Revisiting Barriers to Trade: Do Foregone Health Benefits Matter?

trade health wto policy, Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, International Relations/Trade, Political Economy,

Revisiting Barriers to Trade: Do Foregone Health Benefits Matter?

This paper examins the question of revisiting the imposition of existing trade barriers in one case of an evolving marketplace – when a traditional food product is altered to provide, or discovered to have, human health benefits that increases their value to consumers. In other words, the food becomes a functional food. A functional food has the potential provide direct benefits to consumers as well as indirect benefits to society in the form of health care cost savings. If the trade barrier was put in place prior to these direct and indirect benefits of the food becoming apparent, then they would not have been considered when the decision to impose the trade barrier was taken. In these circumstances, policy makers may wish to revisit a decision to impose a trade barrier.trade health, Agricultural and Food Policy, Health Economics and Policy, International Relations/Trade,

Trade barriers and functional foods — what are the forgone benefits?

Functional foods provide positive externality benefits to society through the promotion of health benefits that lower the potential of illness for individual consumer and reduce the health care costs that are borne by governments. With strong market growth and considerable potential social benefits, functional foods appear to be an important area for future expansion in the global food market. However, pre-existing trade barriers to international commence reduce, or sometimes eliminate, trade in functional foods. Given that there are benefits associated with health-giving attributes from functional foods, retaining trade restrictions on functional foods may lead to additional forgone benefits. To examine the effects of the positive health benefits arising from functional foods when pre-existing trade restrictions are in place, a comparative-static partial equilibrium trade model is modified. Four cases pertaining to import restrictions on functional foods are examined in the trade model based on two categories: trade policies and ability to produce. The theoretical framework provides an illustration of the potential welfare benefits forgone from the existence of trade barriers when a traditional food becomes a functional food. Empirical case studies examined canola oil as a functional food. The value of the benefits foregone from maintaining trade barriers to canola oil in two countries: China and United Kingdom were estimated. In addition, a cost of illness model was used to estimate health care savings. The final ratio suggests that existing trade policies directly result in non-trivial costs to society. . As a result, current trade regulations might be re-evaluated by policy makers to better reflect the evolving markets for functional foods

Long Text Generation via Adversarial Training with Leaked Information

Automatically generating coherent and semantically meaningful text has many applications in machine translation, dialogue systems, image captioning, etc. Recently, by combining with policy gradient, Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) that use a discriminative model to guide the training of the generative model as a reinforcement learning policy has shown promising results in text generation. However, the scalar guiding signal is only available after the entire text has been generated and lacks intermediate information about text structure during the generative process. As such, it limits its success when the length of the generated text samples is long (more than 20 words). In this paper, we propose a new framework, called LeakGAN, to address the problem for long text generation. We allow the discriminative net to leak its own high-level extracted features to the generative net to further help the guidance. The generator incorporates such informative signals into all generation steps through an additional Manager module, which takes the extracted features of current generated words and outputs a latent vector to guide the Worker module for next-word generation. Our extensive experiments on synthetic data and various real-world tasks with Turing test demonstrate that LeakGAN is highly effective in long text generation and also improves the performance in short text generation scenarios. More importantly, without any supervision, LeakGAN would be able to implicitly learn sentence structures only through the interaction between Manager and Worker.Comment: 14 pages, AAAI 201

Texygen: A Benchmarking Platform for Text Generation Models

We introduce Texygen, a benchmarking platform to support research on open-domain text generation models. Texygen has not only implemented a majority of text generation models, but also covered a set of metrics that evaluate the diversity, the quality and the consistency of the generated texts. The Texygen platform could help standardize the research on text generation and facilitate the sharing of fine-tuned open-source implementations among researchers for their work. As a consequence, this would help in improving the reproductivity and reliability of future research work in text generation.Comment: 4 page

Adaptive Evolution and the Birth of CTCF Binding Sites in the <i>Drosophila</i> Genome

Changes in the physical interaction between cis-regulatory DNA sequences and proteins drive the evolution of gene expression. However, it has proven difficult to accurately quantify evolutionary rates of such binding change or to estimate the relative effects of selection and drift in shaping the binding evolution. Here we examine the genome-wide binding of CTCF in four species of Drosophila separated by between ∼2.5 and 25 million years. CTCF is a highly conserved protein known to be associated with insulator sequences in the genomes of human and Drosophila. Although the binding preference for CTCF is highly conserved, we find that CTCF binding itself is highly evolutionarily dynamic and has adaptively evolved. Between species, binding divergence increased linearly with evolutionary distance, and CTCF binding profiles are diverging rapidly at the rate of 2.22% per million years (Myr). At least 89 new CTCF binding sites have originated in the Drosophila melanogaster genome since the most recent common ancestor with Drosophila simulans. Comparing these data to genome sequence data from 37 different strains of Drosophila melanogaster, we detected signatures of selection in both newly gained and evolutionarily conserved binding sites. Newly evolved CTCF binding sites show a significantly stronger signature for positive selection than older sites. Comparative gene expression profiling revealed that expression divergence of genes adjacent to CTCF binding site is significantly associated with the gain and loss of CTCF binding. Further, the birth of new genes is associated with the birth of new CTCF binding sites. Our data indicate that binding of Drosophila CTCF protein has evolved under natural selection, and CTCF binding evolution has shaped both the evolution of gene expression and genome evolution during the birth of new genes.</p