WTO Disciplines and Fisheries Subsidies - Should the SCM Agreement" Be Modified?

This article considers the negotiations on a possible modification of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM Agreement) in relation to fisheries subsidies. The mandate for these negotiations was given by the Doha Ministerial Declaration of 2001. The current WTO regulations are deficient in that many subsidies do not meet certain criteria of the SCM Agreement. This is mainly due to the current definition of a subsidy, the requirements for specificity and the inadequate categorisation of "red box" and "amber box" subsidies. In order to address fisheries subsidies adequately, this article contends that the SCM Agreement must be changed. The United States, the European Community, several developing countries and Japan are actively discussing this issue. After examining the different proposals, the best solution seems to be to find a common categorisation for fisheries subsidies and to identify those which lead to over-capacity and over-fishing. Such subsides should be prohibited and named in an illustrative list. Furthermore, subsidies which are not reported to the WTO should be actionable. Any country which has not fulfilled its notification duties would have the burden of proving that these subsidies are consistent with the SCM Agreement. Under new WTO rules, subsidies which are beneficial for the environment should be permitted, such as subsidies for the retirement of fishing licences, the retraining of fishers and the scrapping of old vessels

Harmonic blending approximation

The concept of harmonic Hilbert space $H_D({\mathbb R} ^n)$ was introduced in [2] as an extension of periodic Hilbert spaces [1], [2], [5], [6]. In [4] we introduced multivariate harmonic Hilbert spaces and studied approximation by exponential-type function in these spaces and derived error bounds in the uniform norm for special functions of exponential type which are defined by Fourier partial integrals $S_b(f)$: $$S_b(f)(x)=\int _{ {\mathbb R} ^n } \chi _{[-b,b]}(t) F(t) \exp (i(t,x)) dt,$$ $[-b,b]=[-b_1,b_1]\times ... \times [-b_n ,b_n], \quad b_1>0,...,b_n>0$, where $F(t)\sim \left( {\textstyle\frac 1{2\pi}}\right) ^n\ \int_{{\mathbb R} ^n}f(x) \exp (-i(x,t))dx \ \in L_2({\mathbb R} ^n) \cap L_1({\mathbb R} ^n)$ is the Fourier transform of $f \in L_2({\mathbb R} ^n) \cap C_0({\mathbb R} ^n)$. In this paper we will investigate more general approximation operators $S_\psi$ in harmonic Hilbert spaces of tensor product type

Multivariate Anisotropic Interpolation on the Torus

We investigate the error of periodic interpolation, when sampling a function on an arbitrary pattern on the torus. We generalize the periodic Strang-Fix conditions to an anisotropic setting and provide an upper bound for the error of interpolation. These conditions and the investigation of the error especially take different levels of smoothness along certain directions into account