Regional integration and the prices of imports : an empirical investigation

The authors explore the effects on the terms of trade of regional economic integration. They show why it is an appropriate measure of the welfare effects of such integration, comparing it with the many ex post studies that base their conclusions on changes in the import shares of member and nonmember countries. They demonstrate, by using a simple strategic model, how member countries might gain in their terms of trade, and nonmembers lose, through a lowering of preferential tariffs. Most important, they show that measuring such price effects, though difficult, is feasible. This is the first ex post study of its kind, they believe, and an improvement over previous ex post studies on how integration affects the rest of theworld. Using finely disaggregated data about Spanish imports of finished manufactures from major OECD trading partners, despite their noisiness, they found a consistent story over all of the country pairs examined. They find that nonmembers (in this case, Japan and the United States) suffered detectable losses in terms of trade relative to European Community competitors in Spanish import markets for differentiated goods.Trade Policy,Environmental Economics&Policies,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Environmental Economics&Policies,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT

How regional blocs affect excluded countries - the price effects of MERCOSUR

The welfare effects of preferential trading agreements, are most directly linked to changes in trade prices - that is, the terms of trade. The authors use a simple strategic pricing game in segmented markets, to measure the effects of MERCOSUR on the pricing of"non-member"exports to the regional trading bloc. Working with detailed data on unit values, and tariffs, they find that the creation of MERCOSUR is associated with significant declines in the prices of non-members'exports to the bloc. These can be explained largely by tariff preferences offered to a country's partners. Focusing on the Brazilian market (by far the largest in MERCOSUR), they show that non-members'export prices to Brazil respond to both most-favorable-nation, and preferential tariffs. Preferential tariffs induce reductions in non-memberexport prices.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Export Competitiveness,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets

Regional Multinationals and the Korean Comestics Industry

This paper analyzes the market penetration and expansion strategy of cosmetics and toiletries multinational enterprises (MNEs) in South Korea from the perspective of regional strategy as developed recently by Rugman. We find that MNEs have different market entry and expansion strategies in the home region and in the foreign region. Home region MNEs (Japanese MNEs in this case), in general, utilize their firm-specific advantages (FSAs) better than foreign region MNEs (European and MNEs from the Americas in this case). Due to differences in transaction costs, home region MNEs exploit downstream FSAs while foreign region MNEs develop upstream FSAs. Market similarity also leads to a greater incentive to operate in the home region rather than in foreign regions. The home region effect significantly increases the likelihood of entry into foreign markets as the host country’s “diamond” significantly affects the market entry strategies of MNEs.regional strategy, market penetration, cosmetics industry, double diamond, South Korea

The Regional Sales of Multinationals in the World Cosmetics Industry

This paper analyzes the regional characteristics and strategies of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the world cosmetics and toiletries industry, based on the new work by Rugman on regional strategy. We test the proposition that MNEs may asymmetrically develop their upstream and downstream firm specific advantages (FSAs). We find that the upstream activities of the MNEs in cosmetics are home region based but that downstream activities are less so. Further, the asymmetry of FSAs in the world cosmetics industry is mainly due to the atypical Asian entry strategies of North American and West European cosmetics MNEs. Two case studies confirm how variations in FSAs can affect regional strategy.regionalism, regional strategy, cosmetics industry, firm specific advantage, Avon, Gucci

Estimation of Human Body Shape and Posture Under Clothing

Estimating the body shape and posture of a dressed human subject in motion represented as a sequence of (possibly incomplete) 3D meshes is important for virtual change rooms and security. To solve this problem, statistical shape spaces encoding human body shape and posture variations are commonly used to constrain the search space for the shape estimate. In this work, we propose a novel method that uses a posture-invariant shape space to model body shape variation combined with a skeleton-based deformation to model posture variation. Our method can estimate the body shape and posture of both static scans and motion sequences of dressed human body scans. In case of motion sequences, our method takes advantage of motion cues to solve for a single body shape estimate along with a sequence of posture estimates. We apply our approach to both static scans and motion sequences and demonstrate that using our method, higher fitting accuracy is achieved than when using a variant of the popular SCAPE model as statistical model.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figure