The Solution to North America’s Triple Problem: The Case for a North American Investment Fund

Despite the expansion of trade and investment achieved by the North American Free Trade Agreement, challenges remain. The most serious is the persistence of an income gap between Mexico and its northern neighbors. Unless this gap is narrowed, other challenges, including immigration, trade, and security, will persist. The solution is the creation of a viable North American Investment Fund, which will be possible only if the three governments articulate a North American Community and pledge to contribute, each in its own way, to a strategy that will close the income gap and build institutions to resolve old problems and address new opportunities

El TLC como centro de un proceso de integración: las cuestiones no comerciales

En la primavera de 1990 el presidente de México, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, propuso una zona de libre comercio con Estados Unidos. Desde la perspectiva de México, que durante la mayor parte del siglo XX había tratado de mantenerse alejado de Estados Unidos por temor a que se minara la soberanía mexicana, la idea de Salinas era genuinamente revolucionaria. Su meta era garantizar el acceso de los productos mexicanos a los mercados estadunidenses, promoviendo así la inversión extranjera para generar empleos y desarrollo en su país. Cuando se iniciaron formalmente las negociaciones, en junio de 1991, Canadá se había unido a Estados Unidos y a México en la mesa de negociaciones, a fin de celebrar un Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte. Salinas, el presidente George Bush y el primer ministro canadiense Brian Mulroney, deseaban limitar la agenda a las cuestiones del comercio y de la inversión, utilizando como modelo el Acuerdo de Libre Comercio firmado por Estados Unidos y Canadá en 1988. Pero el TLC no era una negociación de libre comercio típica; era la primera vez que países industrializados estaban negociando con un país en desarrollo mucho más pobre, sobre la base del acceso recíproco. El acceso de España y Portugal a la Comunidad Europea a fines de los años ochenta guardaba cierta semejanza con el TLC, excepto que la disparidad del ingreso entre los países del norte y los del sur era considerablemente mayor en América del Norte que en Europa.

Trasplantament renal pediàtric: experiència a l'Hospital Clínic de Barcelona

Resum Introducció. Amb la introducció de la ciclosporina A, el pronòstic dels trasplantaments d'òrgans ha variat radicalment. En aquest estudi es revisa el trasplantament renal pediàtrica des del punt de vista d'una UCIP centrada en la problemática postoperatória i en els resultats finals. Material i mètodes. Es revisen 27 trasplantaments renals que es van fer entre el 1986 i el 1994, la gran majoria entre els 10 i els 14 anys, amb un rang de 4 a 20 anys. Resultats. Quant a l'etiologia de la IRC: 8 casos de malformació quística, 6 de quadres amb patologia intersticial, 4 heredofamiliars i glomerulars i els 5 restants sistèmics o congènits. Tres quartes parts deis pacients (el 78%) ja estaven en diàlisi. Es va detectar risc immunológic elevat (presència l'anticossos limfocitotóxics o retrasplantacions) en el 38%. En l'evolució postoperatória immediata destaquen com a complicacions: un cas de trombosi renal i dos esclats renals; a curt termini es va detectar un rebuig en 16 casos i necrosi tubular aguda en 5, i van necessitar diàlisi el 18% del total. Als 5 anys la supervivència de l'empelt va ser del 78% i la del pacient del 100%. Conclusions. Comparant aquestes darreres dades amb registres similars nacionals, europeus i americans, s'han obtingut uns resultats equiparables

KD Diagnosis Does Not Increase Cardiovascular Risk in Children According to Dynamic Intima–Media Roughness Measurements

Background: Kawasaki Disease (KD) is a generalized vasculitis in childhood with possible long-term impact on cardiovascular health besides the presence of coronary artery lesions. Standard vascular parameters such as carotid intima–media thickness (cIMT) have not been established as reliable markers of vascular anomalies after KD. The carotid intima–media roughness (cIMR) representing carotid intimal surface structure is considered a promising surrogate marker for predicting cardiovascular risk even beyond cIMT. We therefore measured cIMR in patients with a history of KD in comparison to healthy controls to investigate whether KD itself and/or KD key clinical aspects are associated with cIMR alterations in the long-term. Methods: We assessed cIMR in this case-control study (44 KD, mean age in years (SD); 13.4 (7.5); 36 controls, mean age 12.1 (5.3)) approximately matched by sex and age. Different clinical outcomes such as the coronary artery status and acute phase inflammation data were analyzed in association with cIMR values. Results: When comparing all patients with KD to healthy controls, we detected no significant difference in cIMR. None of the clinical parameters indicating the disease severity, such as the persistence of coronary artery aneurysm, were significantly associated with our cIMR values. However, according to our marginally significant findings (p = 0.044), we postulate that the end-diastolic cIMR may be rougher than the end-systolic values in KD patients. Conclusions: We detected no significant differences in cIMR between KD patients and controls that could confirm any evidence that KD predisposes patients to a subsequent general arteriopathy. Our results, however, need to be interpreted in the light of the low number of study participants

Soft balancing in the Americas : Latin American opposition to U.S. intervention, 1898–1936

In the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, scholars of international relations debated how to best characterize the rising tide of global opposition. The concept of “soft balancing” emerged as an influential, though contested, explanation of a new phenomenon in a unipolar world: states seeking to constrain the ability of the United States to deploy military force by using multinational organizations, international law, and coalition building. Soft balancing can also be observed in regional unipolar systems. Multinational archival research reveals how Argentina, Mexico, and other Latin American countries responded to expanding U.S. power and military assertiveness in the early twentieth century through coordinated diplomatic maneuvering that provides a strong example of soft balancing. Examination of this earlier case makes an empirical contribution to the emerging soft-balancing literature and suggests that soft balancing need not lead to hard balancing or open conflict

The Epidemics of Donations: Logistic Growth and Power-Laws

This paper demonstrates that collective social dynamics resulting from individual donations can be well described by an epidemic model. It captures the herding behavior in donations as a non-local interaction between individual via a time-dependent mean field representing the mass media. Our study is based on the statistical analysis of a unique dataset obtained before and after the tsunami disaster of 2004. We find a power-law behavior for the distributions of donations with similar exponents for different countries. Even more remarkably, we show that these exponents are the same before and after the tsunami, which accounts for some kind of universal behavior in donations independent of the actual event. We further show that the time-dependent change of both the number and the total amount of donations after the tsunami follows a logistic growth equation. As a new element, a time-dependent scaling factor appears in this equation which accounts for the growing lack of public interest after the disaster. The results of the model are underpinned by the data analysis and thus also allow for a quantification of the media influence

The Critical Juncture Concept’s Evolving Capacity to Explain Policy Change

This article examines the evolution of our understanding of the critical junctures concept. The concept finds its origins in historical intuitionalism, being employed in the context of path dependence to account for sudden and jarring institutional or policy changes. We argue that the concept and the literature surrounding it—now incorporating ideas, discourse, and agency—have gradually become more comprehensive and nuanced as historical institutionalism was followed by ideational historical institutionalism and constructivist and discursive institutionalism. The prime position of contingency has been supplanted by the role of ideas and agency in explaining critical junctures and other instances of less than transformative change. Consequently, the concept is now capable of providing more comprehensive explanations for policy change