Industrial competitiveness of the auto parts industries in four large Asian countries : the role of government policy in a challenging international environment

Rationalization and stabilization following the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s combined with the expansion and liberalization of regional and global trade to create significant parts industries in China, Indonesia, and the Republic of Korea. Conventional policies of stabilization and liberalization, however, cannot fully explain growth patterns. Japan and Korea grewinto major players before liberalizing trade and investment, while even after extensive liberalization Indonesia has yet to move from extensive to intensive growth. These anomalies suggest that to explain success in the auto parts industry we need to move beyond liberalization to look at policies and institutions promoting economies of scale, skill formation, quality upgrading, supplier-linkage cooperation, and innovation. In Japan, the regional and global leader, innovative assemblers led industrial development and supported key suppliers, but the government also supported diffusion of quality control techniques and new technology to small and medium enterprises, and encouraged stable employment among core employees. Korea remains weaker on both small and medium enterprise and employment fronts, but government-encouraged consolidation around a small number of business groups, an extended period of protection, and support for export promotion led to economies of scale. Liberalization of foreign investment after the financial crisis helped ameliorate the excessive statism of earlier policies and strengthened the parts industry. In China, liberalization for WTO entry, rapid expansion in demand, and strong support by local governments encouraged a wave of foreign investment in both assembly and parts. In contrast, institutional weaknesses continue to constrain development opportunities in Indonesia.Technology Industry,Economic Theory&Research,Water and Industry,Markets and Market Access,Non Bank Financial Institutions

Who tolerates tax increases? : Age and gender in the raising of Japanese consumption taxes

日本の政党は、国の借金増大という喫緊の課題に直面し、歳出削減や増税に対する一般の人々の支持を取り付けようと懸命になっている。本論文では、1985年から2015年にかけて実施された世論調査の結果を用いながら、消費税への人々の支持が費用および便益の認識に左右されているということを示す。具体的には、公共財（特に社会保障プログラム）に資金を供給するために税金が必要だと回答者が考えていれば、消費税への支持率は高くなる。また、高齢者は納税の便益をすぐに受けられる立場にあるため、増税に対する許容度は年齢とともに上昇する。しかし女性は男性に比べて許容度は低くなっており、これは消費税の引き上げによる価格上昇に対して女性の方がより敏感であるからだと考えられる。Facing alarming public debt, Japanese political parties struggle to muster public support for painful expenditure cuts and tax increases. Using public opinion surveys between 1985 and 2015, we show that public support for consumption taxes is conditional on perceptions of costs and benefits. Approval is higher when respondents believe that taxes are necessary to fund public goods, particularly social insurance programs. We also find that tolerance for tax hikes increases with age, as the elderly are closer to receiving the benefits of tax payments, but lower for women, likely because they are more sensitive to price increases imposed by the consumption tax.特集　社会規範と世論の形

Defining the gap between research and practice in public relations programme evaluation - towards a new research agenda

The current situation in public relations programme evaluation is neatly summarized by McCoy who commented that 'probably the most common buzzwords in public relations in the last ten years have been evaluation and accountability' (McCoy 2005, 3). This paper examines the academic and practitioner-based literature and research on programme evaluation and it detects different priorities and approaches that may partly explain why the debate on acceptable and agreed evaluation methods continues. It analyses those differences and proposes a research agenda to bridge the gap and move the debate forward

Rapid One-Step Quantitative Reverse Transcriptase PCR Assay with Competitive Internal Positive Control for Detection of Enteroviruses in Environmental Samples

Human enteroviruses can serve as a more accurate indicator of human fecal contamination than conventional bacteriological fecal indicators. We describe here a quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR (qRT-PCR) assay specifically tailored to detect these viruses in environmental waters. The assay included a competitive internal positive control (CIPC) that allowed the inhibition of qRT-PCRs to be quantitatively assessed. Coamplification of the CIPC with enteroviral genetic material did not affect the sensitivity, specificity, or reproducibility of the enteroviral qRT-PCR assay. The assay is rapid (less than 5 h from sample to result), has a wide dynamic range (>3 logs), and is capable of detecting as few as 25 enteroviral genomes with an average amplification efficiency of 0.91. In samples with low or moderate inhibition, the delay in CIPC amplification was used to adjust enterovirus qRT-PCR concentrations to account for losses due to inhibition. Samples exhibiting significant inhibition were not corrected but instead diluted twofold and immediately assayed again. Using significantly inhibited samples, it was found that dilution relieved inhibition in 93% (25 of 27) of the samples. In addition, 15% (4 of 27) of these previously negative samples contained enteroviral genomes. The high-throughput format of the assay compared to conventional culture-based methods offers a fast, reliable, and specific method for detecting enteroviruses in environmental water samples. The ability of the assay to identify false negatives and provide improved quantitative assessments of enterovirus concentrations will facilitate the tracking of human fecal contamination and the assessment of potential public health risk due to enteroviruses in recreational and shellfish harvesting waters

Chromosomal-level assembly of the Asian Seabass genome using long sequence reads and multi-layered scaffolding

We report here the ~670 Mb genome assembly of the Asian seabass (Lates calcarifer), a tropical marine teleost. We used long-read sequencing augmented by transcriptomics, optical and genetic mapping along with shared synteny from closely related fish species to derive a chromosome-level assembly with a contig N50 size over 1 Mb and scaffold N50 size over 25 Mb that span ~90% of the genome. The population structure of L. calcarifer species complex was analyzed by re-sequencing 61 individuals representing various regions across the species' native range. SNP analyses identified high levels of genetic diversity and confirmed earlier indications of a population stratification comprising three clades with signs of admixture apparent in the South-East Asian population. The quality of the Asian seabass genome assembly far exceeds that of any other fish species, and will serve as a new standard for fish genomics

Status of Muon Collider Research and Development and Future Plans

The status of the research on muon colliders is discussed and plans are outlined for future theoretical and experimental studies. Besides continued work on the parameters of a 3-4 and 0.5 TeV center-of-mass (CoM) energy collider, many studies are now concentrating on a machine near 0.1 TeV (CoM) that could be a factory for the s-channel production of Higgs particles. We discuss the research on the various components in such muon colliders, starting from the proton accelerator needed to generate pions from a heavy-Z target and proceeding through the phase rotation and decay ($\pi \to \mu \nu_{\mu}$) channel, muon cooling, acceleration, storage in a collider ring and the collider detector. We also present theoretical and experimental R & D plans for the next several years that should lead to a better understanding of the design and feasibility issues for all of the components. This report is an update of the progress on the R & D since the Feasibility Study of Muon Colliders presented at the Snowmass'96 Workshop [R. B. Palmer, A. Sessler and A. Tollestrup, Proceedings of the 1996 DPF/DPB Summer Study on High-Energy Physics (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, CA, 1997)].Comment: 95 pages, 75 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Special Topics, Accelerators and Beam

Genomic, Pathway Network, and Immunologic Features Distinguishing Squamous Carcinomas

This integrated, multiplatform PanCancer Atlas study co-mapped and identified distinguishing molecular features of squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) from five sites associated with smokin

Pan-Cancer Analysis of lncRNA Regulation Supports Their Targeting of Cancer Genes in Each Tumor Context

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are commonly dys-regulated in tumors, but only a handful are known toplay pathophysiological roles in cancer. We inferredlncRNAs that dysregulate cancer pathways, onco-genes, and tumor suppressors (cancer genes) bymodeling their effects on the activity of transcriptionfactors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs in5,185 TCGA tumors and 1,019 ENCODE assays.Our predictions included hundreds of candidateonco- and tumor-suppressor lncRNAs (cancerlncRNAs) whose somatic alterations account for thedysregulation of dozens of cancer genes and path-ways in each of 14 tumor contexts. To demonstrateproof of concept, we showed that perturbations tar-geting OIP5-AS1 (an inferred tumor suppressor) andTUG1 and WT1-AS (inferred onco-lncRNAs) dysre-gulated cancer genes and altered proliferation ofbreast and gynecologic cancer cells. Our analysis in-dicates that, although most lncRNAs are dysregu-lated in a tumor-specific manner, some, includingOIP5-AS1, TUG1, NEAT1, MEG3, and TSIX, synergis-tically dysregulate cancer pathways in multiple tumorcontexts