THE ANDEAN PRICE BAND SYSTEM: EFFECTS ON PRICES, PROTECTION AND PRODUCER WELFARE

The Andean Community's Price Band System (APBS), introduced in 1995, had the announced goal of reducing domestic price instability by buffering fluctuations in international prices through use of a variable import tariff. This paper evaluates the effects of the Andean Price Band System on domestic producer price variability, levels of nominal protection and changes in producer welfare. Application is made to four important food products - maize, rice, sugar and milk - in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, from the period 1990 to 1998. The effects of the APBS on producer price variability are analyzed through 1) comparing coefficients of variation of detrended, monthly deseasonalized real prices before and after the harmonization of the APBS in 1995, and 2) variance decomposition of real domestic prices. For Colombia and Ecuador, the APBS is shown to have successfully reduced real price instability below levels of instability which existed prior to its introduction. Real exchange rate instability also decreased sharply in these two countries following introduction of the APBS. In Venezuela, real price instability is shown to have increased following introduction of the APBS, while real exchange rate instability was unchanged. The APBS' effects on producer price protection are examined through estimation of average nominal protection coefficients for the twelve country-commodity combinations identified above before and after the introduction of the APBS. Results show that in all three countries and four virtually all products, the APBS contributed to increased producer protection. Finally, this paper uses a variant of the Newbery-Stiglitz approach to calculate efficiency benefits due to risk reduction among producers and the transfer benefits created by redistributing income among producers, consumers and government. The results show that the risk reduction benefits created by the APBS are small. Similarly, the income transfer effects, though larger, are also low, and both contribute to generally low levels of estimated producer welfare effects. Overall, the paper concludes that the APBS has been of limited usefulness as a policy instrument designed to reduce producer price variability in an economically efficient manner.Andean Community, price band system, agricultural prices, price stabilization, Demand and Price Analysis,

IS A BEEF DEFICIENCY PAYMENT PARETO-SUPERIOR IN SOUTH KOREA?

South Korea uses a quota and a tariff on beef imports to keep farm prices high. Part of the quota rents are used to support indirect benefits to producers. The welfare costs of these policies are analyzed. Following a suggestion of Hayami, a deficiency payment financed by tariff revenues from increased imports is considered as an alternative to the quota. As Anderson (1983) found for Japan, a deficiency payment is Pareto-superior only if indirect benefits from the quota revenue are ignored.International Relations/Trade,

Tracking analysis of a first order phase- locked loop with two sinewaves modulation

Phase locked-loop tracking with sine wave modulation in Apollo communication system

Clearigate ® Treatments for Control of Giant Salvinia

Results of recent field trials using the chelated copper formulation Clearigate® 4 showed that applying a 20% solution by volume was effective for controlling populations of giant salvinia in irrigation canals. 5 Lower rates may be efficacious, thereby reducing chemical use and cost; however, little is known about the dose-response effects of Clearigate® against giant salvinia. The objective of this study was to determine the effective rate range of chelated copper applied as Clearigate® for control of giant salvinia

Azimuthal correlations of forward di-hadrons in d+Au collisions at RHIC in the Color Glass Condensate

We present a good description of recent experimental data on forward di-hadron azimuthal correlations measured in deuteron-gold collisions at RHIC, where monojet production has been observed. Our approach is based on the Color Glass Condensate effective theory for the small-x degrees of freedom of the nuclear wave function, including the use of non-linear evolution equations with running QCD coupling. Our analysis provides further evidence for the presence of saturation effects in RHIC data.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, version to appear in PR

Curating a Nation: The Role of Asia’s Twenty-First Century Museums in Constructing National Narratives

Museums of the modern world act to preserve and promote cultural heritage, science, and art. Within the continent of Asia, museums have been crucial foci for various nations’ cultural ministries. By analyzing the missions of specific museums with a critical lens, the objective of national identity and narrative building becomes exposed in the decisions of museums’ exhibits and curations. With having used ethnographic methods and scholarly research concerning national museums in the countries of Mongolia, Japan, China, Thailand, and India, I argue that museums serve as mediums of communication for higher political and cultural institutions to foster, construct, and manipulate national narratives consumed by the general public in order to homogenize ideal identities on the local and global scale. The extent to which museums execute these tasks vary greatly depending on the variables of targeted audiences, sources of funding, and the presentation and interpretation of historical events and archaeological artifacts

Vacuum quark condensate, chiral Lagrangian, and Bose-Einstein statistics

In a series of articles it was recently claimed that the quantum chromodynamic (QCD) condensates are not the properties of the vacuum but of the hadrons and are confined inside them. We point out that this claim is incompatible with the chiral Lagrangian and Bose-Einstein statistics of the Goldstone bosons (pions) in chiral limit and conclude that the quark condensate must be the property of the QCD vacuum.Comment: 4 Pages, To appear in Phys. Lett.

'Some tactical problems in digital simulation' for the next 10 years

In his influential 1963 paper ‘Some Tactical Problems in Digital Simulation’, Conway identified important issues that became the pillars of research in simulation analysis methodology. Naturally these ‘problems’ were a product of the applications of interest at the time, as well as the state of simulation and computing, much of which has changed dramatically. In light of those changes, we attempt to identify the tactical problems that might occupy simulation researchers for the next 10 years

On-line dynamic monitoring of the SHARON process for sustainable nitrogen removal from wastewater

The goal of this work is the development of a suitable monitoring module, which is to be the first module of an integrated fault detection and control system for the SHARON process. To model the process properly, different PCA models lire tested. As a first step, PCA is used in an iterative manner to exclude data not considered to represent normal operational conditions and process behaviour from the original data set. To improve the performance of the identified model, it is decided to account for dynamics in the SHARON process by means of auto-regressive exogenous (ARX) Structuring of data before the identification. A fruitful replacement of missing values for this purpose is done by means of a static PCA model. It is shown that the different criteria used in model selection lead to the same DPCA model. In this paper all steps of the monitoring module design are explained and the performance of different models is analyzed

Effective Exchange Rate Classifications and Growth

We propose an econometric procedure for obtaining de facto exchange rate regime classifications which we apply to study the relationship between exchange rate regimes and economic growth. Our classification method models the de jure regimes as outcomes of a multinomial logit choice problem conditional on the volatility of a country's effective exchange rate, a bilateral exchange rate and international reserves. An `effective' de facto exchange rate regime classification is then obtained by assigning country-year observations to the regime with the highest predictive probability obtained from the estimation problem. An econometric investigation into the relationship between exchange rate regimes and GDP growth finds that growth is higher under stable currency-value regimes. Significant asymmetric effects on country growth from not doing what is said are found for nonindustrialized countries. Countries that exhibit `fear of floating' experience significantly higher growth.