Budgetary Implications of Enlargement: Agriculture. CEPS Policy Brief No. 22, May 2002

[Introduction]. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) accounts for 45% of the total EU budget. Will its extension to Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) break the EU budget? The 10 CEECs currently negotiating for membership would increase the number of farmers by 120% and would increase the area under cultivation by 42%. It is thus widely expected that enlargement will dramatically increase the cost of the CAP. Early studies of the cost of extending the CAP to the CEECs arrived at very large numbers. But most of these studies pre-dated the 1999 Berlin Council and the Agenda 2000 reforms agreed there. These early budgetary impact estimations are now considered inaccurate. The discussion here is based on a set of more recent studies, which have incorporated the actual Agenda 2000 reforms and adjusted expectations on the number of countries and timing of enlargement, and are considered to be more accurate in their predictions. More specifically, the studies are produced by DIW (Berlin/Göttingen), IBO/LEI (The Hague) and IAMO (Halle)

Policy instruments in the Common Agricultural Policy

Policy changes in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) can be explained in terms of the exhaustion and long-term contradictions of policy instruments. Changes in policy instruments have reoriented the policy without any change in formal Treaty goals. The social and economic efficacy of instruments in terms of evidence-based policy analysis was a key factor in whether they were delegitimized. The original policy instruments were generally dysfunctional, but reframing the policy in terms of a multifunctionality paradigm permitted the development of more efficacious instruments. A dynamic interaction takes place between the instruments and policy informed by the predominant discourses

Globalization's effects on world agricultural trade, 1960–2050

Recent globalization has been characterized by a decline in the costs of cross-border trade in farm and other products. It has been driven primarily by the information and communication technology revolution and—in the case of farm products—by reductions in governmental distortions to agricultural production, consumption and trade. Both have boosted economic growth and reduced poverty globally, especially in Asia. The first but maybe not the second of these drivers will continue in coming decades. World food prices will depend also on whether (and if so by how much) farm productivity growth continues to outpace demand growth and to what extent diets in emerging economies move towards livestock and horticultural products at the expense of staples. Demand in turn will be driven not only by population and income growth, but also by crude oil prices if they remain at current historically high levels, since that will affect biofuel demand. Climate change mitigation policies and adaptation, water market developments and market access standards particularly for transgenic foods will add to future production, price and trade uncertainties

Testing Multiple Coordination Constraints with a Novel Bimanual Visuomotor Task

The acquisition of a new bimanual skill depends on several motor coordination constraints. To date, coordination constraints have often been tested relatively independently of one another, particularly with respect to isofrequency and multifrequency rhythms. Here, we used a new paradigm to test the interaction of multiple coordination constraints. Coordination constraints that were tested included temporal complexity, directionality, muscle grouping, and hand dominance. Twenty-two healthy young adults performed a bimanual dial rotation task that required left and right hand coordination to track a moving target on a computer monitor. Two groups were compared, either with or without four days of practice with augmented visual feedback. Four directional patterns were tested such that both hands moved either rightward (clockwise), leftward (counterclockwise), inward or outward relative to each other. Seven frequency ratios (3∶1, 2∶1, 3∶2, 1∶1, 2∶3. 1∶2, 1∶3) between the left and right hand were introduced. As expected, isofrequency patterns (1∶1) were performed more successfully than multifrequency patterns (non 1∶1). In addition, performance was more accurate when participants were required to move faster with the dominant right hand (1∶3, 1∶2 and 2∶3) than with the non-dominant left hand (3∶1, 2∶1, 3∶2). Interestingly, performance deteriorated as the relative angular velocity between the two hands increased, regardless of whether the required frequency ratio was an integer or non-integer. This contrasted with previous finger tapping research where the integer ratios generally led to less error than the non-integer ratios. We suggest that this is due to the different movement topologies that are required of each paradigm. Overall, we found that this visuomotor task was useful for testing the interaction of multiple coordination constraints as well as the release from these constraints with practice in the presence of augmented visual feedback

Credit Market Imperfections and the Distribution of Policy Rents: The Common Agricultural Policy in the New EU Member States

This article analyses how credit market imperfections affect the impacts of subsidies by analyzing the effects of agricultural subsidies in the new Eastern Member States of the European Union with a partial equilibrium model which integrates credit and land market imperfections. We show that credit constraints have important implications for the distribution of policy rents. Credit market imperfections may induce very different effects of direct payments and lump-sum transfers

Business process variant analysis based on mutual fingerprints of event logs

Comparing business process variants using event logs is a common use case in process mining. Existing techniques for process variant analysis detect statistically-significant differences between variants at the level of individual entities (such as process activities) and their relationships (e.g. directly-follows relations between activities). This may lead to a proliferation of differences due to the low level of granularity in which such differences are captured. This paper presents a novel approach to detect statistically-significant differences between variants at the level of entire process traces (i.e. sequences of directly-follows relations). The cornerstone of this approach is a technique to learn a directly-follows graph called mutual fingerprint from the event logs of the two variants. A mutual fingerprint is a lossless encoding of a set of traces and their duration using discrete wavelet transformation. This structure facilitates the understanding of statistical differences along the control-flow and performance dimensions. The approach has been evaluated using real-life event logs against two baselines. The results show that at a trace level, the baselines cannot always reveal the differences discovered by our approach, or can detect spurious differences.This research is partly funded by the Australian Research Council (DP180102839) and Spanish funds MINECO and FEDER (TIN2017-86727-C2-1-R).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Prospective SPECT-CT organ dosimetry-driven radiation-absorbed dose escalation using the In-111 (111In)/yttrium 90 (90Y) ibritumomab tiuxetan (Zevalin ®) theranostic pair in patients with lymphoma at myeloablative dose levels

PURPOSE: We prospectively evaluated the feasibility of SPECT-CT/planar organ dosimetry-based radiation dose escalation radioimmunotherapy in patients with recurrent non-Hodgkin\u27s lymphoma using the theranostic pair of METHODS: 24 patients with CD20-positive relapsed or refractory rituximab-sensitive, low-grade, mantle cell, or diffuse large-cell NHL, with normal organ function, platelet counts \u3e 75,000/mm RESULTS: Patient-specific hybrid SPECT/CT + planar organ dosimetry was feasible in all 18 cases and used to determine the patient-specific therapeutic dose and guide dose escalation (26.8 ± 7.3 MBq/kg (mean), 26.3 MBq/kg (median) of CONCLUSIONS: Patient-specific outpatien

Synaptotagmin 5 regulates Ca2+-dependent Weibel-Palade body exocytosis in human endothelial cells.

Membrane protein insertion is an essential cellular process. The broad biophysical and topological range of membrane proteins necessitates multiple insertion pathways, which remain incompletely defined. Here, we have discovered a new membrane protein insertion pathway, identified the class of substrates it handles, explained why other known pathways do not work for these substrates and reconstituted the pathway using purified components