Agenda for future multilateral trade negotiations: traditional and new issues

Introduction: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade(GATT) was signed at the Geneva conference in 1947. It came into effect on 1 January 1948.After nearly five decades of its existence, GATT made way to the formation of the World Trade Organization(WTO) on January 1,1995. GATT was a multilateral trade agreement that set rules of conduct for international trade relations and provided a forum for multilateral negotiations regarding the solution of trade problems and the gradual elimination of tariffs and other non tariff barriers of trade. The agreement was based largely upon principles of non-discrimination and reciprocity so as to liberalize trade. With the exception of Custom Unions and Free Trade Areas (FTAs),all contracting parties were generally bound by the agreement's Most Favoured Nation (MFN)Clause. Protection were to be given to domestic industries through custom tariffs, thereby prohibiting import quotas and other restrictive trade practices. The agreement also provided for the binding of the tariff levels negotiated among member countries and established a framework for the settlement of grievances put forward by members who argued that their rights, under the terms of agreement, had been violated or compromised by other members trade practices. Eight rounds of trade negotiations were held under the aegis of GATT, the last being the most ambitious one i.e., the Uruguay Round (UR). UR negotiations was concerned both with old issues such as unfinished business of previous GATT rounds and with grievances accumulated over the years and new issues such as trade in services, the protection of intellectual property rights, trade in agriculture and trade related investment measures. Until the Uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations, the developing countries were generally observers.They benefited as "free riders" from whatever reductions in trade barriers were negotiated among developed countries,while simultaneously they argued for,and to some degree received,special and differentialtreatment(S&D),both through the Generalized System of Preferences(GSP) and through the automaticity with which the balance of payments exception was used to permit them to continue reliance upon quantitative restrictions. All that changed with the conclusion of the eight and the most ambitious multilateral trade negotiation -the Uruguay Round on April 15,1994. By that time many policy makers and development economists had become convinced that the highly protectionist policies followed by developing countries in the name of import substitution were inimical to sustained economic growth,and the outer oriented policies and integration with the international economy offered a better hope for rapid development. Sachs and Warner(1995) extensive study has shown that trade boosts economic growth. It is argued that developing countries achieved some considerable gains by participating in the round. The first WTO Ministerial Conference was held in Singapore in December 1996.The Second Ministerial Conference, held in Geneva in May 1998, carried forward the results of the Singapore Ministerial meeting and established the work programme to examine trade -related issues involving global electronic commerce. Attention was paid to preparations for the negotiations mandated under the Uruguay Round built –in agenda. There was an ongoing interaction among the WTO members as follow-up of the two ministerial meetings and for the preparation for the Third Ministerial Conference to be held in Seattle from November 30 to December 3,1999. This conference was expected to launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations to begin in 2000(millennium round). This new round was to be devoted to items on the Uruguay built in agenda together with new issues to be decided upon. This paper will discuss the new and old provisions of the GATT and the WTO. Further it will examine the importance of such provisions and suggest ways and means for making them more relevant and beneficial for all members of the WTO.The paper is organized in the following manner. Section I will deal with the new issues.Section II will discuss the traditional issues and the concerns of the developing countries. The last section will give conclusions

Publication Trend in Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal) : A Scientometric Approach

Scientometrics is an effective method to quantitatively analyse the productivity and progress of all forms of written communication. This study aims to examine the scientific research productivity on Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal) during 1998-2019. Required data was collected from Scopus database. The year wise distribution of articles, relative growth rate, doubling time, collaboration coefficient, country and affiliation wise distribution, citation patterns etc., were analysed. Findings revealed that the highest numbers of articles were published in the year 2019 and lowest in 1998. In 2013, there was no single article. The highest contribution was countrywise Nigeria and institution wise University of Ibadan. Study also revealed the average citation per paper was 1.51. The paper 'Using Google Analytics for improving library website content and design: A case study' by Fang W. received a citation of 67 and ranked as the highly cited paper

Mapping of Research Productivity of College and Research Libraries News (C&RL News) during 1996-2019: A Scientometric Approach

College and Research Libraries News (C&RL News) is an editorially reviewed publication that publishes news, case studies and other non-research material. The articles in the News do not go through peer review and are meet different standards. This study presents a systematic analysis of the publications in the C&RL News, magazine during the year 1996 to 2019. The analysis provides the understanding of features about highly cited publications. Although the articles in the magazine had been published after an editorial review only and not as other standard peer reviewed policies adopted by reputed journals, it appears in second quartile (Q2) in SCImago Journal Raking among publications of library and information science. The publication data collected from Scopus database has been utilized for analyses and interpretations. Authors have applied scientometric indicators such as collaboration coefficient, annual growth rate, relative growth rate to recognize various dynamics of the magazine. Authors have also analysed the characteristics of the highly cited publications and found that high profile collaborative authorship and addressing the contemporary trending topics are consistent features of highly cited documents, even without having a formal peer-review process

A clinico-radiological and pathological profile of lung cancer patients presented to All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Patna)

Background: Lung cancer is one of the most common cancers and cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The clinicopathologicalprofile of lung cancer has shown marked regional and geographical variation. Majority of the patients have locallyadvanced or disseminated disease at presentation and are not candidates for surgery. Objective: The aim of this study was toevaluate the clinico-radiological and pathological profile of lung cancer patients and difference in histopathology betweensmoker and non-smoker. We also assessed yield of the various diagnostic procedures used for confirmation of lung cancer.Materials and Methods: A total of 30 patients diagnosed between May 1, 2016, and December 31, 2016. The completedemographic profile, smoking status, clinical, radiological, and diagnostic details were recorded in the study. Data were enteredand analyzed using SPSS software. Results: A total of 30 patients (19 male and 11 female) included in our study with mean age of55.26 years. Cough (80%) and dyspnea (80%) were the most common symptom and mass (86%), pleural effusion (53.3%) was themost common radiological presentation of patients. Clubbing and hemoptysis both was found only in 8 out of 30 (26%) patients.Adenocarcinoma (46.6%) was the most common histopathological type followed by squamous cell carcinoma (16.6%) and smallcell carcinoma (13.3%). The majority of patients (60%) presented in Stage 4. Computed tomography guided biopsy had better yieldin compare to ultrasonography guided (80% vs. 70.8%). Bronchoscopic procedure had lowest yield (38.8%). Conclusion: Theclinicopathological profile of lung cancer has changed in last few years, especially in the increase in adenocarcinoma incidence,and now it is the most common cause in both smokers and non-smoker

On TP2 and Log-Concavity

1 online resource (PDF, 11 pages

Mechanism of efficient anti-Markovnikov olefin hydroarylation catalyzed by homogeneous Ir(III) complexes

The mechanism of the hydroarylation reaction between unactivated olefins (ethylene, propylene, and styrene) and benzene catalyzed by [(R)Ir(μ-acac-O,O,C^3)-(acac-O,O)_2]_2 and [R-Ir(acac-O,O)_2(L)] (R = acetylacetonato, CH_3, CH_2CH_3, Ph, or CH_2CH_2Ph, and L = H_2O or pyridine) Ir(III) complexes was studied by experimental methods. The system is selective for generating the anti-Markovnikov product of linear alkylarenes (61 : 39 for benzene + propylene and 98 : 2 for benzene + styrene). The reaction mechanism was found to follow a rate law with first-order dependence on benzene and catalyst, but a non-linear dependence on olefin. ^(13)C-labelling studies with CH_3^(13)CH_2-Ir-Py showed that reversible β-hydride elimination is facile, but unproductive, giving exclusively saturated alkylarene products. The migration of the ^(13)C-label from the α to β-positions was found to be slower than the C–H activation of benzene (and thus formation of ethane and Ph-d_5-Ir-Py). Kinetic analysis under steady state conditions gave a ratio of the rate constants for CH activation and β-hydride elimination (k_(CH): k_β) of 0.5. The comparable magnitude of these rates suggests a common rate determining transition state/intermediate, which has been shown previously with B3LYP density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Overall, the mechanism of hydroarylation proceeds through a series of pre-equilibrium dissociative steps involving rupture of the dinuclear species or the loss of L from Ph-Ir-L to the solvento, 16-electron species, Ph-Ir(acac-O,O)_2-Sol (where Sol refers to coordinated solvent). This species then undergoes trans to cis isomerization of the acetylacetonato ligand to yield the pseudo octahedral species cis-Ph-Ir-Sol, which is followed by olefin insertion (the regioselective and rate determining step), and then activation of the C–H bond of an incoming benzene to generate the product and regenerate the catalyst

Long-Term Memorability On Advertisements

Marketers spend billions of dollars on advertisements but to what end? At the purchase time, if customers cannot recognize a brand for which they saw an ad, the money spent on the ad is essentially wasted. Despite its importance in marketing, until now, there has been no study on the memorability of ads in the ML literature. Most studies have been conducted on short-term recall (<5 mins) on specific content types like object and action videos. On the other hand, the advertising industry only cares about long-term memorability (a few hours or longer), and advertisements are almost always highly multimodal, depicting a story through its different modalities (text, images, and videos). With this motivation, we conduct the first large scale memorability study consisting of 1203 participants and 2205 ads covering 276 brands. Running statistical tests over different participant subpopulations and ad-types, we find many interesting insights into what makes an ad memorable - both content and human factors. For example, we find that brands which use commercials with fast moving scenes are more memorable than those with slower scenes (p=8e-10) and that people who use ad-blockers remember lower number of ads than those who don't (p=5e-3). Further, with the motivation of simulating the memorability of marketing materials for a particular audience, ultimately helping create one, we present a novel model, Sharingan, trained to leverage real-world knowledge of LLMs and visual knowledge of visual encoders to predict the memorability of a content. We test our model on all the prominent memorability datasets in literature (both images and videos) and achieve state of the art across all of them. We conduct extensive ablation studies across memory types, modality, brand, and architectural choices to find insights into what drives memory