GATT-UR and Philippine Agriculture: Facts and Fallacies

GATT-UR provisions on agriculture have been most controversial. Its ratification depends on the establishment of adequate “safety nets” to protect farmers from the anticipated adverse welfare impacts of the GATT-UR implementation. This paper argues that the global and Philippine trade liberalization in the spirit of GATT-UR will benefit the poor and farmers. Senate should therefore ratify the agreements to allow the government to attend their business of carrying out economic and institutional reform for sustainable economic growth.agriculture sector, General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, rural sector

Random Delays and the Synchronization of Chaotic Maps

We investigate the dynamics of an array of logistic maps coupled with random delay times. We report that for adequate coupling strength the array is able to synchronize, in spite of the random delays. Specifically, we find that the synchronized state is a homogeneous steady-state, where the chaotic dynamics of the individual maps is suppressed. This differs drastically from the synchronization with instantaneous and fixed-delay coupling, as in those cases the dynamics is chaotic. Also in contrast with the instantaneous and fixed-delay cases, the synchronization does not dependent on the connection topology, depends only on the average number of links per node. We find a scaling law that relates the distance to synchronization with the randomness of the delays. We also carry out a statistical linear stability analysis that confirms the numerical results and provides a better understanding of the nontrivial roles of random delayed interactions.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

GATT-UR and Philippine Agriculture: Facts and Fallacies

GATT-UR provisions on agriculture have been most controversial. Its ratification depends on the establishment of adequate “safety nets” to protect farmers from the anticipated adverse welfare impacts of the GATT-UR implementation. This paper argues that the global and Philippine trade liberalization in the spirit of GATT-UR will benefit the poor and farmers. Senate should therefore ratify the agreements to allow the government to attend their business of carrying out economic and institutional reform for sustainable economic growth.agriculture sector, General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, rural sector

Water Demand Projections for Metro Manila: A Critical Review

Establishment of an efficient water price structure requires an accurate water demand projections. This month’s issue points out the urgent need for greater efforts in developing the basic data requirements, estimating demand functions of various users and improving the methodology for reliable water demand projections.water sector, water demand, water demand models, water demand projections, household water demand, industrial and commercial water demand

A spectrophotometric catalogue of HII galaxies

We present a spectrophotometric catalogue of 90 emission-line galaxies (ELGs) discovered during an objective - prism survey that aimed to search for dwarf galaxies within the voids (Popescu et al. 1996, 1998). The paper presents line ratios, equivalent widths and absolute fluxes for the emission-lines seen in the spectra of the galaxies. A list of newly discovered Wolf-Rayet galaxies is presented. Many objects included in the catalogue have low metallicity and the extreme cases are proposed as candidates for very low metallicity galaxies.Comment: 14 pages, to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics Suppl. Serie

Constraints to Food Security: The Philippine Case

Over the past two decades, the Philippine economic growth has been erratic and lower than most developing countries in Asia. The agriculture sector has not performed well since 1980s, hence losing its comparative advantage. Recommendations of Congressional Commission on Agricultural Modernization is adopted through the Agricultural and Fisheries Modernization Act which spells out the need for policy and institutional reforms and setting up of public expenditures program. High food prices affect the food security of the large majority of the poor and distorted price incentives lead to lower sectoral and economy-wide income. To address market failure in the agriculture sector, there is therefore a need to implement appropriate policies with respect to trade and exchange rate policies, financial markets, intellectual property rights and biosafety. In addition, the paper cites the need for a cost-effective public expenditure program in research and extension, irrigation and market infrastructure. Efficient institutional frameworks for property rights and government bureaucracy are also suggested.agriculture sector, food price stability

Modelling the spectral energy distribution of galaxies from the ultraviolet to submillimeter

We present results from a new modelling technique which can account for the observed optical/NIR - FIR/submm spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of normal star-forming galaxies in terms of a minimum number of essential parameters specifying the star-formation history and geometrical distribution of stars and dust. The model utilises resolved optical/NIR images to constrain the old stellar population and associated dust, and geometry-sensitive colour information in the FIR/submm to constrain the spatial distributions of young stars and associated dust. It is successfully applied to the edge-on spirals NGC891 and NGC5907. In both cases the young stellar population powers the bulk of the FIR/sub-mm emission. The model also accounts for the observed surface brightness distribution and large-scale radial brightness profiles in NGC891 as determined using the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) at 170 and 200 mcrions and at 850 micron using SCUBA.Comment: 20 pages (Latex), Highlight talk at the Joint European and National Astronomical Meeting JENAM 2001, to be published in Reviews in Modern Astronomy 15: Five Days of Creation: Astronomy with Large Telescopes from Ground and Base. Germany : Astronomische Gesellschaft, 200