Capital Account Liberalization and Foreign Direct Investment

We examine the impact of capital account policies on FDI inflows. Using an annual panel dataset of 83 developing and developed countries for 1984-2000, we find that capital account openness is positively but only very moderately associated with the amount of FDI inflows after controlling for other macroeconomic and institutional measures. To a large extent, other country characteristics seem to determine FDI inflows instead of capital account policies. Furthermore, we find that capital controls are easily circumvented in corrupt and politically unstable regimes. We conclude that liberalizing the capital account is not sufficient to generate increases in inflows unless it is accompanied by a lower level of corruption or a decrease in political risk.Foreign direct investment, capital controls, capital flows, capital account liberalization

Is Foreign Direct Investment Good for Growth? Evidence from Sectoral Analysis of China and Vietnam

We estimate the impact of FDI on growth using sectoral data for FDI inflows to China and Vietnam. Previous empirical studies, using either cross-country growth regressions or firm-level micro-econometric analysis, fail to reach a consensus. Our paper is the first to use sectoral FDI inflow data to evaluate the sector-specific impact of FDI on growth. Our results show that, for the two developing-transition economies we examine, FDI has a statistically-significant positive effect on economic growth operating directly and through its interaction with labor. Intriguingly, we find the effects seem to be very different across economic sectors, with almost all the beneficial impact limited to industrial sector. Other sectors appear to gain very little growth benefit from sector-specific FDI.Foreign direct investment, growth, China, Vietnam

Cd diffused mesa-substrate buried heterostructure InGaAsP/InP laser

A new type of buried heterostructure InGaAsP/InP lasers grown by a single-step liquid phase epitaxy on Cd diffused mesa substrate is described. These lasers exhibit excellent current and optical confinement. Threshold currents as low as 15 mA are achieved for a laser with a 2-µm-wide active region

An Infrastructure for acquiring high quality semantic metadata

Because metadata that underlies semantic web applications is gathered from distributed and heterogeneous data sources, it is important to ensure its quality (i.e., reduce duplicates, spelling errors, ambiguities). However, current infrastructures that acquire and integrate semantic data have only marginally addressed the issue of metadata quality. In this paper we present our metadata acquisition infrastructure, ASDI, which pays special attention to ensuring that high quality metadata is derived. Central to the architecture of ASDI is a erification engine that relies on several semantic web tools to check the quality of the derived data. We tested our prototype in the context of building a semantic web portal for our lab, KMi. An experimental evaluation omparing the automatically extracted data against manual annotations indicates that the verification engine enhances the quality of the extracted semantic metadata

Acute military psychiatric casualties from the war in Iraq

Background: The view that most military personnel evacuated from war zones are suffering from combat stress reactions, or are otherwise traumatised by the horrors of war, has an impact on all aspects of military psychiatry. Aims: To delineate the reasons for psychiatric aeromedical evacuation from Iraq from the start of build-up of UK forces in January 2003 until the end of October that year, 6 months after the end of formal hostilities. Method: A retrospective study was conducted of field and in-patient psychiatric assessments of 116 military personnel evacuated to the UK military psychiatric in-patient facility in Catterick Garrison. Results: Evacuees were mainly non-combatants (69%). A significant proportion were in reserve service (21%) and had a history of contact with mental health services (37%). Only 3% had a combat stress reaction. In over 85% of cases evacuation was for low mood attributed to separation from friends or family, or difficulties adjusting to the environment. Conclusions: These findings have implications especially for screening for suitability for deployment, and for understanding any longer-term mental health problems arising in veterans from Iraq

NO EVIDENCE FOR THE IN VIVO INDUCTION OF GENOMIC INSTABILITY BY LOW DOSES OF 137CS GAMMA RAYS IN BONE MARROW CELLS OF BALB/CJ AND C57BL/6J MICE

In spite of extensive research, assessment of potential health risks associated with exposure to low-dose (≤ 0.1 Gy) radiation is still challenging. We evaluated the in vivo induction of genomic instability, expressed as late-occurring chromosome aberrations, in bone- marrow cells of two strains of mouse with different genetic background, i.e. the radiosensitive BALB/cJ and the radioresistant C57BL/6J strains following a whole-body exposure to varying doses of 137Cs gamma rays (0, 0.05, 0.1, and 1.0 Gy). A total of five mice per dose per strain were sacrificed at various times post-irradiation up to 6 months for sample collections. Three-color fluorescence in situ hybridization for mouse chromosomes 1, 2, and 3 was used for the analysis of stable-aberrations in metaphase-cells. All other visible gross structural-abnormalities involving non-painted-chromosomes were also evaluated on the same metaphase-cells used for scoring the stable-aberrations of painted-chromosomes. Our new data demonstrated in bone-marrow cells from both strains that low doses of low LET-radiation (as low as 0.05 Gy) are incapable of inducing genomic instability but are capable of reducing specific aberration-types below the spontaneous rate with time post- irradiation. However, the results showed the induction of genomic instability by 1.0 Gy of 137Cs gamma rays in the radiosensitive strain only

Elastic and Raman scattering of 9.0 and 11.4 MeV photons from Au, Dy and In

Monoenergetic photons between 8.8 and 11.4 MeV were scattered elastically and in elastically (Raman) from natural targets of Au, Dy and In.15 new cross sections were measured. Evidence is presented for a slight deformation in the 197Au nucleus, generally believed to be spherical. It is predicted, on the basis of these measurements, that the Giant Dipole Resonance of Dy is very similar to that of 160Gd. A narrow isolated resonance at 9.0 MeV is observed in In.Comment: 31 pages, 11 figure

A context model for semantic mediation in Web services composition

This paper presents a context-driven approach that aims at supporting semantic mediation between composed Web services. Despite the widespread adoption of Web services by the IT community, innovative solutions are needed in order to overcome the challenging issue that relates to the semantic disparity of exchanged data. Indeed, there is a lack of means for interpreting these data according to the contextual requirements of each Web service. The context-driven approach suggests two steps. The first step consists of developing a model for anchoring context to data flowing between Web services. In the second step, we use this model to support the semantic mediation between Web services engaged in a composition. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006