Competition Policy Reform in Agriculture: A Comparison of the BRICs Countries

This paper forms part of a project titled ‘Facilitating Efficient Agricultural Markets in India: An Assessment of Competition and Regulatory Reform Requirements funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). The project follows from previous research which found that India’s border reforms need to be complemented by ‘behind-the-border’ domestic reforms if government policy objectives of improved productivity, higher rural employment and incomes and enhanced food security are to be met. The project is being undertaken by Indian and Australian collaborators with expertise in agricultural policy development. Stage 1 of the project is designed to develop a common understanding among those collaborators of contemporary market based policy development principles and the extent to which they have been adopted in other developing countries. The BRICs economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well as South Africa, were chosen for this purpose. A comparative overview of agricultural policy developments in these economies is underway drawing observations about policy reform impacts on agricultural production and the extent to which policy reforms have been consistent with competition policy and microeconomic reform principles applied in developed economies, such as Australia. The extent to which trade practices law has emerged in developing economies as an alternative to direct regulation is also considered. Preliminary findings are reported to facilitate broader discussion and encourage input from interested parties. Stage 2 of the project, commencing later in 2009, will involve the application of competition policy principles to the marketing regulations of a selection of agricultural industries in India. Consideration will be given to clarifying regulatory objectives, assessing their consistency with accepted forms of ‘market failure’ and assessing whether regulatory measures address those policy objectives in a manner least restrictive on competition. As well as facilitating efficient policy reform within India’s agricultural sector, the project aims to enhance the development of market based agricultural policy frameworks and the policy development skills of Indian and Australian policy makers.

Computational Analysis of the Impact on India of the Uruguay Round and the Forthcoming WTO Trade Negotiations

The Indian economy has experienced a major transformation during the decade of the 1990s. Apart from the impact of various unilateral economic reforms undertaken since 1991, the economy also had to reorient itself to the changing multilateral trade discipline within the newly written GATT-WTO framework. The unilateral trade policy measures have encompassed exchange-rate policy, foreign investment, external borrowing, import licensing, custom tariffs, and export subsidies. The multilateral aspect of India's trade policy refers to India's WTO commitments regarding trade in goods and services, trade-related investment measures, and intellectual property rights. The present study analyzes the economic effects on India and other major trading countries/regions of the Uruguay Round (UR) trade liberalization and the liberalization that might be undertaken in a new WTO negotiating round. India's welfare gain is expected ot be 1.1% ($4.7 billion over its 2005 GDP) when the UR scenarios get fully implemented. The additional welfare gain is an estimated 2.7$11.4 billion) when the assumed future WTO round of multilateral trade liberalization is achieved. Resources would be allocated in India to the labor-intensive sectors such as textiles, clothing, leather and leather products, and food, beverages, and tobacco. These sectors would also experience growth in output and exports. Real returns to both labor and capital would increase in the economy. The scale effect (percent change in output per firm) is positive for all the ten sectors of manufacturing, indicating that Indian firms become more efficient than before. Finally, even if India undertakes unilateral trade liberalization of the order indicated in the WTO multilateral scenarios, it would still benefit, although less so than with multilateral liberalization.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39696/3/wp312.pd

Computational Analysis of the Impact on India of the Uruguay Round and the Forthcoming WTO Trade Negotiations

The Indian economy has experienced a major transformation during the decade of the 1990s. Apart from the impact of various unilateral economic reforms undertaken since 1991, the economy also had to reorient itself to the changing multilateral trade discipline within the newly written GATT-WTO framework. The unilateral trade policy measures have encompassed exchange-rate policy, foreign investment, external borrowing, import licensing, custom tariffs, and export subsidies. The multilateral aspect of India's trade policy refers to India's WTO commitments regarding trade in goods and services, trade-related investment measures, and intellectual property rights. The present study analyzes the economic effects on India and other major trading countries/regions of the Uruguay Round (UR) trade liberalization and the liberalization that might be undertaken in a new WTO negotiating round. India's welfare gain is expected ot be 1.1% ($4.7 billion over its 2005 GDP) when the UR scenarios get fully implemented. The additional welfare gain is an estimated 2.7$11.4 billion) when the assumed future WTO round of multilateral trade liberalization is achieved. Resources would be allocated in India to the labor-intensive sectors such as textiles, clothing, leather and leather products, and food, beverages, and tobacco. These sectors would also experience growth in output and exports. Real returns to both labor and capital would increase in the economy. The scale effect (percent change in output per firm) is positive for all the ten sectors of manufacturing, indicating that Indian firms become more efficient than before. Finally, even if India undertakes unilateral trade liberalization of the order indicated in the WTO multilateral scenarios, it would still benefit, although less so than with multilateral liberalization.

A Hybrid Intuitionistic Logic: Semantics and Decidability

An intuitionistic, hybrid modal logic suitable for reasoning about distribution of resources was introduced by Jia and Walker. The modalities of the logic allow validation of properties in a particular place, in some place and in all places. We give a sound and complete Kripke semantics for the logic extended with disjunctive connectives. The extended logic can be seen as an instance of Hybrid IS5. We also give a sound and complete birelational semantics, and show that it enjoys the finite model property: if a judgement is not valid in the logic, then there is a finite birelational counter-model. Hence, we prove that the logic is decidable

A Distributed Kripke Semantics

An intuitionistic, hybrid modal logic suitable for reasoning about distribution of resources was introduced in [10]. We extend the Kripke semantics of intuitionistic logic, enriching each possible Kripke state with a set of places, and show that this semantics is both sound and complete for the logic. In the semantics, resources of a distributed system are interpreted as atoms, and placement of atoms in a possible state corresponds to the distribution of the resources. The modalities of the logic allow us to validate properties in a particular place, in some place and in all places. We extend the logic with disjunctive connectives, and refine our semantics to obtain soundness and completeness for extended logic. The extended logic can be seen as an instance of Hybrid IS5 [2, 18]

A reduced semantics for deciding trace equivalence using constraint systems

Many privacy-type properties of security protocols can be modelled using trace equivalence properties in suitable process algebras. It has been shown that such properties can be decided for interesting classes of finite processes (i.e., without replication) by means of symbolic execution and constraint solving. However, this does not suffice to obtain practical tools. Current prototypes suffer from a classical combinatorial explosion problem caused by the exploration of many interleavings in the behaviour of processes. M\"odersheim et al. have tackled this problem for reachability properties using partial order reduction techniques. We revisit their work, generalize it and adapt it for equivalence checking. We obtain an optimization in the form of a reduced symbolic semantics that eliminates redundant interleavings on the fly.Comment: Accepted for publication at POST'1

Amorphous, Self-Healed (ASH-G) geopolymer and (ASH-C) ceramic composites

Basalt is a common volcanic rock found all around the world and on Mars. The abundance of basalt has attracted attention from construction firms and material researchers as an alternative reinforcement source. Potassium geopolymer in the stoichiometric composition K2O • Al2O3 • 4SiO2 • 11H2O was produced from fumed silica, deionized water, potassium hydroxide, (i.e. water glass) and metakaolin. The geopolymer matrix was fabricated in an IKA® high shear mixer. ½” chopped basalt fibers from Kameny Vek in Moscow were added to potassium geopolymer in amounts of 7.5 wt %. The basalt fibers and 7.5 wt % glass frit (900°C) were then dispersed in KGP using a planetary high shear Thinky mixer and the samples were allowed to set under applied pressure at ambient temperatures for 1 day followed by 1 day at 50°C to complete the reaction. A low melting temperature fine glass frit (Tm = 900°C) was added to produce self-sealing/crack filling in a dehydrated but un-crystallized geopolymer composite (900-1000 °C). Sample geometries were 1” x 1” x 6” in dimensions. Six samples from each basalt weight class were heated to 400, 800, 900, 1000, 1100, and 1200 °C. The ramp up and down rates were 7 °C/min with a 1 hour soak time at each set temperature. SEM/EDS data indicated that melting and bonding of the glass phase dispersed into the surrounding KGP matrix, produced a self-sealing effect on the dehydrated and cracked matrix. The chopped basalt fibers melted after the KGP matrix crystallized into leucite, providing a network/glass filling system in a ceramic (1200 °C). At intermediate temperatures the geopolymer was converted to a ceramic, but the basalt fibers remained intact. The amorphous self-healing effect of the glass frit significantly improved to the flexure strength of the geopolymer and ceramic composite

Escaping the complexity-bitrate-quality barriers of video encoders via deep perceptual optimization

We extend the concept of learnable video precoding (rate-aware neural-network processing prior to encoding) to deep perceptual optimization (DPO). Our framework comprises a pixel-to-pixel convolutional neural network that is trained based on the virtualization of core encoding blocks (block transform, quantization, block-based prediction) and multiple loss functions representing rate, distortion and visual quality of the virtual encoder. We evaluate our proposal with AVC/H.264 and AV1 under per-clip rate-quality optimization. The results show that DPO offers, on average, 14.2% bitrate reduction over AVC/H.264 and 12.5% bitrate reduction over AV1. Our framework is shown to improve both distortion- and perception-oriented metrics in a consistent manner, exhibiting only 3% outliers, which correspond to content with peculiar characteristics. Thus, DPO is shown to offer complexity-bitrate-quality tradeoffs that go beyond what conventional video encoders can offe

Deep bore well water level fluctuations in the Koyna region, India: the presence of a low order dynamical system in a seismically active environment

Water level fluctuations in deep bore wells in the vicinity of seismically active Koyna region in western India provides an opportunity to understand the causative mechanism underlying reservoir-triggered earthquakes. As the crustal porous rocks behave nonlinearly, their characteristics can be obtained by analysing water level fluctuations, which reflect an integrated response of the medium. A Fractal dimension is one such measure of nonlinear characteristics of porous rock as observed in water level data from the Koyna region. It is inferred in our study that a low nonlinear dynamical system with three variables can predict the water level fluctuations in bore wells