The Puzzling Relationship Between Trade and Environment: NAFTA, Competitiveness, and the Pursuit of Environmental Welfare Objectives

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is often claimed to be a promising beginning for the reconciliation of trade and environment. Professor Porras, however, suggests that the form that reconciliation takes in NAFTA is extremely problematic. Harmonization of standards to facilitate the free flow of trade is a familiar trade goal. NAFTA\u27s provisions regarding environmental standards, however, are not a straightforward requirement to harmonize standards. Rather, NAFTA recognizes state autonomy in standard setting, on the one hand, while requiring a form of upward harmonization, on the other. According to Professor Porras, the result of such an arrangement is the perpetuation of economic and political inequality among states. States with low environmental standards are not given the opportunity to set their environmental standards in accordance with their own values, capacities, and priorities, but must instead divert resources to achieve the standards that are deemed appropriate by states with higher environmental standards. Professor Porras argues that the dual choice of autonomy and upward harmonization in NAFTA reflects the desire of environmentalists in high-standard states to safeguard both their environmental standards and their standards of living. States with lower standards are made to raise their standards so that their comparatively lower standards do not enable them to gain a competitive advantage to the detriment of the high standard states\u27 economies. Professor Porras suggests that in choosing upward harmonization, environmentalists in high-standard states are responding to the perceived link between environmental protection and the nation\u27s economic health. In selecting a mechanism which tends to perpetuate existing economic inequalities between states, however, NAFTA fails to give equal attention to the demands of sustainable development in poorer countries

The Puzzling Relationship Between Trade and Environment: NAFTA, Competitiveness, and the Pursuit of Environmental Welfare Objectives

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is often claimed to be a promising beginning for the reconciliation of trade and environment. Professor Porras, however, suggests that the form that reconciliation takes in NAFTA is extremely problematic. Harmonization of standards to facilitate the free flow of trade is a familiar trade goal. NAFTA\u27s provisions regarding environmental standards, however, are not a straightforward requirement to harmonize standards. Rather, NAFTA recognizes state autonomy in standard setting, on the one hand, while requiring a form of upward harmonization, on the other. According to Professor Porras, the result of such an arrangement is the perpetuation of economic and political inequality among states. States with low environmental standards are not given the opportunity to set their environmental standards in accordance with their own values, capacities, and priorities, but must instead divert resources to achieve the standards that are deemed appropriate by states with higher environmental standards. Professor Porras argues that the dual choice of autonomy and upward harmonization in NAFTA reflects the desire of environmentalists in high-standard states to safeguard both their environmental standards and their standards of living. States with lower standards are made to raise their standards so that their comparatively lower standards do not enable them to gain a competitive advantage to the detriment of the high standard states\u27 economies. Professor Porras suggests that in choosing upward harmonization, environmentalists in high-standard states are responding to the perceived link between environmental protection and the nation\u27s economic health. In selecting a mechanism which tends to perpetuate existing economic inequalities between states, however, NAFTA fails to give equal attention to the demands of sustainable development in poorer countries

Panama City Reflections: Growing the City in the Time of Sustainable Development

The image that frames our arrival in Panama City is unexpected, yet pervasive. From the moment we land we are aware of the skyscrapers. Improbably enough, in this mostly flat, hot, humid, congested third world urban landscape, fronting on the Pacific, luxury residential skyscrapers are rising everywhere. On our first morning in the city, we take a couple of taxis to the Parque Metropolitano, a small, relatively untouched green area within the city limits. This area is a legacy of the U.S. controlled Canal Zone, protected for now, because of its status as an essential component of the canal watershed! We hike up the hill through an exuberant tropical forest and, within twenty minutes, we have reached one of the best vista points over the city. From our bird\u27s eye view, the city opens up before us, old and new. As we make our way from the first mirador up the steep stairs to the second platform the initial view of a quiet sea of green of the Canal Zone, spotted with its distinctive white-painted, red-roofed, barrack villages gives way to the dense, bustling, concrete urban space of the city, engaged, it would seem, in a frenzy of construction. When we get to thirty, we give up trying to count the cranes that sit atop the high rises under construction

ClinPrior: an algorithm for diagnosis and novel gene discovery by network-based prioritization

BackgroundWhole-exome sequencing (WES) and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) have become indispensable tools to solve rare Mendelian genetic conditions. Nevertheless, there is still an urgent need for sensitive, fast algorithms to maximise WES/WGS diagnostic yield in rare disease patients. Most tools devoted to this aim take advantage of patient phenotype information for prioritization of genomic data, although are often limited by incomplete gene-phenotype knowledge stored in biomedical databases and a lack of proper benchmarking on real-world patient cohorts.MethodsWe developed ClinPrior, a novel method for the analysis of WES/WGS data that ranks candidate causal variants based on the patient's standardized phenotypic features (in Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) terms). The algorithm propagates the data through an interactome network-based prioritization approach. This algorithm was thoroughly benchmarked using a synthetic patient cohort and was subsequently tested on a heterogeneous prospective, real-world series of 135 families affected by hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) and/or cerebellar ataxia (CA).ResultsClinPrior successfully identified causative variants achieving a final positive diagnostic yield of 70% in our real-world cohort. This includes 10 novel candidate genes not previously associated with disease, 7 of which were functionally validated within this project. We used the knowledge generated by ClinPrior to create a specific interactome for HSP/CA disorders thus enabling future diagnoses as well as the discovery of novel disease genes.ConclusionsClinPrior is an algorithm that uses standardized phenotype information and interactome data to improve clinical genomic diagnosis. It helps in identifying atypical cases and efficiently predicts novel disease-causing genes. This leads to increasing diagnostic yield, shortening of the diagnostic Odysseys and advancing our understanding of human illnesses

THE CITY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW: IN PURSUIT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

This article argues that the internationalization of cities and the localization of sustainable development have combined to turn cities into the international loci of sustainable development. The author contends that while it is positive that cities are willing to engage in addressing sustainable development and climate change, there are dangers in allowing cities to take on the primary function of defining sustainable development. Problems caused by privatization of city services and the tendency of cities to consider local interests primary in engaging in the trade-offs required by sustainable development are discussed. Finally, the author concludes that sustainable development requires a multi-level definition and that the choice not be between decentralized, autonomous cities and a powerful state excluding city power, but rather a state that provides generous space for the exercise of local autonomy