A CASE AGAINST THE SIMULTANEOUS USE OF MARKET ACCESS RESTRICTIONS, DOMESTIC SUPPORT, AND EXPORT SUBSIDIES

The Uruguay Round of GATT introduced market disciplines to international trade in agricultural commodities. However, in cases where countries negotiated the right to limit market access, support domestic production at high levels and subsidize exports, the spirit of the WTO rules have been violated. The Norwegian meat market (beef, pork, lamb and mutton, and chicken) situations are studied in terms of the policy implications and WTO commitments. If Norway's policy objective is to target some level of production that satisfies its non-trade concerns, then semi-decoupled income support could be an improvement over a policy mix that simultaneously restricts market access, provides domestic support and applies export subsidies.Norway, meat, market access limitations, domestic support, export subsidies, International Relations/Trade,

A Risk Management Approach to Emerging Market’s Sovereign Debt Sustainability with an application to Brazilian data

In this paper we study the question of debt sustainability from a risk management perspective. The debt accumulation equation for any country involves variables that are stochastic and closely intertwined. When these aspects are taken into consideration the notion of debt sustainability is expanded to studying the stochastic properties of the debt dynamics. We illustrate the methodology by studying the Brazilian case. We find that even though the debt could be sustainable in the absence of risk, there are paths in which it is clearly unsustainable. Furthermore, we show that properties of the debt dynamics are closely related to the spreads on sovereign dollar denominated debtPublic Debt, Debt Sustainability, Country Risk, Brazil

A Risk Management Approach to Emerging Market's Sovereign Debt Sustainability with an Application to Brazilian Data

In this paper we study the question of debt sustainability from a risk management perspective. The debt accumulation equation for any country involves variables that are stochastic and closely intertwined. When these aspects are taken into consideration the notion of debt sustainability is expanded to studying the stochastic properties of the debt dynamics. We illustrate the methodology by studying the Brazilian case. We find that even though the debt could be sustainable in the absence of risk, there are paths in which it is clearly unsustainable. Furthermore, we show that properties of the debt dynamics are closely related to the spreads on sovereign dollar denominated debt.

Infinitesimal moduli for the Strominger system and Killing spinors in generalized geometry

We construct the space of infinitesimal variations for the Strominger system and an obstruction space to integrability, using elliptic operator theory. We initiate the study of the geometry of the moduli space, describing the infinitesimal structure of a natural foliation on this space. The associated leaves are related to generalized geometry and correspond to moduli spaces of solutions of suitable Killing spinor equations on a Courant algebroid. As an application, we propose a unifying framework for metrics with holonomy \SU(3) and solutions of the Strominger system.Comment: 48 pages. Section 5 and Appendix A from previous version have been suppressed and will appear elsewhere. Title slightly changed, references added, presentation improved. To appear in Math. Anna

Perfect simulation for interacting point processes, loss networks and Ising models

We present a perfect simulation algorithm for measures that are absolutely continuous with respect to some Poisson process and can be obtained as invariant measures of birth-and-death processes. Examples include area- and perimeter-interacting point processes (with stochastic grains), invariant measures of loss networks, and the Ising contour and random cluster models. The algorithm does not involve couplings of the process with different initial conditions and it is not tied up to monotonicity requirements. Furthermore, it directly provides perfect samples of finite windows of the infinite-volume measure, subjected to time and space ``user-impatience bias''. The algorithm is based on a two-step procedure: (i) a perfect-simulation scheme for a (finite and random) relevant portion of a (space-time) marked Poisson processes (free birth-and-death process, free loss networks), and (ii) a ``cleaning'' algorithm that trims out this process according to the interaction rules of the target process. The first step involves the perfect generation of ``ancestors'' of a given object, that is of predecessors that may have an influence on the birth-rate under the target process. The second step, and hence the whole procedure, is feasible if these ``ancestors'' form a finite set with probability one. We present a sufficiency criteria for this condition, based on the absence of infinite clusters for an associated (backwards) oriented percolation model.Comment: Revised version after referee of SPA: 39 page