Recent developments in monetary and financial integration in Asia.

Asia’s share of world trade has expanded constantly over the last two decades. This increase reflects, inter alia, the considerable strengthening of trade links between the countries of the region, fostered by the vertical specialisation of the Asian economies. In the 1980s, the most advanced economies in the region, e.g. Japan, relocated the most labour-intensive stages of their production processes to the newly-industrialised Asian economies like South Korea and Singapore and then, in the 1990s, to emerging Asia, i.e. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The emergence of China has also given signifi cant impetus to regional trade integration. Surging intra-regional direct investment fl ows have accompanied and shored up trade fl ows, however, portfolio investment fl ows and cross-border bank loans have remained limited. Given that production processes within the region are complementary and that the final destination for exports is outside the region, the lack of a regional exchange rate arrangement in Asia does not appear to be a concern in the short term. Indeed, the regional integration initiatives adopted in Asia in the aftermath of the 1997-1998 financial crisis aim to build further resilience to fi nancial market turbulence. Firstly, deeper and more liquid local bond markets should make it possible to reduce the double financial mismatch, i.e. the currency mismatch and maturity mismatch, which largely sustained the crisis. In this regard, the ASEAN+3 Asian Bond Market Initiative examines the supply-side issues while the Asian Bond Funds initiative of the Executives’ Meeting of East Asia-Pacifi c Central Banks (EMEAP) deals with demand-side issues via the pooling of resources to buy bonds issued by member countries. Secondly, the Chiang Mai Initiative, which consists in a network of currency swap arrangements between the central banks of the ASEAN+3 member states, provides these countries with a regional fi nancial assistance mechanism in the event of a liquidity crisis. The Asian vertical model of production appears to have reached its limit and is evolving towards a more “horizontal” model in terms of both production (substitutability of production processes as a result of the shift towards higher value-added activities) and consumption (expansion of the regional market linked to the growth potential of domestic Chinese demand). Regional monetary co-operation could therefore aim in the future at curbing intra-regional exchange rate fl uctuations in order to promote trade and investment within the region.

Patient safety indicators for England from hospital administrative data: case-control analysis and comparison with US data

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The Healthcare Commission received a small grant from the Health and Social Care Information Centre to support the initial recoding work

The Coester Line in Relativistic Mean Field Nuclear Matter

The Walecka model contains essentially two parameters that are associated with the Lorentz scalar (S) and vector (V) interactions. These parameters are related to a two-body interaction consisting of S and V, imposing the condition that the two-body binding energy is fixed. We have obtained a set of different values for the nuclear matter binding energies at equilibrium densities. We investigated the existence of a linear correlation between $B_N$ and $\rho_0$, claimed to be universal for nonrelativistic systems and usually known as the Coester line, and found an approximate linear correlation only if $V?S$ remains constant. It is shown that the relativistic content of the model, which is related to the strength of $V?S$, is responsible for the shift of the Coester line to the empirical region of nuclear matter saturation.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Variants of the human PPARG locus and the susceptibility to chronic periodontitis

Apart from its regulatory function in lipid and glucose metabolism, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)γ has impact on the regulation of inflammation and bone metabolism. The aim of the study was to investigate the association of five polymorphisms (rs10865710, rs2067819, rs3892175, rs1801282, rs3856806) within the PPARG gene with chronic periodontitis. The study population comprised 402 periodontitis patients and 793 healthy individuals. Genotyping of the PPARG gene polymorphisms was performed by PCR and melting curve analysis. Comparison of frequency distribution of genotypes between individuals with periodontal disease and healthy controls for the polymorphism rs3856806 showed a P-value of 0.04 but failed to reach significance after correction for multiple testing (P  0.90). A 3-site analysis (rs2067819-rs1801282-rs3856860) revealed five haplotypes with a frequency of ≥1% among cases and controls. Following adjustment for age, gender and smoking, none of the haplotypes was significantly different between periodontitis and healthy controls after Bonferroni correction. This study could not show a significant association between PPARG gene variants and chronic periodontitis