Do regional trade pacts benefit the poor ? An illustration from the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement in Nicaragua

The main objective of this paper is to provide an ex-ante assessment of the poverty and income distribution impacts of the Central American Free Trade Area agreement on Nicaragua. The authors use a general equilibrium macro model to simulate trade reform scenarios and estimate their price effects, while a micro-module maps these price changes into real income changes at the individual household level. A useful insight from this analysis is that even if the final total impact on poverty is not too large, its dispersion across households-due to their heterogeneity of factor endowments, inputs use, commodity production, and consumption preferences-is significant and should be taken into account when designing compensatory policies. Additionally, growth and redistribution decomposition show that, at least in the short to medium run, redistribution can be as important as growth. The main policy message that emerges from the paper is that Nicaragua should consider enlarging its own liberalization to countries other than the United States to boost trade-induced poverty reductions.Economic Theory&Research,Free Trade,Inequality,Markets and Market Access,Consumption

Extension of Decision Tree Algorithm for Stream Data Mining Using Real Data

Recently, because of increasing amount of data in the society, data stream mining targeting large scale data has attracted attention. The data mining is a technology of discovery new knowledge and patterns from the massive amounts of data, and what the data correspond to data stream is data stream mining. In this paper, we propose the feature selection with online decision tree. At first, we construct online type decision tree to regard credit card transaction data as data stream on data stream mining. At second, we select attributes thought to be important for detection of illegal use. We apply VFDT (Very Fast Decision Tree learner) algorithm to online type decision tree construction

Localized Distributions of Quasi Two-Dimensional Electronic States near Defects Artificially Created at Graphite Surfaces in Magnetic Fields

We measured the local density of states of a quasi two-dimensional electron system (2DES) near defects, artificially created by Ar-ion sputtering, on surfaces of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) with scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) in high magnetic fields. At valley energies of the Landau level spectrum, we found two typical localized distributions of the 2DES depending on the defects. These are new types of distributions which are not observed in the previous STS work at the HOPG surface near a point defect [Y. Niimi \textit{et al}., Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 97}, 236804 (2006).]. With increasing energy, we observed gradual transformation from the localized distributions to the extended ones as expected for the integer quantum Hall state. We show that the defect potential depth is responsible for the two localized distributions from comparison with theoretical calculations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Multidimensional Inequality: An Empirial Application to Brazil

This paper illustrates two empirical approaches to the measurement of multidimensional inequality. The first approach is based on the analysis of the independent distribution of monetary and nonmonetary welfare attributes. The second approach considers pair-wise joint distributions of those attributes, hence allowing for differences in the various distributions, as well as possible correlations between the attributes. The analysis is based on household survey data from Brazil for 1996. We focus on inequalities in income, education, health and political participation outcomes. We calculate the extent of vertical and horizontal monetary and non-monetary inequalities, examine the determinants of both types of inequality and analyse their impact on household welfare. Our results show that economic analyses based solely on the distribution of income variables will not portray fully the degree of socio-economic and political inequalities in Brazil. In fact, traditional analysis of inequality may overestimate the extent of inequality, as education and other non-monetary welfare attributes appear to be more equally distributed in Brazil than income.multidimensional inequality, education inequalities, health inequalities, political inequalities, household data, Brazil

Remittances and the Brain Drain: Skilled Migrants Do Remit Less

It has been argued that the brain drain’s negative impact may be offset by the higher remittance levels skilled migrants send home. This paper examines whether remittances actually increase with migrants’ education level. The determinants of remittances it considers include migration levels or rates, migrants’ education level, and source countries’ income, financial sector development and expected growth rate. The estimation takes potential endogeneity into account, an issue not considered in the few studies on this topic. Our main finding is that remittances decrease with the share of migrants with tertiary education. This provides an additional reason for which source countries would prefer unskilled to skilled labor migration. Moreover, as predicted by our model, remittances increase with source countries’ level and rate of migration, financial sector development and population, and decrease with these countries’ income and expected growth rate.migration, remittances, education level, brain drain

Determinants of remittances : recent evidence using data on internal migrants in Vietnam

This paper examines the determinants of remittance behavior for Vietnam using data from the 2004 Vietnam Migration Survey on internal migrants. It considers how, among other things, the vulnerability of a migrant's life at the destination, their link to relatives back home, and the time spent at the destination affect remittances. The paper finds that migrants act as risk-averse economic agents and sendremittances back to the household of origin as part of an insurance exercise in the face of economic uncertainty. Remittances are also found to be driven by a migrant's labor market earnings level. The paper highlights the important role of remittances in providing an effective means of risk-coping and mutual support within the family.Population Policies,Access to Finance,Gender and Development,Debt Markets,Remittances

パーキンソン病の診断における123IイオフルパンSPECTとMIBG心筋シンチグラフィーの併用の有用性に関する検討

藤田医科大

A role for chromatin remodellers in replication of damaged DNA

In eukaryotic cells, replication past damaged sites in DNA is regulated by the ubiquitination of proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA). Little is known about how this process is affected by chromatin structure. There are two isoforms of the Remodels the Structure of Chromatin (RSC) remodelling complex in yeast. We show that deletion of RSC2 results in a dramatic reduction in the level of PCNA ubiquitination after DNA-damaging treatments, whereas no such effect was observed after deletion of RSC1. Similarly, depletion of the BAF180 component of the corresponding PBAF (Polybromo BRG1 (Brahma-Related Gene 1) Associated Factor) complex in human cells led to a similar reduction in PCNA ubiquitination. Remarkably, we found that depletion of BAF180 resulted after UV-irradiation, in a reduction not only of ubiquitinated PCNA but also of chromatin-associated unmodified PCNA and Rad18 (the E3 ligase that ubiquitinates PCNA). This was accompanied by a modest decrease in fork progression. We propose a model to account for these findings that postulates an involvement of PBAF in repriming of replication downstream from replication forks blocked at sites of DNA damage. In support of this model, chromatin immunoprecipitation data show that the RSC complex in yeast is present in the vicinity of the replication forks, and by extrapolation, this is also likely to be the case for the PBAF complex in human cells