Agricultural Trade Liberalization and Poverty in Tunisia: Micro-simulation in a General Equilibrium Framework

The study tries to answer the following questions: Will exposure to world agricultural prices generate more poverty or less? To what extent will households be affected by changes in agricultural trade polices? Do multilateral agricultural liberalization matter more than bilateral changes? Results of simulations using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model linked to household survey data suggest that trade liberalization has only modest effects on the level of GDP, but it has a substantial effect in reducing poverty. Moreover, the combined effects of global and domestic liberalization are more pro-poor than the effect of domestic liberalization alone. As a net importer of agricultural commodities, Tunisia may be expected to experience terms-oftrade losses from higher world agricultural prices. However, given Tunisia's significant agricultural import protection policies, it is expected that the agricultural sector will lose from trade liberalization that removes this protection.Tunisia, agricultural trade liberalization, poverty, International Relations/Trade,

Impact of trade liberalization on agriculture in the near East and North Africa:

Trade liberalization Africa, Agricultural trade., Economic development Africa, Sub-Saharan., Sustainable agriculture Africa, Sub-Saharan, Agricultural marketing, Agricultural policy Africa, Sub-Saharan, Agriculture Economic aspects Africa,

Public spending and poverty reduction in an oil-based economy: The case of Yemen

"This study is part of a collaborative project between the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Arab Planning Institute in Kuwait on public policy and poverty reduction in the Arab region. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of an increase in public spending in priority areas on economic growth and poverty reduction in Yemen. To accomplish this objective, the study builds a dynamic Computable General Equilibrium model to provide a baseline scenario of changes in the economy and poverty levels in Yemen during the period 1998-2016. Alternative scenarios are then compared to isolate the specific impact of several policies on poverty. The scenarios assume an increase in public spending devoted to three priority areas (agriculture, education, and health), which affect the economy through an increase in sectoral or economy-wide technical factor productivity. Results of public spending experiments show that targeting increased amounts of public spending towards education and health services will generate more economic growth and poverty reduction than increasing public spending solely on the agricultural sector. However, when an oil sector is a prominent part of the economy, as in Yemen, additional public spending on health and education does not improve productivity in the oil sector. Therefore, spending on agriculture becomes the most important channel for poverty reduction and economic growth. While increasing public spending in priority areas appears to be the best solution available for the government to reduce poverty during the next decade, the road is still long for Yemen to be able to achieve its Millennium Development Goals for poverty reduction. Re-allocating public expenditures from defense to key sectors appears to be an additional option for reducing poverty, given the financial constraints facing Yemen. However, in the current context of terrorism concerns, it will be difficult to convince policy-makers to reduce spending on defense and security. Seeking additional resources from international donors seems to be the only option available to increase benefits from increased public spending in the priority areas identified and assessed in this study." from Authors' AbstractPublic investments, Poverty reduction, economic growth,

Agricultural Trade Liberalization in West Asia and North Africa

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/28/07.International Relations/Trade,

La qualité de l'audit : analyse critique et proposition d'une approche d'évaluation axée sur la nature des travaux d'audit réalisés

L'approche rationnelle de la qualité de l'audit débouche sur une incapacité à évaluer la pertinence des travaux menés. Une nouvelle approche d'évaluation devrait être axée sur le niveau d'adaptabilité des travaux d'audit aux risques de l'entreprise. Nous estimons ainsi que le contrôle de la qualité de l'audit doit désormais se situer au niveau de la mise en oeuvre, à travers l'évaluation des programmes d'audit.qualité d'audit; approches d'évaluation; adaptabilité des travaux d'audit

Private Sector Development in Kuwait: A Product Space Approach

The advent of oil in the GCC countries has led their governments to assume an ever-increasing role in the economy and to build comprehensive welfare states, based largely on the provision of employment in the public sector and the generous supply of social services and heavily subsidized utilities, to their citizens. Moreover, an intricate web of regulatory and restrictive rules and regulations has come into existence over time, resulting in a private sector that is not competitive, is not outward-looking and is generally rent-seeking. The aim of this paper is to investigate the challenges that are preventing Kuwait from succeeding in diversifying its economy and developing a competitive private sector and the pre-requisite enabling environment, thereby reducing its dependence on the oil sector. Results of the analysis carried out in this study reveal that developing the role of private sector in the economic transformation of Kuwait could be achieved through a three interconnected strategies: improving the enabling environment for business to free private sector investors from existing regulations and red tape, developing new markets and opportunities through the creation of new investment opportunities, and ensuring competitiveness and integration with the regional and world economies

Economic and regulatory policy implications of overlapping preferential trade agreements in the Arab countries : the case of Tunisia

Tunisia’s 'Association Agreement' with the European Union (EU) will remove trade barriers on a large variety of goods by 2008. This paper (2007) undertakes an assessment of the impact of reforms, degree of implementation, flanking measures taken by the government, and the compliance of different regional trade agreements (RTAs) signed by Tunisia with World Trade Organization (WTO). Discriminatory treatment between off-shore and on-shore enterprises as well as protection of the local market has resulted in development of an off-shore sector supplied with imported intermediary products, scarcely integrated in the Tunisian economy, and an inefficient export sector, too weak to resist foreign competition

Reinforcement learning-based school energy management system

Energy efficiency is a key to reduced carbon footprint, savings on energy bills, and sustainability for future generations. For instance, in hot climate countries such as Qatar, buildings are high energy consumers due to air conditioning that resulted from high temperatures and humidity. Optimizing the building energy management system will reduce unnecessary energy consumptions, improve indoor environmental conditions, maximize building occupant's comfort, and limit building greenhouse gas emissions. However, lowering energy consumption cannot be done despite the occupants' comfort. Solutions must take into account these tradeoffs. Conventional Building Energy Management methods suffer from a high dimensional and complex control environment. In recent years, the Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm, applying neural networks for function approximation, shows promising results in handling such complex problems. In this work, a Deep Reinforcement Learning agent is proposed for controlling and optimizing a school building's energy consumption. It is designed to search for optimal policies to minimize energy consumption, maintain thermal comfort, and reduce indoor contaminant levels in a challenging 21-zone environment. First, the agent is trained with the baseline in a supervised learning framework. After cloning the baseline strategy, the agent learns with proximal policy optimization in an actor-critic framework. The performance is evaluated on a school model simulated environment considering thermal comfort, CO2 levels, and energy consumption. The proposed methodology can achieve a 21% reduction in energy consumption, a 44% better thermal comfort, and healthier CO2 concentrations over a one-year simulation, with reduced training time thanks to the integration of the behavior cloning learning technique. 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Acknowledgments: This publication was made possible by the National Priority Research Program (NPRP) grant [NPRP10-1203-160008] from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation) and the co-funding by IBERDROLA QSTP LLC. The findings achieved herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.Scopus2-s2.0-8510663929

Topological Interface-State Lasing in a Polymer-Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Superlattice

The advance of topological photonics has heralded a revolution for manipulating light as well as for the development of novel photonic devices such as topological insulator lasers. Here, we demonstrate topological lasing of circular polarization in a polymer-cholesteric liquid crystal (P-CLC) superlattice, tunable in the visible wavelength regime. By use of the femtosecond-laser direct-writing and self-assembling techniques, we establish the P-CLC superlattice with a controlled mini-band structure and a topological interface defect, thereby achieving a low threshold for robust topological lasing at about 0.4 uJ. Thanks to the chiral liquid crystal, not only the emission wavelength is thermally tuned, but the circularly polarized lasing is readily achieved. Our results bring about the possibility to realize compact and integrated topological photonic devices at low cost, as well as to engineer an ideal platform for exploring topological physics that involves light-matter interaction in soft-matter environments.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

The Coffee Residues and the Esparto Fibers as a Lignocellulosic Material for Removal of Dyes from Wastewater by Adsorption

Biosorption onto lignocellulosic products such as coffee residues and esparto fibers in natural and modified forms have been identified as a potential alternative to the existing biosorbents applied for dye removal from wastewater. The efficiency of each material has been discussed with respect to the operating conditions and the chemical modifications. The investigated thermodynamics and kinetics studies were exposed also in terms of equilibrium isotherms and fitted kinetic models. Moreover, the crucial role of the chemical structures of the cellulosic fibers as an affecting factor on the mechanism of the adsorption process was evaluated and compared. The different treatment methods showed an improvement in terms of removal and maximum adsorption capacity. In fact, in some cases the removal capacity can be increased to 99% and the maximum adsorption capacity can reach 67 mg/g. On the other hand, the different investigations showed that the study data fitted to the known model such as Langmuir isotherm and pseudo-second-order kinetic