WTO’s Trade Liberalisation, Agricultural Growth, and Poverty Alleviation in Pakistan

Pakistan is an agrarian based developing country, and like many other developing countries, its agriculture sector is subjected to domestic forces of demand and supply and changes in prices at international level, as well. More specifically, in the late 1990s, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) emerged as one the major players affecting such market changes more vigorously at international arena. The WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, which was established as a result of the 1986–94 Uraguay Round talks, requires, for both developed and developing countries, to initiate a process of reforms in their agrarian economies with the objective of establishing a fair and market oriented agricultural trading system through multilateral trade negotiations. This Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) specifically asks for major reductions in export subsidies, domestic support and import barriers on agricultural products to achieve this objective, the WTO’s Agreement of Agriculture [WTO (2001)] had set the following quantitative targets for cuts in each of the three specified area, namely import tariffs, domestic supports and export subsidies.

Globalisation and Its Implications for Agriculture, Food Security, and Poverty in Pakistan

The world trade liberalisation has been the major concern to almost all the international communities since very long due to the extensive trade restrictions imposed by the developed and industrial countries. These restrictions caused to create a very tough protectionist economic environment for all the countries [SESRTCIC (1995) and Chaudhary (2001)]. Pakistan is one of the founder members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) since 1948 and a signatory of Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Agreement (MTA) with Word Trade Organisation (WTO). The Agreement made significant progress in three major areas i.e. market liberalisation which could add approximately one percent of world real GDP (US$212–274 billion) and 10 percent to world trade upon full implementation of the Agreement, strengthening of rule and institutional structure, particularly the creation of WTO, which could decide on dispute and impairment of trade rules and principles, and integration of new areas into the multilateral trading system such as general agreements on trade in services (GATS) and trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs), trade-related investment measures (TRIMs) and the traditionally sensitive and contentious sectors (agriculture, and textile and clothing) [Abidin (1994); GATT (1994) and IMF (1994)]. The classical economists explained the welfare benefits of globalisation (by the specialisation and widening of markets through trade). Trade can bring settlement by allowing countries to take benefit of their comparative advantage, harvest the profit of scale economies and ensure competition, greater variety and potentially, more stable markets and prices.

WTO’s Trade Liberalisation, Agricultural Growth, and Poverty Alleviation in Pakistan

Pakistan is an agrarian based developing country, and like many other developing countries, its agriculture sector is subjected to domestic forces of demand and supply and changes in prices at international level, as well. More specifically, in the late 1990s, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) emerged as one the major players affecting such market changes more vigorously at international arena. The WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, which was established as a result of the 1986-94 Uraguay Round talks, requires, for both developed and developing countries, to initiate a process of reforms in their agrarian economies with the objective of establishing a fair and market oriented agricultural trading system through multilateral trade negotiations. This Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) specifically asks for major reductions in export subsidies, domestic support and import barriers on agricultural products to achieve this objective, the WTO’s Agreement of Agriculture [WTO (2001)] had set the following quantitative targets for cuts in each of the three specified area, namely import tariffs, domestic supports and export subsidies

Exact and Heuristic Algorithms for Runway Scheduling

This paper explores the Single Runway Scheduling (SRS) problem with arrivals, departures, and crossing aircraft on the airport surface. Constraints for wake vortex separations, departure area navigation separations and departure time window restrictions are explicitly considered. The main objective of this research is to develop exact and heuristic based algorithms that can be used in real-time decision support tools for Air Traffic Control Tower (ATCT) controllers. The paper provides a multi-objective dynamic programming (DP) based algorithm that finds the exact solution to the SRS problem, but may prove unusable for application in real-time environment due to large computation times for moderate sized problems. We next propose a second algorithm that uses heuristics to restrict the search space for the DP based algorithm. A third algorithm based on a combination of insertion and local search (ILS) heuristics is then presented. Simulation conducted for the east side of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport allows comparison of the three proposed algorithms and indicates that the ILS algorithm performs favorably in its ability to find efficient solutions and its computation times

Citrus Marketing in Punjab: Constraints and Potential for Improvement

Pakistan is blessed with the agro-ecological environment conducive to the production of nearly thirty types of fruits of which citrus, mango, dates, guava, apple, melons and banana are relatively more common. The market value of these fruits produced during 2002-03 is estimated at about Rs 73 billion, which is roughly 6.73 percent of agriculture value added in the year [Pakistan (2004)]. During the same period, Pakistan earned nearly 5 billion rupees from fruit exports, representing 9 percent of total export earnings from all raw agricultural commodities. Citrus is the largest grown fruit in Pakistan. The market value of citrus produced in 2002-03 was Rs 10.6 billion [Pakistan (2004)]. Within the citrus family, Kinnow is the largest planted specie

Low Reynolds Number Numerical Simulation of the Aerodynamic Coefficients of a 3D Wing

A low Reynolds number, three-dimensional CFD analysis is carried out for a finite flat plate wing using the commercial CFD code STAR CCM+. The six-aerodynamic force and moment components CL, CD, CM, CN, Cl, CY and their derivatives are computed at a Reynolds numbers of 3x105 by varying the pitch, roll and yaw angles about the quarter chord point. The computed results have been validated with experimental aerodynamic balance data when possible. The results indicate that roll and yaw angle affect the aerodynamic coefficients of the flat plate wing along with the pitch angle. The influence of roll and yaw angles on the six aerodynamics coefficients were found to be significant for high pitch angles specially 100 and 150. Stability derivatives have also been reported. This data is important for the design of MAVs and small UAVs and is currently perhaps not available in the open literature

Globalisation and Its Implications for Agriculture, Food Security, and Poverty in Pakistan

The world trade liberalisation has been the major concern to almost all the international communities since very long due to the extensive trade restrictions imposed by the developed and industrial countries. These restrictions caused to create a very tough protectionist economic environment for all the countries [SESRTCIC (1995) and Chaudhary (2001)]. Pakistan is one of the founder members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) since 1948 and a signatory of Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Agreement (MTA) with Word Trade Organisation (WTO). The Agreement made significant progress in three major areas i.e. market liberalisation which could add approximately one percent of world real GDP (US$212-274 billion) and 10 percent to world trade upon full implementation of the Agreement, strengthening of rule and institutional structure, particularly the creation of WTO, which could decide on dispute and impairment of trade rules and principles, and integration of new areas into the multilateral trading system such as general agreements on trade in services (GATS) and trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs), trade-related investment measures (TRIMs) and the traditionally sensitive and contentious sectors (agriculture, and textile and clothing) [Abidin (1994); GATT (1994) and IMF (1994)]. The classical economists explained the welfare benefits of globalisation (by the specialisation and widening of markets through trade). Trade can bring settlement by allowing countries to take benefit of their comparative advantage, harvest the profit of scale economies and ensure competition, greater variety and potentially, more stable markets and prices. The free movement of capital directs resources towards their more productive use

MPJ Express meets YARN:towards Java HPC on Hadoop systems

AbstractMany organizations—including academic, research, commercial institutions—have invested heavily in setting up High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities for running computational science applications. On the other hand, the Apache Hadoop software—after emerging in 2005— has become a popular, reliable, and scalable open-source framework for processing large-scale data (Big Data). Realizing the importance and significance of Big Data, an increasing number of organizations are investing in relatively cheaper Hadoop clusters for executing their mission critical data processing applications. An issue here is that system administrators at these sites might have to maintain two parallel facilities for running HPC and Hadoop computations. This, of course, is not ideal due to redundant maintenance work and poor economics. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by allowing HPC and Hadoop jobs to co-exist on a single hardware facility. We achieve this goal by exploiting YARN—Hadoop v2.0—that de-couples the computational and resource scheduling part of the Hadoop framework from HDFS. In this context, we have developed a YARN-based reference runtime system for the MPJ Express software that allows executing parallel MPI-like Java applications on Hadoop clusters. The main contribution of this paper is provide Big Data community access to MPI-like programming using MPJ Express. As an aside, this work allows parallel Java applications to perform computations on data stored in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)

Artificial Intelligence A Byproduct of Natural Intelligence and Their Salient Features

This paper mainly focuses on the creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) using natural intelligence but the question to be considered whether the natural intelligence can be created using artificial intelligence or not. The Artificial intelligence is the outcome of functionality and capabilities of human brain called neural Network. In this paper, it is presumed that the artificial intelligence is a byproduct of natural intelligence and then we discuss some relationship between both of these, especially the working of natural intelligence. Some other important questions are raised to understand a deep linkage between natural and artificial intelligence. There exists lot of non-material phenomenon created by dint of natural intelligence (not created by human) causing to produce systems run by artificial intelligence theorems and algorithms working at backend. The software based on Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) derives its power from human wisdom and natural intelligence. There are several limitations on artificial intelligence. In creation of natural intelligence there is a great role of spirituality.Humans are creator of artificial intelligence with limited abilities. Actually AI started with invention of machines. The applications of creation of natural  intelligence are vastly and abundantly known to humans of 21st Century, which are incorporated in the areas of Space Science, Anatomy, and motion ofPlants, spin of electron, Electronics, plant intelligence and Neural Science etc. The working of machines depending upon the artificial intelligence doesn't provide creativity or self-motivated innovations, within the meaning of natural intelligence