The External Relations of the European Union towards the United States: How Relevant is the European Union in Constraining or Replacing U.S. Hegemony?, Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series, Vol. 1 No. 3, September 2002

(From the introduction). The study object of this paper is the external relations of the European Union towards the United States. The core question of this essay is not the U.S. hegemony by itself; in fact, both parties agree on a myriad of issues, share common values, and keep intensive and active economic and political exchanges. The 1950s and 1960s were witness to the shining power of the United States and Europe was willing to receive U.S. aid through the Marshall Plan. The problem arises when U.S. policies affect Europe and the EU is not able to provide concrete actions to reverse them. At this point, one inquiry is the focus of the analysis: How relevant is the EU in constraining or replacing U.S. hegemony? A simple answer is insufficient to shed light on this question. Most scholars underline the shortcomings of the EU and the influence of the United States in determining EU external relations. However, the EU in 2002 is quite different from the European Community at the beginning of the 1990s. Although reactive to international and regional, political and economic stimuli, the EU has forged informal and formal practices to provide coordinated positions. Depending on the specific area, the EU’s performance is more or less successful. Whereas in economic issues the EU has been able to respond to the U.S. in trade disputes, in political and security affairs the panorama is mostly discouraging. Accordingly, the hypothesis of this paper is: The more the EU is able to encapsulate the interests of the fifteen member states in a common front, the greater are the opportunities for more beneficial agreements with the United States, and to constrain or replace the actions or inactions of U.S. hegemony. In order to support this proposition, four areas of the transatlantic relationship are examined in this paper. The first part focuses on the current theoretical debate on the transatlantic relationship. Secondly, the paper analyzes the different natures of both foreign policies, emphasizing the problems associated with the European (intergovernmental and supranational) model to design its external relations. The third section describes the relative balance between the US and the EU on economic terms, and considers the benefits of having international institutions to regulate trade practices. Finally, the imbalance in security affairs is depicted, highlighting the new institutional developments in Europe to participate in regional crises with or without (but not against) the United States

A Modeling Approach of Return and Volatility of Structured Investment Products with Caps and Floors

Popular investment structured products in Puerto Rico are stock market tied Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA), which offer some stock market growth while protecting the principal. The performance of these retirement strategies has not been studied. This work examines the expected return and risk of Puerto Rico stock market IRA (PRIRAs) and compares their statistical properties with other investment instruments before and after tax. We propose a parametric modeling approach for structured products and apply it to PRIRAs. Our method first estimates the conditional expected return (and variance) of PRIRA assets from which we extract marginal moments through the Law of Iterated Expectation. Our results indicate that PRIRAs underperform against investing directly in the stock market while still carrying substantial risk. The expected return of the stock market IRA from Popular Bank (PRIRA1) after tax is slightly greater than that of investing in U.S. bonds, while PRIRA1 has almost two times the risk. The stock market IRA from Universal (PRIRA2) performs similarly to PRIRA1, while PRIRA2 has a lower risk than PRIRA1. PRIRAs may be reasonable for some risk-averse investors due to their principal protection and tax deferral

Orius insidiosus en el control biológico de trips en aguacate en México

SE REALIZO UN ESTUDIO DONDE SE EVALUÓ EL EFECTO DE UN DEPREDADOR SOBRE EL COMPORTAMIENTO ESPACIAL DE LAS POBLACIONES DE TRIPS EN LA ZONA AGUACATERA DE COATEPEC HARINAS, ESTADO DE MÉXICOEl uso de diferentes alternativas en el control de plagas y enfermedades es de gran importancia en la elaboración de programas de manejo integrado. El presente estudio se realizó con el fin de conocer la efectividad del depredador Orius insidiosus sobre las poblaciones de trips en el cultivo de aguacate, el estudio tuvo lugar en el municipio de Coatepec Harinas, Estado de México, durante los años 2014 y 2015. En tres parcelas se determinó la fluctuación poblacional de trips, realizando muestreos quincenales, se determinó la distribución espacial por medio de la geoestadística. Se determinó el semivariograma experimental para ajustarse a un modelo teórico (esférico, exponencial o gaussiano) a través de los programas Variowin 2.2, su ajuste se validó con el método de validación cruzada y se obtuvieron los mapas de agregación de la plaga a través del Krigeado con el programa Surfer 9.0. Se realizó una prueba de T de Student para conocer si existían diferencias estadísticamente significativas a partir de la liberación del depredador, en la parcela donde hubo liberación existió diferencia contra las otras dos parcelas donde no existió liberación. La estabilidad espacio temporal a corto plazo de la plaga se determinó con las pruebas de Crámer-von Mises y con el índice de asociación de SADIE. Los resultados demostraron que las poblaciones de trips presentan una distribución de tipo agregada, que fue corroborada por los mapas de densidad. Esto nos da un panorama para poder hacer un programa integrado del manejo de dicha plaga, existe reducción de las poblaciones de trips en la parcela donde hubo liberación esto confirma que el depredador Orius insidiosus tiene cierta efectividad en el control de trips en el cultivo de aguacate