Political Economy of East Asian Regional Integration and Cooperation

In the last decade, East Asia has engaged in constructing numerous mechanisms to enhance regional cooperation in the areas of trade and finance. However' the region's economic architecture exhibits certain idiosyncrasies such as an eclectic institutional structure and a limited level of commitment shown by its members. These idiosyncrasies seem to prevent regional cooperation from becoming deeper and more coherent. This paper focuses on the political factors that have thus far shaped the institutional form of East Asian regional trade and financial cooperation' particularly in the three essential aspects of regionalism derived from the theories of regional institution building. The first aspect is the level at which governments are willing to compromise sovereignty and political autonomy for the sake of regional cooperation. The second is the progress in creating mechanisms through which the “losers” and the “weak” within a country or region can be compensated. The third is the clear definition of which members can benefit from such mechanisms. These three elements are useful in furthering regional cooperation and institution building by removing resistance and obstacles that work against functional spillovers. The paper argues that East Asia's economic institutions established through the cooperation efforts of the last ten years exhibit different qualities from those that have emerged in Europe' and thus fall far short of overcoming unexpected political tensions in the region. These deficiencies' however' contrast in two important fields of regional integration. In finance' the clearly defined member governments have difficulty compromising their respective national macroeconomic policy autonomy' while in the field of regional trade cooperation' the challenge is in redistributing the economic gains to those who stand to lose during the process of integration' or to the countries that have a long distance to catch up within a relatively well-defined group.east asian regional integration; asia regional trade cooperation; asia institutional regional cooperation

Grants and debt forgiveness in Africa : a descriptive analysis

The authors analyze the effects of bilateral debt forgiveness on 32 low-income countries in Africa (1984-93). Asking whether it makes a difference for recipient countries to receive pure grants rather that official development assistance (ODA) debt relief, they focus on how one form of aid or the other affects the countries'import capacity. They conclude that: a) grants allowed recipient countries to significantly expand their import capacity for 1984-93 as grants and import capacity have been increasing since 1984. But the increasing share of concessional lending and debt relief in recent years has not allowed these countries to reduce total indebtedness nor solve debt overhang. b) the biggest recipients of debt relief also received the lion's share of the pure grants increase. Debt forgiveness and pure grants were allocated not entirely consistent with standard economic hierarchies. c) bilateral ODA debt forgiveness appears to be neutral in the sense of not having any significant impact on import capacity. During 1989-93, multilateral lending replaced the bilateral lending decrease caused by an increase in grants. d) private creditors have typically withdrawn money as grants increased. And debt relief has had a crowding-out effect on new lending. Bilateral donors are switching their development finance to Africa from concessional and non-concessional lending to a combination of pure grants and ODA relief.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Municipal Financial Management,Public&Municipal Finance,Urban Economics,Municipal Financial Management,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Public&Municipal Finance

THE STRUCTURE OF HUMBLE CAUSATIVES IN JAPANESE

The so-called sa-ire 'sa-insertion' refers to a morphological change in progress in Japanese humble causatives, verbal forms with the causative suffix sase connoting the speaker's humbleness addressed toward a hearer. This change has been regarded as incorrect grammar and never received proper attention beyond prescriptive interpretations. This paper brings up issues surrounding sa-insertion and offers a purely descriptive, structural analysis which appears to induce a number of theoretical implications in Japanese grammar. In particular I argue that the humble causative is a double causative in which the humble interpretation is achieved structurally. Other implications drawn from this analysis include abstractness of morphology and possible accommodation of reflexive causatives in Japanese, an accommodation that has never been reported in previous work on the language

Analysis and interpretation of acidic nature of aluminosilicates

Aluminosilicate solid acid catalysts, especially zeolites, have been widely utilized in petroleum refinery and environmentally benign chemical processes. The acidic property of aluminosilicates has been a subject of advanced studies. Recently an ammonia IRMS-TPD (infrared/mass spectroscopy temperature-programmed desorption) method, an application of operando technique, has been developed to quantify the number and strength distribution of each of Brønsted and Lewis sites on a solid. With an aid of quantum chemistry, relationships among the composition, structure and acidic property are being unveiled to totally understand the chemistry of SiOHAl unit in the aluminosilicates

Exploiting Orthography-free Phonological Evidence in Orthography-rich Language

In modern linguistics where natural spoken language has been the main, if not the sole, target of research inquiry, one area in which orthography becomes as yet at issue is phonology. This should be the case because (a) writing systems encode phonological structure, syllables in particular, as shown in Gnanadesikan (2011), accordingly (b) the orthographical knowledge of a language may merge into the knowledge of that spoken language, and finally (c) once the knowledge at the two levels merge in the language user’s brain, it is hard to separate the two levels. Strictly speaking, then, it is not possible to retrieve phonological evidence for purely spoken language from members of orthography-rich communities. This paper nonetheless demonstrates that there are atypical occasions when orthography-free phonological evidence can be observed. Specifically, it reports on a remarkable performance in a Japanese word-reversing ludling (Latin ludus ‘game’ + lingua ‘language’), which was demonstrated by an individual born with a genetic disorder called Williams syndrome. The paper contends that written evidence, of syllables in particular, may constitute evidence for their linguistic reality but only at the time of the orthography invention. Purely phonological evidence that is free of orthographic and prescriptive influences is vital and ideal in that it encodes and reveals far more dynamic phonological structures of the language

ヤコビ図の空間への自由群の自己同型群の作用II

京都大学新制・課程博士博士(理学)甲第24383号理博第4882号新制||理||1699(附属図書館)京都大学大学院理学研究科数学・数理解析専攻(主査)教授 葉廣 和夫, 教授 加藤 毅, 教授 入谷 寛学位規則第4条第1項該当Doctor of ScienceKyoto UniversityDFA

The Triangulation of Toe-in Style Stereo Camera

This study aimed to propose a triangulation by using a consumer 3D camera in order to measure a distance. In traditional method, error of distance measurement was large. The consumer 3D camera is different from a dedicated measurement stereo camera; the optical axes is installed so as to cross in front of lens several meters away (toe-in style), in order to give a sense of reality of human being’s visual characteristic. We examine accuracy of proposed method by mesh data construction.The 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Image Processing 2014 (ICISIP2014), September 26-29, 2014, Nishinippon Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu, Japa