Transition to Decoupled Rice Support and Its Production Effects in Korea

Abolishing a nearly 50-year-old policy for rice price support, Korea adopted a new direct payment program in 2005. Making the transition to decoupled income support has been governed by the need for operative and effective income safety nets and the WTO disciplines on domestic support. The program aims to deal with over-supply of rice while guarding against the threat of income insecurity. Integrated into a target price mechanism, the fixed and variable payments compensate part of farm income loss arising from adverse market conditions. An empirical estimation based on the farm-level data is performed to test the degree of a linkage between rice support and production. The analysis suggests that rice support have only marginal influence on production with the elasticity of 0.03. To secure a smooth implementation of structural reforms and meet the WTO disciplines, Korea may continue to transfer its support into a decoupled, Green Box type measure.rice, decoupled support, direct payments, agricultural policy reform, Korea, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Agricultural Finance, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Impacts of the Doha Round on Korea's Agricultural Tariff Profile

The purpose of this paper is to simulate the proposed modality in market access and estimate its potential impacts on Korea's tariff profile. By accommodating a tiered formula for tariff reduction, the modality attempts to harmonize tariffs across products and countries. When no flexibility in tariff cuts is taken into account, Korea would face up to 68 percent reduction in tariffs in an average term (the baseline). The provision of sensitive products in which the tariff cuts are allowed to deviate from the tiered formula by two-thirds at a maximum is likely to bring about 11 percentage points of maximum tariff saving effects compared with the baseline case. Besides, Korea would be able to maximize savings in tariff reductions by 25 percentage points by designating special products. It is therefore crucial for the country to secure the right to use the provision of special products as a developing member country. Finally, it is shown that tariff cuts for tropical products would be a stiff challenge since they include many important products including rice, red pepper, Korean citrus and sesame oil.tariff, tiered formula, modality, market access, Doha Round, Korea, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Agricultural Finance, International Relations/Trade,

Decoupled Payments and Agricultural Policy Reform in Korea

Abolishing a nearly 50-year-old policy for rice price support, Korea adopted a new direct payment program in 2005. Making the transition to decoupled income payments has been governed by the need for operative and effective income safety nets and the WTO disciplines on domestic support. The program aims to deal with over-supply of rice while guarding against the threat of income insecurity. Integrated into a target price mechanism, the fixed and variable payments compensate part of farm income loss arising from adverse market conditions. Besides, the government launched a public stockholding measure to ensure food security. A review of previous studies highlights the fixed payment has no or at most minimal effects on production while the variable payment carries a fairly large effect on production. The share of direct payments in agricultural budget accounts for only 8 percent in 2004 and thus the Korean government envisions greater use of decoupled income support.decoupled payments, direct payments, policy reform, rice, Korea, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Josephson current in carbon nanotubes with spin-orbit interaction

We demonstrate that curvature-induced spin-orbit (SO) coupling induces a $0-\pi$ transition in the Josephson current through a carbon nanotube quantum dot coupled to superconducting leads. In the non-interacting regime, the transition can be tuned by applying parallel magnetic field near the critical field where orbital states become degenerate. Moreover, the interplay between charging and SO effects in the Coulomb Blockade and cotunneling regimes leads to a rich phase diagram with well-defined (analytical) boundaries in parameter space. Finally, the 0 phase always prevails in the Kondo regime. Our calculations are relevant in view of recent experimental advances in transport through ultra-clean carbon nanotubes.Comment: 4 (main text) + 10 (appendices) pages, 3 figure

Spin-current noise from fluctuation relations

We present fluctuation relations that connect spin-polarized current and noise in mesoscopic conductors. In linear response, these relations are equivalent to the fluctuation-dissipation theorem that relates equilibrium current--current correlations to the linear conductance. More interestingly, in the weakly nonlinear regime of transport, these relations establish a connection between the leading-order rectification spin conductance, the spin noise susceptibility and the third cumulant of spin current fluctuations at equilibrium. Our results are valid even for systems in the presence of magnetic fields and coupled to ferromagnetic electrodes.Comment: Submitted to the Proceedings of the 31st ICP

On the Origin of Risk Sensitivity: the Energy Budget Rule Revisited

The risk-sensitive foraging theory formulated in terms of the (daily) energy budget rule has been influential in behavioural ecology as well as other disciplines. Predicting risk-aversion on positive budgets and risk-proneness on negative budgets, however, the budget rule has recently been challenged both empirically and theoretically. In this paper, we critically review these challenges as well as the original derivation of the budget rule and propose a `gradual' budget rule, which is normatively derived from a gradual nature of risk sensitivity and encompasses the conventional budget rule as a special case. The gradual budget rule shows that the conventional budget rule holds when the expected reserve is close enough to a threshold for overnight survival, selection pressure being significant. The gradual view also reveals that the conventional budget rule does not need to hold when the expected reserve is not close enough to the threshold, selection pressure being insignificant. The proposed gradual budget rule better fits the empirical findings including those that used to challenge the conventional budget rule.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Emergence of Majorana modes in cylindrical nanowires

We present calculations of Majorana edge modes in cylindrical nanowires of a semiconductor material with proximity-induced superconductivity. We consider a Rashba field along the transverse direction and an applied magnetic field in arbitrary orientation. Our analysis is based on exact numerical diagonalizations for the finite cylinder and on the complex band structure for the semi-infinite one. Orbital effects are responsible for a strong anisotropy of the critical field for which the effective gap vanishes. Robust Majorana modes are induced by the parallel field component and we find regimes with more than one Majorana mode on the same edge. Experimentally, they would manifest as a specific sequence of zero-bias conductances as a function of magnetic field. In the finite cylinder, a degradation of the Majorana modes due to interference of the two edges leads to oscillating non zero energies for large enough fields.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure