Échange international et distorsions internes:Comment gouverner la globalisation ?

La concurrence des pays émergents de la taille de la Chine ou de l’Inde fait resurgir avec force le débat qui oppose partisans et adversaires du libre-échange au sein même des pays développés. Pour les premiers, la croissance du commerce international est forcément bénéficiaire pour tous. Pour les seconds, elle est la cause de tous les maux et en particulier du chômage. Les choses sont pourtant bien différentes et beaucoup moins simples. Les changements dans le commerce international, comme d’ailleurs le progrès technique, créent inévitablement des distorsions qui perturbent le fonctionnement de l’économie. Ces distorsions ne sont pas réductibles à des dysfonctionnements des marchés des biens ou du travail. Elles ne peuvent donc pas être éliminées ab initio en choisissant des institutions optimales. Pour autant, des restrictions au commerce international ne sont pas une solution car elles risquent de créer d’autres distorsions qui viennent s’ajouter aux premières. Des distorsions avant tout intérieures appellent des solutions intérieures. Pour explorer ces solutions, il faut retenir une analyse conçue pour étudier, non les propriétés des positions d’équilibre avant et après l’ouverture à l’échange, mais les caractéristiques d’un processus de transition dont le succès n’est pas assuré. Ce type d’analyse permet de mettre en évidence la nécessité d’introduire une forme d’inertie dans les mécanismes d’ajustement. Si une relative flexibilité des salaires est encore possible quand l’intensité du changement est limitée, une certaine viscosité est requise dans le cas contraire, et un accès facilité aux ressources financières externes est nécessaire. Ce résultat pourrait aider à formuler les choix institutionnels et organisationnels à mettre en œuvre dans les économies qui veulent tirer avantage du commerce international et de la globalisation.Changes in the pattern of international trade inevitably create distortions that perturb the functioning of the economy. These distortions may not be reduced to malfunctioning goods or labour markets, and hence cannot be eliminated by simply choosing the optimal institutions. Domestic distortions call for domestic solutions. To explore these solutions it is useless to analyze the properties of equilibria before and after the opening to trade. Rather, we need to build an analytical framework suited to investigate the characteristics of a transition process whose success is not guaranteed ex ante. it appears that wage rigidity and an easy access to external financial resources are necessary in presence of fast pace of change, while if change is sufficiently slow the standard recipe of wage flexibility may be appropriate. These results may help in the institutional and organizational choices to be implemented in economies willing to profit from international trade and globalization

Effects of Peroral Omega-3 Fatty Acid Supplementation on Cerebrospinal Fluid Biomarkers in Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease: A Randomized Controlled Trial—The OmegAD Study

Background: Studies have suggested a connection between a decrease in the levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We aimed to assess the effect of supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids (n-3 FAs) on biomarkers analyzed in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of patients diagnosed with AD. / Objective: To investigate the effects of daily supplementation with 2.3 g of PUFAs in AD patients on the biomarkers in CSF described below. We also explored the possible correlation between these biomarkers and the performance in the cognitive test Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). / Methods: Thirty-three patients diagnosed with AD were randomized to either treatment with a daily intake of 2.3 g of n-3 FAs (n  =  18) or placebo (n  =  15). CSF samples were collected at baseline and after six months of treatment, and the following biomarkers were analyzed: Aβ 38, Aβ 40, Aβ 42, t-tau, p-tau, neurofilament light (NfL), chitinase-3-like protein 1 (YKL-40), acetylcholinesterase (AChE), butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE), soluble IL-1 receptor type II (sIL-1RII), and IL-6. / Results: There were no significant differences between the groups concerning the level of the different biomarkers in the CSF at baseline. Within the treatment group, there was a small but significant increase in both YKL-40 (p = 0.04) and NfL (p = 0.03), while the other CSF biomarkers remained stable. / Conclusion: Supplementation with n-3 FAs had a statistically significant effect on NfL and YKL-40, resulting in an increase of both biomarkers, indicating a possible increase of inflammatory response and axonal damage. This increase in biomarkers did not correlate with MMSE score. / Trial registration: clinicaltrial.gov Identifier: NCT00211159

Simple Viscous Flows: from Boundary Layers to the Renormalization Group

The seemingly simple problem of determining the drag on a body moving through a very viscous fluid has, for over 150 years, been a source of theoretical confusion, mathematical paradoxes, and experimental artifacts, primarily arising from the complex boundary layer structure of the flow near the body and at infinity. We review the extensive experimental and theoretical literature on this problem, with special emphasis on the logical relationship between different approaches. The survey begins with the developments of matched asymptotic expansions, and concludes with a discussion of perturbative renormalization group techniques, adapted from quantum field theory to differential equations. The renormalization group calculations lead to a new prediction for the drag coefficient, one which can both reproduce and surpass the results of matched asymptotics

An electrogenic redox loop in sulfate reduction reveals a likely widespread mechanism of energy conservation

The bioenergetics of anaerobic metabolism frequently relies on redox loops performed by membrane complexes with substrate- and quinone-binding sites on opposite sides of the membrane. However, in sulfate respiration (a key process in the biogeochemical sulfur cycle), the substrate- and quinone-binding sites of the QrcABCD complex are periplasmic, and their role in energy conservation has not been elucidated. Here we show that the QrcABCD complex of Desulfovibrio vulgaris is electrogenic, as protons and electrons required for quinone reduction are extracted from opposite sides of the membrane, with a H+/e− ratio of 1. Although the complex does not act as a H+-pump, QrcD may include a conserved proton channel leading from the N-side to the P-side menaquinone pocket. Our work provides evidence of how energy is conserved during dissimilatory sulfate reduction, and suggests mechanisms behind the functions of related bacterial respiratory complexes in other bioenergetic contexts

Effects of DHA- Rich n-3 Fatty Acid Supplementation on Gene Expression in Blood Mononuclear Leukocytes: The OmegAD Study

Background: Dietary fish oil, rich in n-3 fatty acids (n-3 FAs), e. g. docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), regulate inflammatory reactions by various mechanisms, e. g. gene activation. However, the effects of long-term treatment with DHA and EPA in humans, using genome wide techniques, are poorly described. Hence, our aim was to determine the effects of 6 mo of dietary supplementation with an n-3 FA preparation rich in DHA on global gene expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Methods and Findings: In the present study, blood samples were obtained from a subgroup of 16 patients originating from the randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled OmegAD study, where 174 Alzheimer disease (AD) patients received daily either 1.7 g of DHA and 0.6 g EPA or placebo for 6 months. In blood samples obtained from 11 patients receiving n-3 FA and five placebo, expressions of approximately 8000 genes were assessed by gene array. Significant changes were confirmed by real-time PCR. At 6 months, the n-3 FAs group displayed significant rises of DHA and EPA plasma concentrations, as well as up-and down-regulation of nine and ten genes, respectively, was noticed. Many of these genes are involved in inflammation regulation and neurodegeneration, e. g. CD63, MAN2A1, CASP4, LOC399491, NAIP, and SORL1 and in ubiqutination processes, e. g. ANAPC5 and UBE2V1. Down-regulations of ANAPC5 and RHOB correlated to increases of plasma DHA and EPA levels. Conclusions: We suggest that 6 months of dietary n-3 FA supplementatio

Constraint Abstractions

Many type based program analyses with subtyping, such as flow analysis, are based on inequality constraints over a lattice. When inequality constraints are combined with polymorphism it is often hard to scale the analysis up to large programs. A major source of inefficiency in conventional implementations stems from computing substitution instances of constraints. In this paper we extend the constraint language with constraint abstractions so that instantiation can be expressed directly in the constraint language and we give a cubic-time algorithm for constraint solving. As an application, we illustrate how a flow analysis with flow subtyping, flow polymorphism and flow-polymorphic recursion can be implemented in O(n³) time where n is the size of the explicitly typed program

A Usage Analysis With Bounded Usage Polymorphism and Subtyping

Previously proposed usage analyses have proved not to scale up well for large programs. In this paper we present a powerful and accurate type based analysis designed to scale up for large programs. The key features of the type system are usage subtyping and bounded usage polymorphism. Bounded polymorphism can lead to huge constraint sets and to express constraints compactly we introduce a new expressive form of constraints which allows constraints to be represented compactly through calls to constraint abstractions

Polymorphism, Subtyping, Whole Program Analysis and Accurate Data Types in Usage Analysis

There are a number of choices to be made in the design of a type based usage analysis. Some of these are: Should the analysis be monomorphic or have some degree of polymorphism? What aboutsubtyping? How should the analysis deal with user defined algebraic data types? Should it be a whole program analysis? Several researchers have speculated that these features are important but there has been a lack of empirical evidence. In this paper we present a systematic evaluation of each of these features in the context of a full scale implementation of a usage analysis for Haskell. Our measurements show that all features increase the precision. It is, however, not necessary to have them all to obtain an acceptable precision

Distributed Binary Decision Diagrams for Symbolic Reachability

Decision diagrams are used in symbolic verification to concisely represent state spaces. A crucial symbolic verification algorithm is reachability: systematically exploring all reachable system states. Although both parallel and distributed reachability algorithms exist, a combined solution is relatively unexplored. This paper contributes BDD-based reachability algorithms targeting compute clusters: high-performance networks of multi-core machines. The proposed algorithms may use the entire memory of every machine, allowing larger models to be processed while increasing performance by using all available computational power. To do this effectively, a distributed hash table, cluster-based work stealing algorithms, and several caching structures have been designed that all utilise the newest networking technology. The approach is evaluated extensively on a large collection of models, thereby demonstrating speedups up to 51,1x with 32 machines. The proposed algorithms not only benefit from the large amounts of available memory on compute clusters, but also from all available computational resources