Export cartels and economic development

This research aims to dispel the myth that export cartels should be prohibited because they restrain competition and, thus, holds back economic development. It also proposes the conditions under which export cartels promote economic development. In contrast to the myth, this research argues that, when it comes to economic development, competition is not always desirable and, therefore, that export cartels should be formed under certain conditions. In other words, the doctrine that maximum competition is optimal competition is not applicable when the objective is economic development. Moreover, as export cartels from developing countries do not possess market power in the global market, if they facilitate their firms, which are mainly SMEs, to be able to export, competition in the global market is increased, rather than decreased. We then propose the concept of competition relocation, which argues that cartelisation does not eliminate competition but relocate competition from the activity being cartelised into other activities. The concept rejects the conventional interpretation of competition as a unidimensional action, in which cartels always decrease competition. On the contrary, competition is multidimensional, i.e., firms compete across different activities. Therefore, cartelisation may not eliminate or decrease competition but simply relocates it across different activities and the overall degree of competition might even increase. Export cartels is simply a tool to relocate competition. Based on the concept of competition relocation, we argue further that, in order to promote economic development, we must make sure that whenever cartelisation promotes the long-term productive capabilities more than competition does, cartelisation should be promoted. To derive the conditions under which export cartels should be promoted, we used both history and game theory. We study the historical lessons of now-developed countries, including Germany, the US, and Japan and draw a game-theoretical model to derive the conditions under which export cartels promote economic development. In terms of game theory, we propose that the situation in which export cartels should be promoted resembles the stag-hunt game, where both cartelisation and competition are Nash equilibria. Even though it is more productive to hunt a stag together, each hunter has an incentive to deviate and catch a hare. The model shows that, whenever the benefit of sharing resources between firms is sufficiently large (in comparison with other parameters), export cartels are more productive than competition. Therefore, most export cartels have been promoted among SMEs. Moreover, it also shows that, even though each firm may be able to export (due to abundant exclusive resources), the environment, which supports the use of resources across firms, could still make export cartels more productive

The architecture of abnormal reward behaviour in dementia: multimodal hedonic phenotypes and brain substrate

Abnormal reward processing is a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases, most strikingly in frontotemporal dementia. However, the phenotypic repertoire and neuroanatomical substrates of abnormal reward behaviour in these diseases remain incompletely characterized and poorly understood. Here we addressed these issues in a large, intensively phenotyped patient cohort representing all major syndromes of sporadic frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease. We studied 27 patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, 58 with primary progressive aphasia (22 semantic variant, 24 non-fluent/agrammatic variant and 12 logopenic) and 34 with typical amnestic Alzheimer's disease, in relation to 42 healthy older individuals. Changes in behavioural responsiveness were assessed for canonical primary rewards (appetite, sweet tooth, sexual activity) and non-primary rewards (music, religion, art, colours), using a semi-structured survey completed by patients' primary caregivers. Changes in more general socio-emotional behaviours were also recorded. We applied multiple correspondence analysis and k-means clustering to map relationships between hedonic domains and extract core factors defining aberrant hedonic phenotypes. Neuroanatomical associations were assessed using voxel-based morphometry of brain MRI images across the combined patient cohort. Altered (increased and/or decreased) reward responsiveness was exhibited by most patients in the behavioural and semantic variants of frontotemporal dementia and around two-thirds of patients in other dementia groups, significantly (P < 0.05) more frequently than in healthy controls. While food-directed changes were most prevalent across the patient cohort, behavioural changes directed toward non-primary rewards occurred significantly more frequently (P < 0.05) in the behavioural and semantic variants of frontotemporal dementia than in other patient groups. Hedonic behavioural changes across the patient cohort were underpinned by two principal factors: a 'gating' factor determining the emergence of altered reward behaviour and a 'modulatory' factor determining how that behaviour is directed. These factors were expressed jointly in a set of four core, trans-diagnostic and multimodal hedonic phenotypes: 'reward-seeking', 'reward-restricted', 'eating-predominant' and 'control-like'-variably represented across the cohort and associated with more pervasive socio-emotional behavioural abnormalities. The principal gating factor was associated (P < 0.05 after correction for multiple voxel-wise comparisons over the whole brain) with a common profile of grey matter atrophy in anterior cingulate, bilateral temporal poles, right middle frontal and fusiform gyri: the cortical circuitry that mediates behavioural salience and semantic and affective appraisal of sensory stimuli. Our findings define a multi-domain phenotypic architecture for aberrant reward behaviours in major dementias, with novel implications for the neurobiological understanding and clinical management of these diseases