Danish Aid Policy: Theory and Empirical Evidence

This paper is a study of Danish aid policy from the early 1960s to 1995. It includes (i) a review of officially stated aims and criteria, (ii) a descriptive analysis of actual behaviour in international comparative perspective, (iii) a review of the theoretical and empirical aid allocation literature, and (iv) a series of panel data regressions to further explore how Danish bilateral aid was, in actual fact, distributed country-by-country. A theoretical model explaining how the allocation process took place is also formulated. It underpins the empirical analysis from which it transpires that a two step model is a useful way of analysing Danish aid allocations. The first step is whether to select a country or not, and the second involves the decision of how much aid to commit. The empirical analysis demonstrates that Danish aid has been guided in both steps by officially stated aims and criteria in an expected and statistically significant manner although a clear Eastern and Southern Africa bias was found. Another general result is that the relative weights of the explanatory variables have varied both from year-to-year and between sub-periods.Danish foreign aid; modelling aid allocation; panel data analysis

Electronic Structures of LNA Phosphorothioate Oligonucleotides

Important oligonucleotides in anti-sense research have been investigated in silico and experimentally. This involves quantum mechanical (QM) calculations and chromatography experiments on locked nucleic acid (LNA) phosphorothioate (PS) oligonucleotides. iso-potential electrostatic surfaces are essential in this study and have been calculated from the wave functions derived from the QM calculations that provide binding information and other properties of these molecules. The QM calculations give details of the electronic structures in terms of e.g., energy and bonding, which make them distinguish or differentiate between the individual PS diastereoisomers determined by the position of sulfur atoms. Rules are derived from the electronic calculations of these molecules and include the effects of the phosphorothioate chirality and formation of electrostatic potential surfaces. Physical and electrochemical descriptors of the PS oligonucleotides are compared to the experiments in which chiral states on these molecules can be distinguished. The calculations demonstrate that electronic structure, electrostatic potential, and topology are highly sensitive to single PS configuration changes and can give a lead to understanding the activity of the molecules. Keywords: LNA phosphorothioate, DNA/LNA oligonucleotide, diastereoisomers, Hartree-Fock calculations, iso-potential surface, anion chromatogram

Report No. 19: Geographic Mobility in the European Union: Optimising its Economic and Social Benefits

Joint expertise with NIRAS Consultants and AMS for the European Commission, Bonn 2008 (159 pages)