NAFTA and the U.S.-Mexican Trucking Dispute

Although the charter of the North American Free Trade Agreement established a schedule that would have opened the border states of the United States to competition from Mexican trucking companies in 1995, and all of the United States to this competition in 2000, the full implementation of these provisions has been delayed due to concerns about the safety of Mexican trucks and drivers. This delay has resulted in much frustration for Mexico, which, in 2009 implemented retaliatory tariffs on products imported from the United States. In March, 2011 the two countries unveiled a deal to resolve this dispute which could help ease tense relations between the two neighbors. This paper discusses the nature and significance of the trucking dispute between Mexico and the United States

The Future of the U.S. Postal Service

Structural, legal, and financial constraints haw brought the U.S. Postal Service \USPS) to the brink of breakdown in the past decade. Faced by declining business brought about by the e-mail revolution and competition from private express companies, the Postal Service has repeatedly requested assistance from the federal government. This culminated in December 2006 with the passage of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which introduces modest revisions in the.pricing and service policies of the Postal Service so as to make it a self-sustaining government corporation. But will it? Although the new legislation addresses some of the problems of the Postal Service, more radical changes may be necessary in the future. One possibility is the complete privatization of the Postal Service including the removal of the legal monopoly that it has on the delivery of letter mail, so as to foster competition in the mail delivery. Because these remedies are currently too controversial for Congress to implement their chances of being enacted in the near future are dim. Instead, what is emerging is a partial approach to privatization in which the Postal Service forms worksharing agreements with private-sector firrns to take advantage of their efficiencies. Whether such partial privatization will significantly improve the efficiency of mail delivery remains to be seen. This article discusses the nature and operation of the Postal Service and assesses the merits of its possible reforms

Boeing and Airbus: Duopoly in Jeopardy?

For decades, Boeing and Airbus have struggled for dominance in the large commercial aircraft market. In 2010 and 2011, the World Trade Organization ruled that each firm has received illegal subsidies from the governments of the United States and the European Union, which have enhanced their competitive positions. This paper considers the nature of these rulings and the future competitive environment in the global jetliner industry

United-Continental Merger

This case study discusses the nature and likely effects of the proposed merger between United Airlines and Continental Airlines. It is intended as a lecture for instructors teaching undergraduate courses in Industrial Organization or Antitrust Economics

Will the Dollar Be Dethroned as the Main Reserve Currency?

The U.S. dollar was in the line of fire as leaders from the largest developed and developing countries participated in the G8 meeting on July, 2009. China and other emerging market heavy-weights such as Russia and Brazil are pushing for debate on an eventual shift away from the dollar to a new global reserve currency. These countries are particularly concerned about the heavy debt burden of the United States and fear inflation will further debase the dollar which has lost 33 percent in value against other major currencies since 2002. Will the dollar continue as the main reserve currency of the world? What are the other currencies to watch as challengers to the throne? This paper address these questions

Industrial Policy and Renewable Energy: Trade Conflicts

Governments use industrial policy to promote the development of new industries and the creation and adoption of new technologies. Such policy involves subsidies granted to producers and consumers, usually for the purpose of correcting a market failure. Concerning renewable energies such as wind energy and solar energy, China, the United States, and the European Union provide extensive support to producers and consumers. This support has resulted in trade frictions among these nations. This paper discusses the relationship between industrial policy and trade disputes in renewable energy

Country characteristics and the incidence of capital income taxation on wages: an empirical assessment

This paper examines the incidence of corporate income taxes on wages using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 13 OECD countries. Within a wage-bargaining framework, our econometric analysis shows that a substantial share of the corporate tax burden is shifted from capital to labour. However, the magnitude of this shift is influenced importantly by country characteristics affecting the process of wage determination, such as the degree of capital mobility, a country's relative influence over the world price of output and trade unions’ strength

The Possibilities of Tolerance: Intercultural Dialogue in a Multicultural Europe

Tolerance is everywhere. The Council of Europe endeavours to build it, schools are required to teach it, and neighbours are asked to extend it. It features in citizenship ceremonies, city-marketing campaigns, and religious texts and is attached to a variety of different objects, people, and behaviours. Yet despite its ubiquitous circulation as a moral good, critiques of tolerance as a way of relating have called for its rejection in favour of alternative projects such as respect and equality. In this paper I contextualise recent critiques and ask what possibilities remain for a politics of tolerance in multicultural Europe. In so doing, I argue that critiques are insufficiently attuned to the different contexts in which tolerance becomes productive and offer a starting point for further empirical research on its embodied practice. Using an example of dialogue, I argue that tolerance can be intrinsic to the development of alternative relations when positioned as part of an ongoing struggle to multiply ways of thinking and acting. I finish by reflecting on the relationship between tolerance, agonism, and dialogue, to outline a more pragmatic politics of difference, arguing that it is not enough to call for alternative projects without attending to the difficult and incremental learning that such projects demand

Exploring Nested Identities: Voluntary Membership, Social Category Identity, and Identification in a Community Choir

Although scholars theorize that identities are layered or nested within one another, little is understood about whether, how, and what layers are expressed by individuals. Such understanding could offer insight into organizational membership decisions, particularly within voluntary organizations where financial incentives are not involved. This study used semi-structured interviews to explore how individuals articulate identities and identification sources when discussing their desire to join and continue participation in a community choir, a voluntary leisure organization. The findings highlight how specific individual activities and higher order nested family and music identities, in addition to the more traditional organizational identifications, all play into membership decisions. The results also suggest that identity researchers and voluntary organization managers may benefit from focusing more attention on (a) higher order and cross-cutting social category identities, (b) individual activities in the organizations, and (c) the isomorphism among different layers of identity and identification.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Second Order Perturbations in the Randall-Sundrum Infinite Brane-World Model

We discuss the non-linear gravitational interactions in the Randall-Sundrum single brane model. If we naively write down the 4-dimensional effective action integrating over the fifth dimension with the aid of the decomposition with respect to eigen modes of 4-dimensional d'Alembertian, the Kaluza-Klein mode coupling seems to be ill-defined. We carefully analyze second order perturbations of the gravitational field induced on the 3-brane under the assumption of the static and axial-symmetric 5-dimensional metric. It is shown that there remains no pathological feature in the Kaluza-Klein mode coupling after the summation over all different mass modes. Furthermore, the leading Kaluza-Klein corrections are shown to be sufficiently suppressed in comparison with the leading order term which is obtained by the zero mode truncation. We confirm that the 4-dimensional Einstein gravity is approximately recovered on the 3-brane up to second order perturbations.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, comment and reference added, typos correcte