Russia’s cereal markets: current trends, changes in net-trade position, and policy implications

This paper provides an overview of the most recent developments on Russian cereal markets. A review of annual statistics on domestic production, trade, consumption, and storage of cereals reveals that the improvement in Russia’s net trade position cannot only be explained by increased productivity of grain producers. Exhausted storage capacities and lowered real trade costs after the devaluation of the Russian rouble in 1998 seem to have contributed to these developments. A computable general equilibrium model for Russia based on 1999 data was used for analyzing various economic developments and policy changes. The model simulations show that market protection in the short run, when the flexibility of labor and capital is restricted, may benefit Russian farmers. If, however, in the long run such structural rigidities can be abolished, a more liberal trade regime would also be positive for the domestic farm sector.Russia, agriculture, cereals, trade, General Equilibrium Analysis, Crop Production/Industries, International Relations/Trade,

Group Violence, Ethnic Diversity, and Citizen Participation: Evidence from Indonesia

This paper addresses the impact of violent conflict on social capital, as measured by citizen participation in community groups defined for four activity types: governance, social service, infrastructure development and risk-sharing. Combining household panel data from Indonesia with conflict event information, we find an overall decrease in citizen contributions in districts affected by group violence in the early post-Suharto transition period. However, participation in communities with a high degree of ethnic polarization is less strongly affected and even stimulated for local governance and risk-sharing activities. Moreover, individual engagement appears to be dependent on the involvement of other members from the own ethnic group, which points to emphases on bonding social networks in the presence of violence. Finally, in conflict regions, the wealthier households are more likely to engage into cooperative and infrastructure improvement activities, while they are dropping from security groups. On the contrary, the poorest households get more involved in social service activities and less in infrastructure groups. Our results illustrate the danger of generalizations when dealing with violence impact on community activities. We found a large variety of responses depending on the considered activity and its expected economic or social function. We also found large observed and unobserved individual heterogeneities of the effect of violent conflict on activity participation. Once an appropriate nomenclature of activities is used and intensive controls for observed and unobserved heterogeneity are performed, we found that some activities can actually be stimulated by conflict situations. In this respect, the ethnic configuration of society seems to be central in understanding this type of social capital building.

Brevets et marques : actifs stratégiques (Patents and trademarks : strategical assets)

Si les brevets et marques sont utilisés ordinairement dans une démarche de protection de savoir-faire, il arrive que des entreprises multinationales se servent de tels actifs à des fins d'ingénierie fiscale, que ce soit sur le plan patrimonial (transferts de propriété des actifs), ou sur le plan de leur exploitation (transfert des bénéfices). A l'aide de deux exemples vécus, l'un à travers une société holding luxembourgeoise et l'autre à travers une société offshore, l'illégalité, les limites, les dangers et les conséquences de tels agissements sont exposés. Used ordinarily for know-how protection purposes, it is not uncommon that multinational firms use patents and trademarks for fiscal engineering aims, either for patrimony management (ownership shifting), or operating strategy (profit shifting). Two case studies, one based on a Luxembourg Holding company and another on an offshore company, try to demonstrate the illegality, limits, dangers and consequences of such schemes.Brevet, marque, holding, offshore, ingénierie fiscale/patent, trademark, holding, offshore, fiscal ingineering

Equivalent income and the economic evaluation of health care

We argue that the economic evaluation of health care (cost-benefit analysis) should respect individual preferences and should incorporate distributional consid- erations. Relying on individual preferences does not imply subjective welfarism. We propose a particular non- welfarist approach, based on the concept of equivalent income, and show how it helps to define distributional weights. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach with empirical results from a pilot survey.cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, willingness-to-pay, social welfare function, equivalent income

Characterization of Revenue Equivalence

The property of an allocation rule to be implementable in dominant strategies by a unique payment scheme is called revenue equivalence. In this paper we give a characterization of revenue equivalence based on a graph theoretic interpretation of the incentive compatibility constraints. The characterization holds for any (possibly in¯nite) outcome space and many of the known results about revenue equivalence are immediate consequence

The impact of cognitive load on operatic singers' timing performance

In the present paper, we report the results of an empirical study on the effects of cognitive load on operatic singing. The main aim of the study was to investigate to what extent a working memory task affected the timing of operatic singers' performance. Thereby, we focused on singers' tendency to speed up, or slow down their performance of musical phrases and pauses. Twelve professional operatic singers were asked to perform an operatic aria three times; once without an additional working memory task, once with a concurrent working memory task (counting shapes on a computer screen), and once with a relatively more difficult working memory task (more shapes to be counted appearing one after another). The results show that, in general, singers speeded up their performance under heightened cognitive load. Interestingly, this effect was more pronounced in pauses-more in particular longer pauses-compared to musical phrases. We discuss the role of sensorimotor control and feedback processes in musical timing to explain these findings

Group Violence, Ethnic Diversity and Citizen Participation: Evidence from Indonesia

We study the impact of violent conflict on social capital, as measured by citizen participation in community groups, defined by four activity types: governance, social service, infrastructure development and risk-sharing. Combining household panel data from Indonesia with conflict event information, we find an overall decrease in citizen contributions in districts affected by group violence in the early post-Suharto transition period. However, participation in communities with a high degree of ethnic polarization is less affected, and is even stimulated for local governance and risk-sharing activities. Moreover, individual engagement appears to depend on the involvement of other members from the same ethnic group, which points toward building of intra-ethnic social networks in the presence of violence. Finally, our results show the danger of generalization when dealing with citizen participation in community activities. We find a large variety of responses depending on the activity and its economic and social functions. We also find large observed and unobserved individual heterogeneities of the effect of violence on participation. Once an appropriate nomenclature of activities is used and controls for heterogeneity are applied, we find that the ethnic and social configuration of society is central in understanding citizen participation

Effects of the vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) and related peptides on glioblastoma cell growth in vitro

The growth rate of numerous cancer cell lines is regulated in part by actions of neuropeptides of the vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) family, which also includes pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating peptide (PACAP), glucagon, and peptide histidine/isoleucine (PHI). The aim of this work was to investigate the effect of these peptides on the growth of the rat glioblastoma cell line C6 in vitro. We also sought to determine which binding sites were correlated with the effects observed. Proliferation studies performed by means of a CyQuant trade mark assay showed that VIP and PACAP strongly stimulated C6 cell proliferation at most of the concentrations tested, whereas PHI increased cell proliferation only when associated with VIP. Two growth hormone-releasing factor (GRF) derivatives and the VIP antagonist hybrid peptide neurotensin-VIP were able to inhibit VIP-induced cell growth stimulation, even at very low concentrations. Binding experiments carried out on intact cultured C6 cells, using 125I-labeled VIP and PACAP as tracers, revealed that the effects of the peptides on cell growth were correlated with the expression on C6 cells of polyvalent high-affinity VIP-PACAP binding sites and of a second subtype corresponding to very high-affinity VIP-selective binding species. The latter subtype, which interacted poorly with PACAP with a 10,000-fold lower affinity than VIP, might mediate the antagonist effects of neurotensin- VIP and of both GRF derivatives on VIP-induced cell growth stimulation

Application of Ewald's Method for Efficient Summation of Dyon Long-Range Potentials

We study a model of dyons for SU(2) Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature T < T_c, in particular its ability to generate a confining force between a static quark antiquark pair. The interaction between dyons corresponds to a long-range 1/r potential, which in naive treatments with a finite number of dyons typically gives rise to severe finite volume effects. To avoid such effects we apply the so-called Ewald method, which has its origin in solid state physics. The basic idea of Ewald's method is to consider a finite number of dyons inside a finite cubic volume and enforce periodicity of this volume. We explain the technicalities of Ewald's method and outline how the method can be applied to a wider class of 1/r^p long-range potentials.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, contribution to conference "Confinement X