Agenda Disputes and Strategic Venue Preferences: The Doha Crisis and Europe’s Flight to Regionalism

Agenda-setting disputes have become increasingly central to the conduct of multilateral trade negotiations. Introducing some simple concepts from Negotiations Theory, we focus on the dynamic interplay between the Doha Round’s agenda setting and bargaining stages, underlining their implications for the European Union’s evolving win-set in the negotiations. We argue that, by successful enshrining a narrow agenda, key developing countries reduced the set of possible final settlements that were both multilaterally viable and attractive from the point of view of key European interests. In an attempt to avoid imposing concentrated costs on those interests, the European Commission has responded by pursuing its best alternative to a multilateral agreement, shifting negotiating resources away from the multilateral table and towards regional FTA negotiations.Trade Policy-making, Doha Round, EU, sectoral lobbying, trade negotiations

Some results on rational surfaces and Fano varieties

The goal of this article is to study the equations and syzygies of embeddings of rational surfaces and certain Fano varieties. Given a rational surface X and an ample and base-point-free line bundle L on X, we give an optimal numerical criterion for L to satisfy property Np. This criterion turns out to be a characterization of property Np if X is anticanonical. We also prove syzygy results for adjunction bundles and a Reider type theorem for higher syzygies. For certain Fano varieties we also prove results on very ampleness and higher syzygies.Comment: 26 pages, AMSTe

Radiative flux measurements in the stratosphere

The objective is to determine how the stratospheric tropospheric exchange of water vapor is affected by the interaction of solar (visible) and planetary (infrared) radiation with tropical cumulonimbus anvils. This research involves field measurements from the ER-2 aircraft as well as radiative transfer modelling to determine heating and cooling rates and profiles that directly affect the exchange between the troposphere and the stratosphere