Central America's Macroeconomic Environment and the Role of the Investment Climate under Free Trade

Central America's economic performance in recent years has benefited from improved macroeconomic management, a favorable external environment, as well as rising investor confidence since the region has pursued greater access to global markets, particularly with the signing of DR-CAFTA in 2004. Nonetheless, while important reforms have been made, at the sectoral level, much remains to be done. The context of a less favorable global environment underlines the need to improve competiveness and enhance productivity. An improved investment climate would contribute to both and help to unleash the full potential of DR-CAFTA.Macroeconomic performance; investment climate; Guatemala; El Salvador; Nicaragua; Hounduras; Costa Rica; Panama

Nonlinear programming without a penalty function or a filter

A new method is introduced for solving equality constrained nonlinear optimization problems. This method does not use a penalty function, nor a barrier or a filter, and yet can be proved to be globally convergent to first-order stationary points. It uses different trust-regions to cope with the nonlinearities of the objective function and the constraints, and allows inexact SQP steps that do not lie exactly in the nullspace of the local Jacobian. Preliminary numerical experiments on CUTEr problems indicate that the method performs well

Building trade barriers and knocking them down: the political economy of unilateral trade liberalizations

Free trade

Luminosity Function of the Perigalactocentric Region

We present H and K photometry of 42,000 stars in an area of 250 arcmin$^{2}$ centered on the Galactic center. We use the photometry to construct a dereddened K band luminosity function (LF) for this region, excluding the excessively crowded inner 2' of the Galaxy. This LF is intermediate between the LF of Baade's window and the LF of inner 2' of the Galactic center. We speculate that the bright stars in this region have an age which is intermediate between the starburst population in the Galactic center and the old bulge population. We present the coordinates and mags for 16 stars with K_{0} < 5 for spectroscopic follow up.Comment: 25 pages. Tarred, gzipped and uuencoded. Includes LaTex source file, Figures 3 to 9 and 5 Tables. Figures 1 and 2 are available at ftp://bessel.mps.ohio-state.edu/pub/vijay . Submitted to Ap

Can Heavy WIMPs Be Captured by the Earth?

If weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in bound solar orbits are systematically driven into the Sun by solar-system resonances (as Farinella et al. have shown is the case for many Earth-crossing asteroids), then the capture of high-mass WIMPs by the Earth would be affected dramatically because high-mass WIMPs are captured primarily from bound orbits. WIMP capture would be eliminated for M_x>630 GeV and would be highly suppressed for M_x>~150 GeV. Annihilation of captured WIMPs and anti-WIMPs is expected to give rise to neutrinos coming from the Earth's center. The absence of such a neutrino signal has been used to place limits on WIMP parameters. At present, one does not know if typical WIMP orbits are in fact affected by these resonances. Until this question is investigated and resolved, one must (conservatively) assume that they are. Hence, limits on high-mass WIMP parameters are significantly weaker than previously believed.Comment: 8 pages + 1 figure. Submitted to Ap