Regional Headquarters Schemes by China’s Ministry of Commerce and the Shanghai Municipal Government: Differences, Limitations, and Possible Combinations

[Excerpt] As large multinational companies (“MNCs”) are continuously extending their Chinese market presence, many are considering moving their Asian-Pacific Headquarters to China. In an attempt to attract MNCs’ Regional Headquarters to Mainland China, the Chinese central government is not only faced with competition from regional hubs, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, but also from internal rivals, such as the Shanghai and Beijing municipal governments. This article analyzes recently passed regulations on the establishment of Regional Headquarters by MNCs in China at the national and the municipal level. The focus will be on Shanghai’s set of regulations, issued in 2002 and 2003, as well as on the People’s Republic of China (“PRC”) Ministry of Commerce’s Holding Company Provisions, which introduced Regional Headquarters as a new investment vehicle at the national level in February 2004. Particular emphasis will be placed on the November 2004 revisions of the national rules, the difference in approval requirements and business scope of national and municipal Regional Headquarters and the two distinct forms of Regional Headquarters (Investment/Management Company) in Shanghai Municipality

Openness and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Analysis

This thesis analyzes the relationship between openness and economic growth. Although long standing and well accepted economic theory clearly shows the gains from open trade between nations, developing countries have followed the protectionist policies of Import Substituting Industrialization (ISI) for a large portion of the twentieth century. The application of ISI by developing nations is characterized by multiple and overlapping protective measures which give rise to high effective rates of protection. These high effective rates of protection create a bias against exports, prevent emerging industries in developing countries from achieving economies of scale and give rise to economic dualism. For these reasons and others, the 1980s saw a shift away from ISI to the policies of export-oriented industrialization (EOI). EOI strives to make neutral the incentives between domestic and foreign production of a good. Trade liberalization in the form of EOI has been shown to enhance the economic performance of numerous developing countries. Numerous efforts made to explain the strong, positive relationship between openness and economic growth rely upon empirical analysis based upon neoclassical production functions. A review of this work shows that this empirical analysis is often based on small data sets which cover a limited time span. In addition, this work does not utilize demographic variables as sources of growth. Most important of all, these works tend to concentrate on measures of exports assuming away any condition of import shortage. This thesis alleviates these shortcomings by developing an economic growth model which assumes that marginal factor productivities differ between the export and domestic sectors of an economy, utilizes demographic variables as sources of growth and accounts for import shortage conditions through the inclusion of an imports growth variable. Finally, empirical analysis based on a large cross country data set confirms the assumptions made by the model

Novel Weapons Testing: Are Invasive Plants More Chemically Defended than Native Plants?

Background: Exotic species have been hypothesized to successfully invade new habitats by virtue of possessing novel biochemistry that repels native enemies. Despite the pivotal long-term consequences of invasion for native food-webs, to date there are no experimental studies examining directly whether exotic plants are any more or less biochemically deterrent than native plants to native herbivores. Methodology/Principal Findings: In a direct test of this hypothesis using herbivore feeding assays with chemical extracts from 19 invasive plants and 21 co-occurring native plants, we show that invasive plant biochemistry is no more deterrent (on average) to a native generalist herbivore than extracts from native plants. There was no relationship between extract deterrence and length of time since introduction, suggesting that time has not mitigated putative biochemical novelty. Moreover, the least deterrent plant extracts were from the most abundant species in the field, a pattern that held for both native and exotic plants. Analysis of chemical deterrence in context with morphological defenses and growth-related traits showed that native and exotic plants had similar trade-offs among traits. Conclusions/Significance: Overall, our results suggest that particular invasive species may possess deterrent secondary chemistry, but it does not appear to be a general pattern resulting from evolutionary mismatches between exotic plants and native herbivores. Thus, fundamentally similar processes may promote the ecological success of both native and exotic species

Learning and literacy in music: activities for integrating children\u27s literature into the elementary general music curriculum

In summary, there is plenty of evidence that supports the use of reading children’s literature in a music classroom. While this concept certainly is starting to gain more traction, the purpose of this thesis is to provide a starting point for educators that have not yet begun to take advantage of the rich abundance of content that is found in such literature, or to assist educators who simply want more ideas and evidence to support their teaching choices. In order to improve our teaching and provide as best of an education as we can to our students, we must utilize all resources available to us: including children’s books that have nothing to do with music

Primary Metabolism of Chickpea Is the Initial Target of Wound Inducing Early Sensed Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceri Race I

BACKGROUND: Biotrophic interaction between host and pathogen induces generation of reactive oxygen species that leads to programmed cell death of the host tissue specifically encompassing the site of infection conferring resistance to the host. However, in the present study, biotrophic relationship between Fusarium oxysporum and chickpea provided some novel insights into the classical concepts of defense signaling and disease perception where ROS (reactive oxygen species) generation followed by hypersensitive responses determined the magnitude of susceptibility or resistant potentiality of the host. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Microscopic observations detected wound mediated in planta pathogenic establishment and its gradual progression within the host vascular tissue. cDNA-AFLP showed differential expression of many defense responsive elements. Real time expression profiling also validated the early recognition of the wound inducing pathogen by the host. The interplay between fungus and host activated changes in primary metabolism, which generated defense signals in the form of sugar molecules for combating pathogenic encounter. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The present study showed the limitations of hypersensitive response mediated resistance, especially when foreign encounters involved the food production as well as the translocation machinery of the host. It was also predicted from the obtained results that hypersensitivity and active species generation failed to impart host defense in compatible interaction between chickpea and Fusarium. On the contrary, the defense related gene(s) played a critical role in conferring natural resistance to the resistant host. Thus, this study suggests that natural selection is the decisive factor for selecting and segregating out the suitable type of defense mechanism to be undertaken by the host without disturbing its normal metabolism, which could deviate from the known classical defense mechanisms

The Predictability of Phytophagous Insect Communities: Host Specialists as Habitat Specialists

The difficulties specialized phytophagous insects face in finding habitats with an appropriate host should constrain their dispersal. Within the concept of metacommunities, this leads to the prediction that host-plant specialists should sort into local assemblages according to the local environmental conditions, i.e. habitat conditions, whereas assemblages of host-plant generalists should depend also on regional processes. Our study aimed at ranking the importance of local environmental factors and species composition of the vegetation for predicting the species composition of phytophagous moth assemblages with either a narrow or a broad host range. Our database consists of 351,506 specimens representing 820 species of nocturnal Macrolepidoptera sampled between 1980 and 2006 using light traps in 96 strict forest reserves in southern Germany. Species were grouped as specialists or generalists according to the food plants of the larvae; specialists use host plants belonging to one genus. We used predictive canonical correspondence and co-correspondence analyses to rank the importance of local environmental factors, the species composition of the vegetation and the role of host plants for predicting the species composition of host-plant specialists and generalists. The cross-validatory fit for predicting the species composition of phytophagous moths was higher for host-plant specialists than for host-plant generalists using environmental factors as well as the composition of the vegetation. As expected for host-plant specialists, the species composition of the vegetation was a better predictor of the composition of these assemblages than the environmental variables. But surprisingly, this difference for specialized insects was not due to the occurrence of their host plants. Overall, our study supports the idea that owing to evolutionary constraints in finding a host, host-plant specialists and host-plant generalists follow two different models of metacommunities: the species-sorting and the mass-effect model

Flavin-Dependent Monooxygenases as a Detoxification Mechanism in Insects: New Insights from the Arctiids (Lepidoptera)

Insects experience a wide array of chemical pressures from plant allelochemicals and pesticides and have developed several effective counterstrategies to cope with such toxins. Among these, cytochrome P450 monooxygenases are crucial in plant-insect interactions. Flavin-dependent monooxygenases (FMOs) seem not to play a central role in xenobiotic detoxification in insects, in contrast to mammals. However, the previously identified senecionine N-oxygenase of the arctiid moth Tyria jacobaeae (Lepidoptera) indicates that FMOs have been recruited during the adaptation of this insect to plants that accumulate toxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids. Identification of related FMO-like sequences of various arctiids and other Lepidoptera and their combination with expressed sequence tag (EST) data and sequences emerging from the Bombyx mori genome project show that FMOs in Lepidoptera form a gene family with three members (FMO1 to FMO3). Phylogenetic analyses suggest that FMO3 is only distantly related to lepidopteran FMO1 and FMO2 that originated from a more recent gene duplication event. Within the FMO1 gene cluster, an additional gene duplication early in the arctiid lineage provided the basis for the evolution of the highly specific biochemical, physiological, and behavioral adaptations of these butterflies to pyrrolizidine-alkaloid-producing plants. The genes encoding pyrrolizidine-alkaloid-N-oxygenizing enzymes (PNOs) are transcribed in the fat body and the head of the larvae. An N-terminal signal peptide mediates the transport of the soluble proteins into the hemolymph where PNOs efficiently convert pro-toxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids into their non-toxic N-oxide derivatives. Heterologous expression of a PNO of the generalist arctiid Grammia geneura produced an N-oxygenizing enzyme that shows noticeably expanded substrate specificity compared with the related enzyme of the specialist Tyria jacobaeae. The data about the evolution of FMOs within lepidopteran insects and the functional characterization of a further member of this enzyme family shed light on this almost uncharacterized detoxification system in insects