Does membership in a regional preferential trade arrangement make a country more or less protectionist?

The author explores whether a systematic relationship exists between a developing country's participation in a preferential regional trade agreement (RTA) and the restrictiveness of its trade regime. The motivation for her study is provided by the current debate about whether regional trading blocs are a stepping-stone toward a more liberal global trading system and whether these blocs have changed over time so that the"new"blocs differ meaningfully from the"old"ones in terms of openness to the rest of the world. She restricts analysis to reciprocal RTAs involving developing countries in partnership either with industrial countries (North-South RTAs) or with other developing countries (South-South RTAs). Nearly every developing country belongs to one or more RTAs, so the author develops criteria for distinguishing effective from noneffective regional blocs. She then taps into many sources of data to compare levels of restrictiveness. She finds no evidence that participation in a regional trade agreement necessarily leads to a more liberal important regime.Trade Policy,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Rules of Origin,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Trade and Regional Integration,Trade Policy

THE IMPACT OF AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP ON JOB SATISFACTION AND TEAM COMMITMENT

One of the challenges toward organization is maintaining good employees in competitive business environment in order to achieve their goals. Employees’ feeling and attitude to their job, team and organization is an important factor which can’t be ignored by organization. In other words, the employees’ effective response to different aspect of job and organization will have several effects on their performance and behavior. One of the important factors in all organizations is organizational leadership as one of the most key strategies to achieving this purpose. Authentic leadership as one of the areas raised in the literature of modern leadership in recent years has been considered by researchers and practitioners. In this study, we explored the impact of authentic leadership and its elements on team commitment and job satisfaction. 80 questionnaires were filled by employees and analyzed by SPSS 18.0 software. According to obtained results, there were meaningful and positive correlation between authentic leadership, job satisfaction and team commitment. Also we conclude that teams with more authentic characteristics in their leaders, had more satisfied and committed employees.authentic leadership, balanced processing, job satisfaction, moral/ethics, self awareness, team commitment, transparency.

Intra - Sub - Saharan African trade : is it too little?

Trade among sub-Saharan African countries is very limited. This fact, plus other political and economic considerations, has been used to motivate a growing number of regional integration schemes. Although many authors have shown that intra-sub-Saharan African trade is limited, none has yet asked whether the level of intra-sub-Saharan African trade is higher or lower than one would expect, given a plausible model of the determination of trade flows. The authors compare actual trade with what a traditional gravity model would predict. They find that a gravity model predicts the low level of intra-sub-Saharan African trade. For the 19 sub-Saharan African countries in their sample, the actual sub-Saharan African share of imports plus exports was an average (median) of 8.1 percent (4.5 percent) while the gravity model predicts a slightly lower, not higher, mean (median) of 7.5 percent (4.5 percent).TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Trade Policy,Common Carriers Industry

Effect of ions on confined near-critical binary aqueous mixture

Near-critical binary mixtures containing ions and confined between two charged and selective surfaces are studied within a Landau-Ginzburg theory extended to include electrostatic interactions. Charge density profiles and the effective interactions between the confining surfaces are calculated in the case of chemical preference of ions for one of the solvent components. Close to the consolute point of the binary solvent, the preferential solubility of ions leads to the modification of the charge density profiles in respect to the ones obtained from the Debye-H\"uckel theory. As a result, the electrostatic contribution to the effective potential between the charged surface can exhibit an attractive well. Our calculations are based on the approximation scheme valid if the bulk correlation length of a solvent is much larger than the Debye screening length; in this critical regime the effect of charge on the concentration profiles of the solvent is subdominant. Such conditions are met in the recent measurements of the effective forces acting between a substrate and a spherical colloidal particle immersed in the near-critical water-lutidine mixture [Nature V. 451, 172 (2008)]. Our analytical results are in a quantitative agreement with the experimental ones.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figure

How ions in solution can change the sign of the critical Casimir potential

We show that hydrophilic ions present in a confined, near-critical aqueous mixture can lead to an attraction between like charge surfaces with opposing preferential adsorption of the two species of the mixture, even though the corresponding Casimir potential in uncharged systems is repulsive. This prediction agrees with recent experiment [Nellen {\it{et al.}}, Soft Matter{\bf{80}}, 061143 (2011)]. We also show that oppositely charged hydrophobic surfaces can repel each other, although the Casimir potential between uncharged surfaces with like preferential adsorption (selectivity) is attractive. This behavior is expected when the electrostatic screening length is larger than the correlation length, and one of the confining surfaces is strongly selective and weakly charged, whereas the other confining surface is weakly selective and strongly charged. The Casimir potential can change sign because the hydrophilic ions near the weakly hydrophobic surface can overcompensate the effect of hydrophobicity, and this surface can act as a hydrophilic one. We also predict a more attractive interaction between hydrophilic surfaces and a more repulsive interaction between hydrophobic surfaces than given by the sum of the Casimir and Deby-H\"uckel potentials. Our theory is derived systematically from a microscopic approach, and combines the Landau-type and Debye-H\"uckel theories with an additional contribution of an entropic origin