TRADE CREATION AND DIVERSION EFFECTS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT OF U.S. SUGAR IMPORTS FROM MEXICO

A world sugar model consisting of 21 countries was developed to determine the effects of NAFTA of U.S. and Mexican sugar markets and to quantify the trade creation and diversion effects on U.S. imports from Mexico. Mexican sugar production increases under NAFTA, causing Mexico to become a net exporter. NAFTA induces sugar imports from Mexico to displace U.S. production, to meet demand expansion, and also to divert U.S. imports from other foreign suppliers to Mexico. Effects of NAFTA on the U.S. sugar market are small because of the side agreements which limit Mexican exports and which include corn sweetener consumption when computing Mexico's production surplus.International Relations/Trade,

Optimization of export support systems: how to promote exports from Portugal to Germany in the area of information technology and electronics

The present paper is a personal reflection on a work project carried out to promote exports from Portugal to Germany in the IT area, under consideration of the deliverables required by the clients CCILA and Anetie. The project outcome approaches the fact that the majority of the Portuguese market players has disadvantages in size and does rarely coordinate activities among each other, which hinders them to export successfully on a broad scale. To bring together Portuguese delivery potential and German market demand, expert interviews were conducted. Based on the findings, a concept was developed to overcome the domestic collaboration issues in order to strengthen the national exports in the identified sector - embedded systems implementation services for machinery and equipment companies

Transconductance fluctuations as a probe for interaction induced quantum Hall states in graphene

Transport measurements normally provide a macroscopic, averaged view of the sample, so that disorder prevents the observation of fragile interaction induced states. Here, we demonstrate that transconductance fluctuations in a graphene field effect transistor reflect charge localization phenomena on the nanometer scale due to the formation of a dot network which forms near incompressible quantum states. These fluctuations give access to fragile broken-symmetry and fractional quantum Hall states even though these states remain hidden in conventional magnetotransport quantities.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

The semileptonic decay Lambda_b -> Lambda_c + tau(-) + antinu_tau in the covariant confined quark model

Recently there has been much interest in the tauonic semileptonic meson decays B -> D + tau + nu_tau and B -> D* + tau + nu_tau where one has found larger rates than what is predicted by the Standard Model. We analyze the corresponding semileptonic baryon decays Lambda_b(0) -> Lambda_c(+) + tau(-) + antinu_tau with particular emphasis on the lepton helicity flip and scalar contributions which vanish for zero lepton masses. We calculate the total rate, differential decay distributions, the longitudinal and transverse polarization of the daughter baryon Lambda_c(+) and the tau-lepton, and the lepton-side forward-backward asymmetries. The nonvanishing polarization of the daughter baryon Lambda_c(+) leads to hadron-side asymmetries in e.g. the decay Lambda_c(+) -> Lambda(0) + pi(+) and azimuthal correlations between the two final state decay planes which we specify. We provide numerical results on these observables using results of the covariant confined quark model. We find large lepton mass effects in the q2-spectra and in the polarization observables.Comment: 26 page

Four-quark structure of Zc(3900), Z(4430) and Xb(5568) states

We examine the four-quark structure of the recently discovered charged $Z_c(3900)$, $Z(4430)$, and $X_b(5568)$ states. We calculate the widths of the strong decays $Z_c^+ \to J/\psi \pi^+$ ($\eta_c\rho^+$, $\bar D^0D^{\ast\,+}$, $\bar D^{\ast\,0}D^+$), $Z(4430)^+ \to J/\psi \pi^+$ ($\psi(2s) \pi^+$), and $X^+_b\to B_s\pi^+$ within a covariant quark model previously developed by us. We find that the tetraquark-type current widely used in the literature for the $Z_c(3900)$ leads to a significant suppression of the $\bar D D^\ast$ and $\bar D^\ast D$ modes. Contrary to this a molecular-type current provides an enhancement by a factor of 6-7 for the $\bar D D^\ast$ modes compared with the $Z_c^+\to J/\psi\pi^+$, $\eta_c\rho^+$ modes in agreement with recent experimental data from the BESIII Collaboration. In case of the $Z(4430)$ state we test a sensitivity of the ratio $R_Z$ of the $Z(4430)^+ \to \psi(2s) \pi^+$ and $Z(4430)^+ \to J/\psi \pi^+$ decay rates to a choice of the size parameter $\Lambda_{Z(4430)}$ of the $Z(4430)$. Using upper constraint for the sum of these two modes deduced from the LHCb Collaboration data we find that $R_Z$ varies from 4.64 to 4.08 when $\Lambda_{Z(4430)}$ changes from 2.2 to 3.2 GeV. Also we make the prediction for the $Z(4430)^+ \to D^{\ast\,+} \bar D^{\ast\,0}$ decay rate.Comment: 14 page