspective / Dale Hathaway 8. Least-developed Countries' perspective / Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla, Marcelle Thomas, and Valeria Piñeiro 9. Cairns Group perspective / Kym Anderson.World Trade Organization., Produce trade Government policy International cooperation., Tariff on farm produce International cooperation., Agricultural policy International cooperation.,

Globalization, trade reform, and the developing countries: essay in IFPRI Annual Report

This essay focuses on trends reflecting the globalization of the international economy and on changes in agricultural markets. In this context it assesses how these factors are affecting developing countries and how, in turn, those countries could affect the Millenium Round of agricultural trade agreements,International economic relations., Trade policy Developing countries Reform., Globalization, Development policies.,

Optimal Policies in an Aging Society

We analyze optimal social security in a two-period overlapping generations model with endogenous retirement and demographic change. In this model, households choose to spend the second period of their lives in full retirement if the tax rate on labor income exceeds a certain threshold. We find that this threshold is increasing in life expectancy and decreasing in the fertility rate, which implies that both types of demographic change increase the relevance of the partial retirement case in which households participate on the labor market. Related, both an increase in life expectancy and a drop in fertility imply that retirement is delayed in the partial retirement case. We also show that when the government decides about the retirement age, the command optimum can be replicated through social security policies as long as the laissez-faire equilibrium features an overaccumulation of capital. When households decide about their retirement age themselves, however, replication of the command optimum is not possible, even if overaccumulation of capital applies. In both cases, it is optimal to expand social security when longevity increases and to reduce it when fertility drops

'A foundation-hatched black elite’: Obama, the US establishment and foreign policy

US foreign policy has a largely unacknowledged racial dimension due to the racial characteristics of the US foreign policy establishment, and in shared mindsets in a soon-to-be ‘majority-minority’ nation. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) racial-ethnic and class factors produce managed change through socialisation in an attenuated meritocratic order, adapting to challenges to elite dominance by incorporating rising talent, without altering broader patterns of power. The greatest success of such a system would be the assimilation of the most elite minority individuals, even as the bulk of those groups’ members continue to experience discrimination. Such success would be compounded by election to the highest office of a minority US president extolling the virtues of post-racial politics. President Barack Obama represents a ‘Wasp-ified’ black elite, assimilated into the extant structures of power that remain wedded to a more secular, non-biologically-racial, version of Anglo-Saxonism or, more broadly, liberal internationalism. Hence, it should occasion little surprise that there has been so little change in US foreign policies during Obama’s two-term presidency

Violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in glassy systems: basic notions and the numerical evidence

This review reports on the research done during the past years on violations of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem (FDT) in glassy systems. It is focused on the existence of a quasi-fluctuation-dissipation theorem (QFDT) in glassy systems and the currently supporting knowledge gained from numerical simulation studies. It covers a broad range of non-stationary aging and stationary driven systems such as structural-glasses, spin-glasses, coarsening systems, ferromagnetic models at criticality, trap models, models with entropy barriers, kinetically constrained models, sheared systems and granular media. The review is divided into four main parts: 1) An introductory section explaining basic notions related to the existence of the FDT in equilibrium and its possible extension to the glassy regime (QFDT), 2) A description of the basic analytical tools and results derived in the framework of some exactly solvable models, 3) A detailed report of the current evidence in favour of the QFDT and 4) A brief digression on the experimental evidence in its favour. This review is intended for inexpert readers who want to learn about the basic notions and concepts related to the existence of the QFDT as well as for the more expert readers who may be interested in more specific results.Comment: 120 pages, 37 figures. Topical review paper . Several typos and misprints corrected, new references included and others updated. to be published in J. Phys. A (Math. Gen.

Characteristics and Treatment Outcomes of Patients with MDR and XDR Tuberculosis in a TB Referral Hospital in Beijing: A 13-Year Experience

Background: Information on treatment outcomes among hospitalized patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) are scarce in China. Methodology/Principal Findings: We conducted this retrospective study to analyze the characteristics and treatment outcomes in MDR- and XDR-TB patients in the 309 Hospital in Beijing, China during 1996-2009. Socio-demographic and clinical data were retrieved from medical records and analyzed. Logistic regression analysis was performed to identify risk factors associated with poor treatment outcomes and Cox proportional hazards regression model was further used to determine risk factors associated with death in TB patients. Among the 3,551 non-repetitive hospitalized TB patients who had drug susceptibility testing (DST) results, 716 (20.2%) had MDR-TB and 51 (1.4%) had XDR-TB. A total of 3,270 patients who had medical records available were used for further analyses. Treatment success rates (cured and treatment completed) were 90.9%, 53.4% and 29.2% for patients with non-MDR-TB, patients with MDR-TB excluding XDR-TB and patients with XDR-TB, respectively. Independent risk factors associated with poor treatment outcomes in MDR-TB patients included being a migrant (adjusted OR = 1.77), smear-positivity at treatment onset (adjusted OR = 1.94) and not receiving 3 or more potentially effective drugs (adjusted OR = 3.87). Independent risk factors associated with poor treatment outcomes in XDR-TB patients were smear-positivity at treatment onset (adjusted OR = 10.42) and not receiving 3 or more potentially effective drugs (adjusted OR = 14.90). The independent risk factors associated with death in TB patients were having chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (adjusted HR = 5.25) and having hypertension (adjusted HR = 4.31). Conclusions/Significance: While overall satisfactory treatment success for non-MDR-TB patients was achieved, more intensive efforts should be made to better manage MDR- and XDR-TB cases in order to improve their treatment outcomes and to minimize further emergence of so-called totally drug-resistant TB cases. © 2011 Liu et al.published_or_final_versio

Data Descriptor: Ash leaf metabolomes reveal differences between trees tolerant and susceptible to ash dieback disease

CMS was funded by the ‘Nornex’ project jointly by UK BBSRC (BBS/E/J/000CA5323) and DEFRA and a BBSRC Tools and Resources grant (BB/N021452/1) awarded to M.G. and D.J.S

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of √ s = 8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT > 120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between Emiss T > 150 GeV and Emiss T > 700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with either large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, or production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presente