Duty-free market access in the Republic of Korea: Potential for least developed countries and Bangladesh

The paper attempts to assess the benefits of Duty-Free and Quota-Free Market (DFQF) access initiatives of the Republic of Korea for least developed countries (LDCs), which have been in place since 1 January 2008. Following a brief introduction on the background of this initiative, this paper examines the exports profile of LDCs, reviews the DFQF scheme of the Republic of Korea, and assesses the potential benefits of the DFQF scheme for LDCs as well as Bangladesh. The export profile of LDCs shows that the share of those countries in world exports in recent years has increased; this can be attributed to price increases for petroleum constituting a major share of LDC total exports. The Republic of Korea is the tenth largest destination of LDC exports, which indicates that the DFQF initiatives of the Republic of Korea for LDCs will have a positive impact on LDC exports. The DFQF scheme of the Republic of Korea covers 6,967 tariff lines, representing about 59 per cent of the all tariff lines of its Customs Schedule. There are at least 25 chapters where product coverage within the chapter is very low, notably below 10 per cent. These include garments, made-up textiles, and major agricultural products including fisheries. Among the DFQF lines, 1,464 lines are duty-free on a most-favoured nation (MFN) basis. Hence, LDCs enjoy tariff preferences on 5,503 tariff lines, while the average margin of preference on these lines is 7.89 per cent. The margin of preferences in most cases is either 6 per cent or 8 per cent. In order to enjoy the preference granted under the scheme, the products should be wholly obtained, or should have at least 50 per cent value addition. Analysis also reveals that the DFQF scheme covers 36.1 per cent of LDCs’ export to the Republic of Korea in 2007, keeping 64.9 per cent of current LDC exports to that country outside the purview of preferential treatment. Only three major export items from LDCs – copper cathodes, raw tobacco and plywood – enjoy -free access. Bangladesh, Congo, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malawi, Myanmar, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia are likely to benefit from duty-free access for these items. The Republic of Korea is the seventh-largest destination for Bangladesh exports. Bangladesh enjoys preferential access to the Republic of Korea under the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA). DFQF access for LDCs adds 5,471 tariff lines for Bangladesh under preferential access. However, analysis shows that the additional lines cover only 4.63 per cent of Bangladesh’s exports to the Republic of Korea in 2007. However, there are important apparel articles in the scheme that may yield benefits for Bangladesh. APTA continues to remain attractive to Bangladesh because of higher trade coverage and more relaxed rules of origin. Nevertheless, the DFQF scheme currently offered by the Republic of Korea is a milestone for the developing countries’ initiative for LDCs, and one that is likely to lead to other countries coming up with similar initiatives. In time, the Republic of Korea is likely to incrementally increase the product coverage, which will lead to higher trade coverage and more favourable rules of origin, and will yield significant benefits for LDCs.least developed countries, Bangladesh, Korea, market access,

Automatic high content screening using deep learning

Recently, deep learning algorithms have been used with success in a variety of domains. Deep learning has proven to be a very helpful tool for discovering complicated structures in high-dimensional and big datasets. In this work, five deep learning models inspired by AlexNet, VGG, and GoogleNet are developed to predict mechanism of actions (MOAs) based on phenotypic screens of a number of cells in dimly lit and noisy images. We demonstrate that our models can predict the MOA for a compendium of drugs that alter cells through single cell or cell population views without any segmentation and feature extraction steps. According to these results, our models do not need to fully realize single-cell measurements to profile samples because they use the morphology of specific phenomena in the cell population samples. We used an imbalanced High Content Screening big dataset to predict MOAs with the main goal of understanding how to work properly with deep learning algorithms on imbalanced datasets when sampling methods, like Oversampling, Undersampling, and Synthetic Minority Over-sampling (SMOTE) algorithms are used for balancing the dataset. Based on our findings, it is now clear that the SMOTE sampling algorithm must be part of the deep learning algorithms when confronting imbalanced datasets. High Content Screening technologies have to deal with screening thousands of cells to provide a number of parameters for each cell, such as nuclear size, nuclear morphology, DNA replication, etc. The success of High Content Screening (HCS) systems depends on automatic image analysis. Recently, deep learning algorithms have overcome object recognition challenges on tasks with a single centered object per image. Present deep learning algorithms have not been applied to images that include multiple specific complex objects, such as microscopic images of many objects such as cells in these images

A Survey Study on the Academics' Views towards the Implementation of the Bologna Process at Duhok Polytechnic University

Over the last two decades, Bologna process had spread from Europe to countries on other continents, including Africa, South America, and Asia. The process has recently attracted the attention of the Kurdistan Regional Government; and has already been applied at a few universities in Kurdistan to replace the previous Iraqi education system, which is based on an annual calendar and is out of date to more formative system including (homework, classwork, assignment, projects, and reports). The new vision of the world is built on this foundation. Recently, and by applying the worldwide standards, Duhok Polytechnic University (DPU) has been able to strengthen the level of professionalism shown in higher education. The researcher wanted to see if the process had a chance of succeeding and what was needed to make it happen. Preparations were necessitated by assessing the perceptions of academicians in Duhok Polytechnic University toward the Bologna process. The study made use of a questionnaire with academicians who were subjected to implement the Bologna process. Due to a variety of factors, like the university's decent infrastructure and a large number of academicians both of which are valuable helps. The research findings implied that the process might be implemented. To summarize, and according to university’s academics, various initiatives had made toward the adoption of the Bologna process, but further preparations and efforts are necessary to be taken in consideration