EU Market Access Teams: New Instruments to Tackle Non-tariff Barriers to Trade. College of Europe EU Diplomacy Paper 2009/9, December 2009

In reaction to modern protectionism, the European Union has reshaped its trade policy based on the principles of partnership and prioritisation. With the Market Access Partnership it has formalised a new diplomatic trade tool in third countries: the Market Access Teams. These teams are networks with multiple stakeholders and they are acting in a decentralised manner in the respective host countries. The various Market Access Teams created worldwide since 2007 underline the growing interest from the EU, Member States and businesses in offensive trade policy instruments. These instruments should be directed at opening foreign markets and eliminating obstacles to trade for European exporters. This paper analyses under what conditions Market Access Teams can effectively remove non-tariff barriers to trade (NTBs) for European exports in third countries. It focuses on non-tariff barriers for the European pharmaceutical industry in three Asian countries (Philippines, Indonesia and Japan). Pharmaceutical products are truly global products which are easy to transport and confronted by global competition and they heavily rely on European intellectual property rights knowledge. I argue that Market Access Teams in their composition and function are an adequate translation of the Commission’s strategic ambition to deliver more tangible results for European exporters through offensive trade policy. A Market Access Team is likely to be more successful, the greater the cohesiveness of its members, the more salient a non-tariff barrier to trade for the European Commission and the less salient that NTB in the host country. The study draws on trade literature, news sources, questionnaires and interviews

Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing for Closely Related Languages - Helsinki's Submission to VarDial 2017

This paper describes the submission from the University of Helsinki to the shared task on cross-lingual dependency parsing at VarDial 2017. We present work on annotation projection and treebank translation that gave good results for all three target languages in the test set. In particular, Slovak seems to work well with information coming from the Czech treebank, which is in line with related work. The attachment scores for cross-lingual models even surpass the fully supervised models trained on the target language treebank. Croatian is the most difficult language in the test set and the improvements over the baseline are rather modest. Norwegian works best with information coming from Swedish whereas Danish contributes surprisingly little

The Pliocene closure fo the Central American Seaway : reconstructing surface-, intermediate- and deep-water connections

Timing of Gateway Closure The shoaling of the Isthmus of Panama and the associated reorganisation of deep-ocean circulation have been controversially reported as contributing to both a warming and a cooling of global climate. A resulting increase in moisture supply to the northern hemisphere, through the initiation or strengthening of the Gulf Stream, may have been an important precondition for Northern Hemisphere Glaciation. A robust timeframe for the closure of this major ocean gateway is essential for understanding its direct and indirect effects on global climate. Method We use radiogenic isotopes of Nd and Pb to reconstruct the history of shallow, intermediate and deep water connections between the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Equatorial Pacific Ocean from 5.0 to 2.0 million years ago. Surface water exchange is characterised using the Nd isotope composition of planktonic foraminiferal calcite. The Nd and Pb isotope compositions of early diagenetic ferromanganese coatings of the same sediment samples are employed to reconstruct intermediate and deep water exchange. Results and Conclusion Our results indicate that Caribbean Intermediate Water continued to diverge from a relatively constant Pacific deepwater Nd composition from 5.0 to 2.0 Ma. Comparison with published stable isotope and Mg/Ca records from the same ODP Sites 999, 1000 and 1241 suggest that Caribbean Intermediate Water composition continued to change even after a decrease in surface water exchange with the Pacific (4.5 Ma onwards [1]). A more rapid restriction of mixing between the Pacific and Caribbean at intermediate depths from 4 to 3.5 Ma clearly preceeded the major increase in ice-rafted-debris north of Iceland [2]. [1] Groeneveld et al. (2008) G3 9, Q01P23. [2] Jansen et al. (2000) Paleoceanography 15, 709-721

Compressing Binary Decision Diagrams

The paper introduces a new technique for compressing Binary Decision Diagrams in those cases where random access is not required. Using this technique, compression and decompression can be done in linear time in the size of the BDD and compression will in many cases reduce the size of the BDD to 1-2 bits per node. Empirical results for our compression technique are presented, including comparisons with previously introduced techniques, showing that the new technique dominate on all tested instances.Comment: Full (tech-report) version of ECAI 2008 short pape

Surveys of the earth's resources and environment by satellites

The potential and promise of observing the earth from the vantage point of space is discussed. The systematic surveying of processes and phenomena occurring on the surface of the earth by Landsat 1 and Nimbus 5 is considered to be useful in the following areas: assessment of water resources; mineral and petroleum exploration; land use planning; crop, forest, and rangeland inventory; assessment of flood, earthquake, and other environmental hazards; monitoring coastal processes; environmental effects of industrial effluents and of air pollution; mapping the distribution and types of ice covering the earth's polar caps and global soil moisture distributions