Total strangers or soul mates? - antidumping and competition policies in Latin America and the Caribbean

As a result of trade reforms in the 1980s and 1990s Latin American and Caribbean countries became more open than at any time since World War II. However, these countries have recently begun to use antidumping measures as the new protection weapon of choice, as other barriers to trade have been reduced. In fact, the fastest growing antidumping actions are within regional integration arrangements, where they are being applied by member countries against each other. The authors argue that antidumping is anticompetitive and that its usual justification as a counter to predatory behavior is not relevant in the region. It is imperative, they say, that antidumping be contained if not altogether eliminated. While they find that safeguards are less anticompetitive than antidumping, they believe that all exceptional protection measures, such as antidumping, countervailing, and safeguards, should be considered together with competition policies. In other words, they should become soul mates rather than remain total strangers. The authors do not find that fine-tuning antidumping policy is a good option. Rather, they believe that both trade and competition policymaking ought to be brought under a single entity, as in Peru. This would lead to a more competitive solution.Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Markets and Market Access,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Trade and Regional Integration,Access to Markets

Anodización del titanio para la mejora ante la degradación química de material quirúrgico

The titanium alloys used in orthopaedic and dental implants are corrosion-resistant and compatible with the human body due to the titanium oxid film which forms spontaneously on the implant surface. However, the utilization of more than one type of alloy or metal on the same patient and the fragility and the thin thickness of the oxid layer, can give rise to the appearance of the corossion phenomena and/or ion release. It is well known that enough concentration of metallic particles are toxic, and are able to produce lnflammation, allergy genetic mutations or carcinogenic processes. With the purpose of minimize the corrossion in the implants and the metallic ion release to the physiological environment it is possible to grow up the titanium oxid layer in a controlled way to have a tough, homogeneous and stable layer with the anodization technique. In this work it is evaluated the improvements in corrosion resistance and the decrease of the metallic ion release due to the anodized layer

Triple Higgs boson production in the linear collider

Triple Higgs boson production (3H) may provide essential information to reconstruct the Higgs potential. We consider 3H-production in the International Linear Collider (ILC) both in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) and in the general Two-Higgs-Doublet Model (2HDM). We compute the total cross-section for the various 3H final states, such as H+H 12h0, H0A0h0, etc., and compare with the more traditional double Higgs (2H) boson production processes. While the cross-sections for the 2H final states lie within the same order of magnitude in both the MSSM and 2HDM, we find that for the 3H states the maximum 2HDM cross-sections, being of order 0.1 pb, are much larger than the MSSM ones which, in most cases, are of order 10 126 pb or less. Actually, the 3H processes could be the dominant mechanism for Higgs boson production in the 2HDM. Ultimately, the origin of the remarkable enhancement of the 3H channels in the 2HDM case (for both type I and type II models) originates in the structure of the trilinear Higgs boson couplings. The extremely clean environment of the ILC should allow a relatively comfortable tagging of the three Higgs boson events. In view of the fact that the MSSM contribution is negligible, these events should manifest themselves mainly in the form of 6 heavy-quark jet final states. Some of these signatures could be spectacular, and in case of being detected would constitute strong evidence of an extended Higgs sector of non-supersymmetric origin

An HLA-I signature favouring KIR-educated Natural Killer cells mediates immune control of HIV in children and contrasts with the HLA-B-restricted CD8+T-cell-mediated immune control in adults

Natural Killer (NK) cells contribute to HIV control in adults, but HLA-B-mediated T-cell activity has a more substantial impact on disease outcome. However, the HLA-B molecules influencing immune control in adults have less impact on paediatric infection. To investigate the contribution NK cells make to immune control, we studied >300 children living with HIV followed over two decades in South Africa. In children, HLA-B alleles associated with adult protection or disease-susceptibility did not have significant effects, whereas Bw4 (p = 0.003) and low HLA-A expression (p = 0.002) alleles were strongly associated with immunological and viral control. In a comparator adult cohort, Bw4 and HLA-A expression contributions to HIV disease outcome were dwarfed by those of protective and disease-susceptible HLA-B molecules. We next investigated the immunophenotype and effector functions of NK cells in a subset of these children using flow cytometry. Slow progression and better plasma viraemic control were also associated with high frequencies of less terminally differentiated NKG2A+NKp46+CD56dim NK cells strongly responsive to cytokine stimulation and linked with the immunogenetic signature identified. Future studies are indicated to determine whether this signature associated with immune control in early life directly facilitates functional cure in children

Gauge and Scheme Dependence of Mixing Matrix Renormalization

We revisit the issue of mixing matrix renormalization in theories that include Dirac or Majorana fermions. We show how a gauge-variant on-shell renormalized mixing matrix can be related to a manifestly gauge-independent one within a generalized ${\bar {\rm MS}}$ scheme of renormalization. This scheme-dependent relation is a consequence of the fact that in any scheme of renormalization, the gauge-dependent part of the mixing-matrix counterterm is ultra-violet safe and has a pure dispersive form. Employing the unitarity properties of the theory, we can successfully utilize the afore-mentioned scheme-dependent relation to preserve basic global or local symmetries of the bare Lagrangian through the entire process of renormalization. As an immediate application of our study, we derive the gauge-independent renormalization-group equations of mixing matrices in a minimal extension of the Standard Model with isosinglet neutrinos.Comment: 31 pages, LaTeX, uses axodraw.st

Diurnal variation in dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide in two low-order streams

8 páginas ; 3 Figuras ; 4 TablasThis investigation aimed to establish the contribution of biological activity, physical and chemical processes, to the diurnal variation in dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide in undisturbed streams. Changes in both gases were monitored during four surveys of 24 h duration in 1993 in two sec- ond-order Mediterranean streams: Riera Major, a siliceous shaded stream and La Solana, a calcareous open stream. In the latter, diurnal changes in carbon dioxide and dissolved oxygen showed similar, clear daily pattern when water discharge was low and algal activity high, indicating that although reaeration was high, changes in the two gases were greatly in¯uenced by stream metabolism. In ad- dition, diurnal changes in Ca2+ and DIC (dissolved inorganic carbon) also showed a clear daily pat- tern, indicating that the precipitation of calcium carbonate was directly or indirectly a ected by biotic processes. On the other hand, no relation between the two gases was observed in Riera Major, where turbulence was higher. In this stream, the concentration of dissolved oxygen was greatly a ected by reaeration, but changes in carbon dioxide showed a clear daily pattern. The lack of agreement between the diurnal variation of the two gases observed in this stream may be explained by the di erence in solubility, which led to marked di erences in the exchange coe cient rate when turbulence is higCICYT of the Ministry of Education and Science (project number NAT89-0886).Peer reviewe