The Economic Consequences of the Doha Round for Ireland

This paper provides a quantitative study of the economic effects of a stylised simulation of trade liberalisation for Ireland using the GTAP model. The experiment incorporates the liberalisation of agricultural, manufacturing and services trade as well as measures to improve trade facilitation. The simulation is implemented against a baseline projection of the Irish and world economy over the next decade. Overall, Ireland’s welfare will increase as a result of further trade liberalisation, with particularly strong gains from services liberalisation. The industrial liberalisation scenario also generates positive gains to Ireland, while agricultural liberalisation has a slightly negative effect on the overall economy.

The Economic Consequences of the Doha Round for Ireland

This paper provides a quantitative study of the economic effects of a stylised simulation of trade liberalisation for Ireland using the GTAP model. The experiment incorporates the liberalisation of agricultural, manufacturing and services trade as well as measures to improve trade facilitation. The simulation is implemented against a baseline projection of the Irish and world economy over the next decade. Overall, Ireland's welfare will increase as a result of further trade liberalisation, with particularly strong gains from services liberalisation. The industrial liberalisation scenario also generates positive gains to Ireland, while agricultural liberalisation has a slightly negative effect on the overall economy.Note: Ireland, trade liberalisation, WTO Doha Round

The Doha Development Agenda: Mixed Prospects for Developing Countries

This paper uses the GTAP computable general equilibrium model to assess the impact of a Doha Development Agenda agreement on agricultural trade liberalisation. In particular, we examine the consequences for developing countries. The simulation incorporates further liberalisation in the areas of market access, export competition and domestic support. Most developing regions can expect strong positive results from this liberalisation, however some suffer a decrease in welfare. The magnitude of the welfare effect for these countries depends on measures to be taken by developing countries themselves, and whether they will materialise must be uncertain. The results highlight the importance of the impact of further liberalisation of the erosion of preferential trading arrangements enjoyed by developing regions.Agricultural trade liberalisation, GTAP, developing countries

The circular economy: An interdisciplinary exploration of the concept and application in a global context

There have long been calls from industry for guidance in implementing strategies for sustainable development. The Circular Economy represents the most recent attempt to conceptualize the integration of economic activity and environmental wellbeing in a sustainable way. This set of ideas has been adopted by China as the basis of their economic development (included in both the 11th and the 12th ‘Five Year Plan’), escalating the concept in minds of western policymakers and NGOs. This paper traces the conceptualisations and origins of the Circular Economy, tracing its meanings, and exploring its antecedents in economics and ecology, and discusses how the Circular Economy has been operationalized in business and policy. The paper finds that while the Circular Economy places emphasis on the redesign of processes and cycling of materials, which may contribute to more sustainable business models, it also encapsulates tensions and limitations. These include an absence of the social dimension inherent in sustainable development that limits its ethical dimensions, and some unintended consequences. This leads us to propose a revised definition of the Circular Economy as “an economic model wherein planning, resourcing, procurement, production and reprocessing are designed and managed, as both process and output, to maximize ecosystem functioning and human well-being”

Quadratic estimates and functional calculi of perturbed Dirac operators

We prove quadratic estimates for complex perturbations of Dirac-type operators, and thereby show that such operators have a bounded functional calculus. As an application we show that spectral projections of the Hodge--Dirac operator on compact manifolds depend analytically on $L_\infty$ changes in the metric. We also recover a unified proof of many results in the Calder\'on program, including the Kato square root problem and the boundedness of the Cauchy operator on Lipschitz curves and surfaces.Comment: To appear in Inventiones Mathematicae. Minor final changes added 4/7 200

ON CHOOSING A BASE COVERAGE LEVEL FOR MULTIPLE PERIL CROP INSURANCE CONTRACTS

For multiple peril crop insurance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture'Â’s Risk Management Agency estimates the premium rate for a base coverage level and then uses multiplicative adjustment factors to recover rates at other coverage levels. Given this methodology, accurate estimation of the base coverage level from 65% to 50%. The purpose of this analysis was to provide some insight into whether such a change should or should not be carried out. Not surprisingly, our findings indicate that the higher coverage level should be maintained as the base.Risk and Uncertainty,

Implications of Domestic Support Disciplines for Further Agricultural Trade Liberalization

This paper employs the GTAP computable general equilibrium model and dataset to analyse the implications of domestic support reductions in the context of agricultural trade liberalisation. Three specific issues are addressed: overhang in domestic support, the accurate distinction of the boxes in the GTAP dataset and the treatment of market price support in the amber box. An extensive domestic support database is used to calculate the change in applied domestic support rates from a specified cut in bound rates, and to identify the impact on the different domestic support boxes and the required reductions in each support category. The GTAP model is extended to incorporate an explicit representation of the market price support element of the AMS. The results from these extensions of the standard database and model support the view that the impact of an agreement to reduce domestic support will be limited and lower than conventionally estimated. Results of simulations combining domestic support cuts with market access and export competition disciplines show that the effect of import tariff reductions dominate the gains from domestic support cuts once full account is taken of the issues addressed in this paper.WTO agricultural negotiations, domestic support, agricultural protection, Aggregate Measure of Support

Discovering bipartite substructure in directed networks

Bipartivity is an important network concept that can be applied to nodes, edges and communities. Here we focus on directed networks and look for subnetworks made up of two distinct groups of nodes, connected by “one-way” links. We show that a spectral approach can be used to find hidden substructure of this form. Theoretical support is given for the idealised case where there is limited overlap between subnetworks. Numerical experiments show that the approach is robust to spurious and missing edges. A key application of this work is in the analysis of high-throughput gene expression data, and we give an example where a biologically meaningful directed bipartite subnetwork is found from a cancer microarray dataset