World Profit Rates, 1960-2019

In this paper we present estimates of the world profit rate using country-level data from the Extended Penn World Table 7.0 and industry-level data from the World Input Output Database. The country-aggregated world profit rate series spans the period from 1960 to 2019, and the industry-aggregated world profit rate series runs from 2000 to 2014. The country-aggregated world profit rate series displays a strong negative linear trend for the period 1960-1980 and a weaker negative linear trend from 1980 to 2019. A medium run decomposition analysis reveals that the decline in the world profit rate is driven by a decline in the output-capital ratio. The industry-aggregated world profit rate shows a negative linear trend for the period 2000-2014, which, once again, is driven by a fall in the output-capital ratio. We have created a World Profitability Dashboard to allow researchers to freely access profit rate series and the underlying data at country, industry, country-group and world levels of aggregation

Scalable downstream purification of recombinant adeno-associated viral vectors

Scalable manufacturing technologies are essential for ensuring modern medicines can be produced to meet the needs of clinical trials, process development, and commercial manufacture. Recent advances in in vivo gene therapies have resulted in multiple regulatory approvals of rAAV vectors for gene transfer in humans. These vectors can be produced using transient transfection of mammalian cells, baculovirus infection of insect cells or produced via engineered stable producer cells. These production methods are performed in single-use bioreactors and utilize other scalable technologies as used in commercial monoclonal antibody manufacture. In this work, we evaluated the use of existing single-use filtration and separation technologies for downstream purification of an rAAV5 viral vector. rAAV5 vector was produced by transient transfection of HEK293 cells in the Pall iCELLis® Nano bioreactor. Bioreactor harvest lysis material was clarified using direct flow filtration with both depth and sterilizing grade filters. The product was concentrated 10x using 100kD OmegaTM flat-sheet tangential flow-filtration (TFF) before primary purification using affinity chromatography. The rAAV5 vector was then polished using Mustang® Q membrane chromatography to enrich for full capsids. A second TFF step was performed to concentrate and buffer exchange with flat sheet TFF with the same 100KD Omega membrane. Final sterile filtration was performed using Supor® EKV validated sterilizing grade filters. All downstream unit operations resulted in acceptable performance. Feasibility of a complete downstream process was established with a theoretical whole process yield of ~25%. This process results in a very low contaminant profile as host cell protein (HCP) and host cell DNA were reduced to near and below the assays’ limits of quantitation during purification. Of particular interest, Mustang Q polishing resulted in retention of only ~10% of total capsids, while recovering ~50% of full capsids enriching the ratio of full capsids to empty capsids by 4.5 fold

Interview Julio Huato

Cuba, “Peasants Torch” (Mexico), Union for Radical Political Economics (USA) Cuba, “Antorcha campesina (México), “Unión para la política económica radical” (Estados Unidos

Maquiladoras and Standard of Living in Mexico Before and After NAFTA

This study assesses the impact across states of for-export, mostly foreign-owned manufacturing plants (commonly known as 'maquiladoras') on various measures of standard of living in Mexico, namely literacy rate, school attendance rates, housing characteristics, life expectancy, infant mortality, and an overall index of human development. The main data set used is from the population and housing censuses of 1980, 1990, and 2000. The study controls for the effect of nonmaquiladora economic activity and prior growth. To remove the endogeneity, maquiladora activity is instrumented with a measure of road transportation time to the nearest major border city in the United States. The resulting IV-TS- OLS and GLS regressions, pooled and with (state and time) fixed effects, are estimated and the results of the respective Hausman specification tests are reported. I conclude that, overall, with the inclusion of state and time effects, maquiladora activity shows no impact on the measures of standard of living analyzed, with one exception: undergraduate schooling rates.Maquiladoras, maquila, Mexico, manufacturing, liberalization, social welfare, standard of living, poverty