Textiles and apparel in NAFTA : a case of constrained liberalization

The authors examine the changes that Mexico's textile and clothing industry is likely to face under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). They compare pre-NAFTA and probable post-NAFTA scenarios for Mexican exports. The U.S. clothing and textile industry is likely to remain among the most protected of U.S. industries, so this is essentially a comparison of two protectionist situations, not of protection and free trade. The authors trace how current quota and tariff restrictions on U.S. imports from Mexico will be replaced by rules of origin designed to protect U.S. industry. Mexican textile and clothing exports will enjoy greater access to the U.S. market if most inputs originate in North America. Under the triple transformation requirements, for example, a cotton shirt would have to be made in the NAFTA region from yarn and fabric of NAFTA origin. Mexican compliance with this rule would not prove onerous. Proximity and long-standing production-sharing arrangements have made Mexico heavily dependent on U.S. inputs. Roughly 53 percent of Mexican textile and apparel exports to the United States fall under production-sharing programs, with an average 69 percent of value added of U.S. origin. Only 15 percent of input requirements for the other 47 percent of trade is imported into Mexico - only 8 percent from non-NAFTA countries. What about future trade? The authors estimate that these Mexican exports to the United States will increase only modestly - partly because of the low level of protection already associated with production-sharing arrangements. Rules oforigin under the NAFTA are small. How much investment from outside North America will be attracted to Mexico under stringent input-sourcing requirements is open to question. The competitiveness of Mexico's apparel industry in non-NAFTA markets will depend to some extent on the international competitiveness of the U.S. textile industry.TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Textiles, Apparel&Leather Industry,Trade Policy

Nontariff measures and developing countries : has the Uruguay Round leveled the playing field?

In the policy environment prevailing before implementation of the Uruguay Round results, exports from developing countries face significant nontariff measures in industrial countries. Based on 1992 trade flows, the import coverage ratio of nontariff measures on this trade was more than 18 percent, compared with less than 11 percent for trade among industrial countries. Trade liberalization measures agreed to in the Uruguay Round will dramatically reduce the incidence of nontariff measures on developing country exports: the coverage ratio will drop to less than 4 percent on nonoil exports. This change has the dual effect of increasing export market opportunities for developing countries and of substantially reducing - if not eradicating - the relatively negative bias against developing country exports. These impressive results from the Uruguay Round are attributed to"tariffication"in agriculture, the abolition of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), and the elimination of voluntary export restraints (VERs) under the safeguards agreement. But all these aspects of liberalization will not happen instantaneously when the Uruguay Round results come into force. Agricultural tariffication will occur immediately, but the MFA will be phased out over ten years and VERs will be eliminated over four years. Considering the extent of the liberalization presaged by these policy changes, the authors speculate about likely sources of pressure for measures to mitigate the effects of removing nontariff measures. They conclude that the greatest risks will probably come from safeguards and antidumping. The new safeguards agreement permits the use of quantitative restrictions to stem the flow of injurious imports, and although the agreement tightens existing GATT rules in some respects, it loosens them in others. The antidumping instrument has been used with increasing frequency by an increasing number of countries in the past two decades or more. The efforts of several governments in the Uruguay Round to impose additional controls on antidumping met with little success, and antidumping continues to offer considerable scope for imposing protectionist trade measures.Trade Policy,Globalization and Financial Integration,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research

Trade policy as a determinant of industrial structure: the case of the Kenyan pharmaceutical industry

This paper argues that pharmaceutical manufacturing in Kenya did not establish itself behind a protectionist barrier. At the same time, the industry displays most of the features associated with the kind of manufacturing activity which requires government intervention in order to locate in a country like Kenya. This apparent paradox is explained primarily in terms of market imperfections in the pharmaceuticals sector and the implications of such a situation for government policy are touched on briefly

Gaussian Process Planning with Lipschitz Continuous Reward Functions: Towards Unifying Bayesian Optimization, Active Learning, and Beyond

This paper presents a novel nonmyopic adaptive Gaussian process planning (GPP) framework endowed with a general class of Lipschitz continuous reward functions that can unify some active learning/sensing and Bayesian optimization criteria and offer practitioners some flexibility to specify their desired choices for defining new tasks/problems. In particular, it utilizes a principled Bayesian sequential decision problem framework for jointly and naturally optimizing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. In general, the resulting induced GPP policy cannot be derived exactly due to an uncountable set of candidate observations. A key contribution of our work here thus lies in exploiting the Lipschitz continuity of the reward functions to solve for a nonmyopic adaptive epsilon-optimal GPP (epsilon-GPP) policy. To plan in real time, we further propose an asymptotically optimal, branch-and-bound anytime variant of epsilon-GPP with performance guarantee. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our epsilon-GPP policy and its anytime variant in Bayesian optimization and an energy harvesting task.Comment: 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2016), Extended version with proofs, 17 page

Leadership and Disability in Asia in the Light of Obstacles and Insights: A Case Study Report

When we discuss leadership, we often discuss leadership in terms of leadership for the abled bodies; we ordinarily forget or talk less about people being disabled. In this paper, the authors discuss leadership and the disability issues. In essence, they examine the notion of how and in what ways can leaders do for persons with disabilities and for the leaders with disabilities to enable them to develop

Top-philic Z′Z' Forces at the LHC

Despite extensive searches for an additional neutral massive gauge boson at the LHC, a $Z^\prime$ at the weak scale could still be present if its couplings to the first two generations of quarks are suppressed, in which case the production in hadron colliders relies on tree-level processes in association with heavy flavors or one-loop processes in association with a jet. We consider the low-energy effective theory of a top-philic $Z'$ and present possible UV completions. We clarify theoretical subtleties in evaluating the production of a top-philic $Z'$ at the LHC and examine carefully the treatment of an anomalous $Z'$ current in the low-energy effective theory. Recipes for properly computing the production rate in the $Z'+j$ channel are given. We discuss constraints from colliders and low-energy probes of new physics. As an application, we apply these considerations to models that use a weak-scale $Z'$ to explain possible violations of lepton universality in $B$ meson decays, and show that the future running of a high luminosity LHC can potentially cover much of the remaining parameter space favored by this particular interpretation of the $B$ physics anomaly.Comment: 30 pages, 12 figure

The future of Global Trade and the WTO Jean-Pierre Cling 1

The global governance of trade is in a deadlock and the WTO is suffering from a long standing crisis of legitimacy. This is confirmed by the eventual failure of the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations in 2011. This paper shows the connection between this crisis and the restructuring of world trade which has been going on for the last few decades, and which is set to continue. New emerging powers (China, India, etc.) are increasing their share of world trade which corresponds to new forms of globalization. This process calls for a reform of world trade governance, especially of the missions of WTO within a renovated economic world order. In order to identify the key channels through which international trade integration will impact the world economy, this paper presents four scenarios of world trade governance from now until 2030

Gaussian Process Planning with Lipschitz Continuous Reward Functions

This paper presents a novel nonmyopic adaptive Gaussian process planning (GPP) framework endowed with a general class of Lipschitz continuous reward functions that can unify some active learning/sensing and Bayesian optimization criteria and offer practitioners some flexibility to specify their desired choices for defining new tasks/problems. In particular, it utilizes a principled Bayesian sequential decision problem framework for jointly and naturally optimizing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. In general, the resulting induced GPP policy cannot be derived exactly due to an uncountable set of candidate observations. A key contribution of our work here thus lies in exploiting the Lipschitz continuity of the reward functions to solve for a nonmyopic adaptive ε-optimal GPP (ε-GPP) policy. To plan in real time, we further propose an asymptotically optimal, branch-and-bound anytime variant of ε-GPP with performance guarantee. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our ε-GPP policy and its anytime variant in Bayesian optimization and an energy harvesting task.Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) (52 R-252-000-550-592

The Changing Presentation of Execution in Newcastle Upon Tyne 1844-1863

The changing presentation of punishment, in particular execution, has been at the heart of much criminal historiography. However, little work has been done to examine the transition outside of London. Newcastle offers a fascinating perspective on any national picture of capital punishment, as it adopted changes far later than most, including close neighbours like Durham. This article questions why so late a transition occurred and what the motivating factors were. Focusing on executions between 1844 and 1863 it will show that far from being led by London, the decisions were largely reactive to immediate crises, chief amongst them an unruly crowd, and not underpinned by any ideological bent. In short, it will argue for caution in speaking of a unified national change in punishment when even to speak of a regional one is problematic