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