Extending Protection at the WTO to Products Other Than Wines and Spirits: Who Will Benefit?

The issue of extending geographic indicator protection to products other than wines and spirits has created wide divergences between demandeurs and opponent countries at the WTO. This article examines the economic impacts of the proposals submitted at the WTO by these two groups of countries, focusing mainly on market access, generic names and impacts for the consumer in North America. Results from our survey show that reducing tariff and non-tariff barriers in North America would be more important in improving market access for EU geographical indications (GIs) than would GI extension. In addition, it would appear that North American consumers may not benefit from extension of protection to products other than wines and spirits..generic names, geographical indications, market access, WTO, International Relations/Trade,

On some simplicial elimination schemes for chordal graphs

We present here some results on particular elimination schemes for chordal graphs, namely we show that for any chordal graph we can construct in linear time a simplicial elimination scheme starting with a pending maximal clique attached via a minimal separator maximal (resp. minimal) under inclusion among all minimal separators

Multitriangulations, pseudotriangulations and primitive sorting networks

We study the set of all pseudoline arrangements with contact points which cover a given support. We define a natural notion of flip between these arrangements and study the graph of these flips. In particular, we provide an enumeration algorithm for arrangements with a given support, based on the properties of certain greedy pseudoline arrangements and on their connection with sorting networks. Both the running time per arrangement and the working space of our algorithm are polynomial. As the motivation for this work, we provide in this paper a new interpretation of both pseudotriangulations and multitriangulations in terms of pseudoline arrangements on specific supports. This interpretation explains their common properties and leads to a natural definition of multipseudotriangulations, which generalizes both. We study elementary properties of multipseudotriangulations and compare them to iterations of pseudotriangulations.Comment: 60 pages, 40 figures; minor corrections and improvements of presentatio

Education supply, economic growth and the dynamic of skills

This paper examines the dynamics of the skill supply and its incidence on economic growth in the presence of education policies. When there are indivisibilities in the financing of human capital, small differences in the initial distribution of skills may greatly affect the stationary distribution : the economy may end up in a "low skill trap", or in a high skill equilibrium. The model implies that for some ranges of initial distributions there will be intergenerational immobility. Finally, cross-country différences in long-term macroeconomic adjustment to education policies may be attributed, among other factors, to the existence of a congestion effect in the education System.Groth, Education, Human capital, Social mobility

Electron acceleration in vacuum by ultrashort and tightly focused radially polarized laser pulses

Exact closed-form solutions to Maxwell's equations are used to investigate electron acceleration driven by radially polarized laser beams in the nonparaxial and ultrashort pulse regime. Besides allowing for higher energy gains, such beams could generate synchronized counterpropagating electron bunches.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the Ultrafast Phenomena XVIII conferenc

Sample-path Large Deviations in Credit Risk

The event of large losses plays an important role in credit risk. As these large losses are typically rare, and portfolios usually consist of a large number of positions, large deviation theory is the natural tool to analyze the tail asymptotics of the probabilities involved. We first derive a sample-path large deviation principle (LDP) for the portfolio's loss process, which enables the computation of the logarithmic decay rate of the probabilities of interest. In addition, we derive exact asymptotic results for a number of specific rare-event probabilities, such as the probability of the loss process exceeding some given function