102 research outputs found
Closer Integration, Controversial Rules: Issues Arising from the CEPA between Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao
WTO and the settlement of disputes: from a developing country perspective
Until the end of 1994, there was no multilateral or international organisation that was
competent to deal with trade issues between countries. For almost fifty years, the
international trading system had functioned without such an organisation: under the aegis
of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade(GATT), rules of the game in
international trade had been developed and reasonably respected. But the GATT was
applied through the Protocol of Provisional Application practised from 1948, it did not
have the legal status of an international organisation.
Then, all of that changed from 1 January 1995. A new institution, the World Trade
Organisation(WTO) came into being for the purposes of assisting the governments of its
Members to better manage problems of international economic interdependence. This
event occurred fifty years after the establishment of the Bretton Woods System which
was targeted at setting up a framework to regulate international economic affairs; and
almost fifty years after the 1947 establishment of the GATT and the later failure of the
International Trade Organisation(ITO), which would have been the institution to
complete the Bretton Woods System in parallel with its sister institutions of the
International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development(World Bank).
The establishment of the WTO is one of the major achievements of the extended
Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations( 1986-1994) which was under the
auspices of the GATT. This newly-born institution marks the regulation of international
trade shifting from negotiation-orientation to rule-orientation. Although the World Trade
Organisation, as one scholar observed, "has no jailhouse, no bail bondsmen, no blue
helmets, no truncheons or tear gas", the sense of community encourages its Members to
abide by the rules and the possible retaliation measures which are authorised by the WTO
to a suffering Member seem effective, so far, in frightening those potential recalcitrants
who may breach their commitments. In the context of assistance to its Members, the
WTO has no power over debt reduction, nor can it guarantee development funds or
infrastructure spending to assist development. What it may offer is trade rules which are
designed to maximise the benefits from open markets. Apart from these obvious
advantages, there are also some other outstanding achievements resulted from these
multilateral trade negotiations, which can be summarised in the following aspects.
Firstly, the Uruguay Round negotiations have resulted in some impressive advances
in market access with a reduction in the numbers of products exported to the developed
countries from the developing countries in accordance with quotas(the remaining quotas
will be changed into tariffs), as well as substantial tariff-cutting(perhaps the most of all
eight rounds of GATT multilateral trade negotiations). Some of the most substantial
tariff-cutting has been accomplished by the developing countries. Overall, developed
countries' tariffs on industrial products have been cut by an average of 40 percent, with
the average tariff reduced from 6.3 percent to 3.8 percent. The average tariff cut on
industrial products achieved by developing countries is estimated to be 20 percent with
the average tariff reduced from 15.3 percent to 12.3 percent. As the tariff-cutting is
negotiated on a reciprocal basis, the developing countries, while they are expecting to
increase their exports to the developed countries, will also be required to further open
their own markets for foreign investment and products.
Secondly, not only has the largest number of countries in history made significant
trade liberalisation commitments in goods, but the participating countries have agreed
to expand the scope of their activities considered to include trade in services and
protection of trade-related intellectual property rights, to reintegrate textiles and apparel
into the GATT system, to start the process of liberalisation in agriculture. All countries
ended up agreeing to accept the entire package of agreements, a major change from prior
Rounds. Although the WTO agreements have no direct effect upon the national law, the
WTO Members are required to keep their domestic law and regulations in conformity
with the WTO rules. This will bring some fundamental changes to the legal system of
some Members, particularly those with a centralised economy. While the opening of
markets for textile and agricultural products may benefit some of the developing
countries, the inclusion of the General Agreement on Trade in Services(GATS) and
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property RightsfTJUPS) within the
ambit of the WTO will surely have some significant impact on most developing
countries. Furthermore, these expansions started the considerations of this institution
beyond trade issues to trade-related ones, although the linkage is still a little murky.
Thirdly, the Uruguay Round negotiations aimed at phasing out all the "voluntary
export restraint agreements"(prevalent before the Uruguay Round in industries such as
steel, electronic products and motor vehicles), the so-called grey-area practice whereby
one country agrees to limit its exports to another country to a pre-set level. Compliance of
such arrangements with the GATT has always been doubted, as all the compromises and
benefits negotiated are only bilateral, not multilateral. However, these arrangements
have long been tolerated by the GATT due to the economic and social significance of the
sectors concerned. The binding commitments offered by each WTO Member have guided
them back to the track of the most-favoured-nation principle, and this will make the
international trade more predictable and enforceable.
Fourthly, the increasing number of accession signifies that the new institution is
attracting more and more countries to join. Some of the new entrants, like China, are
transforming their economies from centralisation to market-orientation. The impact of the
WTO rules upon their domestic systems is comprehensive and ostensible, touching
almost every aspect of their ordinary life. Developing countries are more fully integrated
into the GATT/WTO system than before, with a requirement that all WTO Members
should have their goods and service tariff schedules with some constraint on certain
developing country exceptions. This measure can be regarded as one of the most
important Uruguay Round achievements.
Last but not least, the Uruguay Round negotiations, for the first time, established an
overall unified dispute settlement mechanism for all portions of the agreements signed
during the negotiations, together with a legal text entitled Understanding on Rules and
Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes {Dispute Settlement Understanding or
DSU) to carry out those procedures. These new procedures include measures to avoid the
"blocking" when the Dispute Settlement Body decides to establish a panel, to adopt the
panel or Appellate Body report, which frequently occurred under the previous positive
consensus decision-making mechanism, and for the first time, a new "appellate
procedure", which is designed to replace some of the procedures that were vulnerable to
blocking. The significance of this new dispute settlement mechanism can best be
described in the words of late His Majesty King Hassan II of Morocco at the closing
ceremony of the Uruguay Round negotiations at Marrakesh, Morocco, on 15 April 1994:
"By bringing into being the World Trade Organisation today, we are enshrining the rule
of law in international economic and trade relations, thus setting universal rules and
disciplines over the temptations of unilateralism and the law of the jungle.
Coresets for Relational Data and The Applications
A coreset is a small set that can approximately preserve the structure of the
original input data set. Therefore we can run our algorithm on a coreset so as
to reduce the total computational complexity. Conventional coreset techniques
assume that the input data set is available to process explicitly. However,
this assumption may not hold in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we
consider the problem of coresets construction over relational data. Namely, the
data is decoupled into several relational tables, and it could be very
expensive to directly materialize the data matrix by joining the tables. We
propose a novel approach called ``aggregation tree with pseudo-cube'' that can
build a coreset from bottom to up. Moreover, our approach can neatly circumvent
several troublesome issues of relational learning problems [Khamis et al., PODS
2019]. Under some mild assumptions, we show that our coreset approach can be
applied for the machine learning tasks, such as clustering, logistic regression
and SVM
An MILP model and a hybrid evolutionary algorithm for integrated operation optimisation of multi-head surface mounting machines in PCB assembly
This paper focuses on an operation optimisation problem for a class of multi-head surface mounting machines in printed circuit board assembly lines. The problem involves five interrelated sub-problems: assigning nozzle types as well as components to heads, assigning feeders to slots and determining component pickup and placement sequences. According to the depth of making decisions, the sub-problems are first classified into two layers. Based on the classification, a two-stage mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is developed to describe it and a two-stage problem-solving frame with a hybrid evolutionary algorithm (HEA) is proposed. In the first stage, a constructive heuristic is developed to determine the set of nozzle types assigned to each head and the total number of assembly cycles; in the second stage, constructive heuristics, an evolutionary algorithm with two evolutionary operators and a tabu search (TS) with multiple neighbourhoods are combined to solve all the sub-problems simultaneously, where the results obtained in the first stage are taken as constraints. Computational experiments show that the HEA can obtain good near-optimal solutions for small size instances when compared with an optimal solver, Cplex, and can provide better results when compared with a TS and an EA for actual instances
Delicate Textured Mesh Recovery from NeRF via Adaptive Surface Refinement
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have constituted a remarkable breakthrough in
image-based 3D reconstruction. However, their implicit volumetric
representations differ significantly from the widely-adopted polygonal meshes
and lack support from common 3D software and hardware, making their rendering
and manipulation inefficient. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel
framework that generates textured surface meshes from images. Our approach
begins by efficiently initializing the geometry and view-dependency decomposed
appearance with a NeRF. Subsequently, a coarse mesh is extracted, and an
iterative surface refining algorithm is developed to adaptively adjust both
vertex positions and face density based on re-projected rendering errors. We
jointly refine the appearance with geometry and bake it into texture images for
real-time rendering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves
superior mesh quality and competitive rendering quality.Comment: ICCV 2023 camera-ready, Project Page: https://me.kiui.moe/nerf2mes
Real-time Neural Radiance Talking Portrait Synthesis via Audio-spatial Decomposition
While dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown success in
high-fidelity 3D modeling of talking portraits, the slow training and inference
speed severely obstruct their potential usage. In this paper, we propose an
efficient NeRF-based framework that enables real-time synthesizing of talking
portraits and faster convergence by leveraging the recent success of grid-based
NeRF. Our key insight is to decompose the inherently high-dimensional talking
portrait representation into three low-dimensional feature grids. Specifically,
a Decomposed Audio-spatial Encoding Module models the dynamic head with a 3D
spatial grid and a 2D audio grid. The torso is handled with another 2D grid in
a lightweight Pseudo-3D Deformable Module. Both modules focus on efficiency
under the premise of good rendering quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate
that our method can generate realistic and audio-lips synchronized talking
portrait videos, while also being highly efficient compared to previous
methods.Comment: Project page: https://me.kiui.moe/radnerf
Identification of alternative splicing events related to fatty liver formation in duck using full-length transcripts
Multiscale 3D genome organization underlies duck fatty liver with no adipose inflammation or serious injury
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common form of chronic liver disease. Little is known about how gene expression and chromatin structure are regulated in NAFLD due to lack of suitable model. Ducks naturally develop fatty liver similar to serious human non-alcoholic fatty liver (NAFL) without adipose inflammation and liver fibrosis, thus serves as a good model for investigating molecular mechanisms of adipose metabolism and anti-inflammation. Here, we constructed a NAFLD model without adipose inflammation and liver fibrosis in ducks. By performing dynamic pathological and transcriptomic analyses, we identified critical genes involving in regulation of the NF-κB and MHCII signaling, which usually lead to adipose inflammation and liver fibrosis. We further generated dynamic three-dimensional chromatin maps during liver fatty formation and recovery. This showed that ducks enlarged hepatocyte cell nuclei to reduce inter-chromosomal interaction, decompress chromatin structure, and alter strength of intra-TAD and loop interactions during fatty liver formation. These changes partially contributed to the tight control the NF-κB and the MHCII signaling. Our analysis uncovers duck chromatin reorganization might be advantageous to maintain liver regenerative capacity and reduce adipose inflammation. These findings shed light on new strategies for NAFLD control.</p
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