Facilitating Development in the World Trade Organization: A Proposal for the Council for Trade and Development and the Agreement on Development Facilitation (ADF)

Facilitating economic development has been an important objective in the World Trade Organization. Nonetheless, WTO rules set significant barriers to development efforts, and this paper advocates an extensive reform of the WTO system and WTO rules to remove these barriers and to better facilitate developmen

Bilateralism under the World Trade Organization

The establishment of the World Trade Organization ( WTO ), which replaced the five decades of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ( GATT ) regime,\u27 has significantly reinforced multilateral control over international trade on a global scale. As of October 2005, membership in the WTO has reached 148 nations, including the majority of former Soviet bloc and other communist countries,2 making the WTO the United Nations of International Trade. ,3 WTO disciplines have significant impact on world trade today; they have been enforced by the monitoring activities of various WTO bodies and by strengthened dispute resolution mechanisms. In addition, a significant number of bilateral/regional trade agreements co- exist alongside the WTO. There are over 130 of these agreements in force. Around 90% of WTO members have signed at least one or more regional trade agreements ( RTAs ). Thus, the bilateralism represented by these RTAs is as much a factor as the multilateralism of the WTO in shaping international trade relations today. RTAs provide exclusive preferential treatment to trade with member states.These exclusionary preferences by RTAs create a discriminatory environment in international trade. This is not consistent with the core objective of the multilateral trading system, namely the Most-Favored Nation ( MFN ) principle. Current GATT/WTO provisions allow for the establishment of a customs union or free trade area as an exception to the MFN requirement. The rationale for this exception is that the preferential trade arrangement of a customs union or free trade area could eventually develop into a multinational framework, thereby giving the benefit of lower trade barriers to more countries as the number of participating countries increases.The growth of membership has also been seen in many customs or free trade areas. For example, the European Community has grown well beyond its original membership, which was comprised a limited number of Western European countries, to include most of Europe today. The proliferation of these trade clubs, which provide trade preferences limited to their members, may undermine the WTO\u27s objective of promoting non- discriminatory trade for all nations. Problems are compounded because some of the recent bilateral trade agreements purport to impose regulatory elements beyond the reduction of trade barriers, such as enforcement of intellectual property rights, the requirement of environmental and labor standards, and the authorization of uninhibited capital transfers. The inclusion and promotion of these regulatory elements in free trade agreements ( FTAs ) has significant implications on the current multilateral trading system. Section Ilof this article discusses the proliferation of RTAs, most of which are FTAs, as well as their impact on and consistency with the multilateral trading system. The Mainland China and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Agreement is introduced as an example of a recent bilateral trade treaty between developed and developing economies; its consistency with relevant WTO requirements is examined.This article also provides a discussion of bilateralism in the regulation of investment measures, as represented by numerous bilateral investment treaties ( BITs ), and examines its consistency with relevant provisions of the WTO. Unlike trade, there is no comprehensive multilateral framework for investment on a global scale. A previous attempt by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development to create one failed,9 while over 1,100 BITs around the world provide some regulatory governance in this area at the bilateral level. The WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures provides a few provisions that prohibit some trade- related investment measures. The General Agreement on Trade in Services also has provisions that have relevance to the regulation of investment measures. Section III of this paper questions the regulatory consistency of BITs with relevant WTO provisions

Nonpropagation of tachyon on the BTZ black hole in type 0B string theory

We obtain the BTZ black hole (AdS$_3 \times$S$^3$) as a non-dilatonic solution from type 0B string theory. Analyzing the perturbation around this black hole background, we show that the tachyon is not a propagating mode.Comment: some detailed explanations are added, modified version will be appeared in Physics Letters B, 11 pages in RevTeX, no figure

COVID-19: A Call for Legal and Institutional Reform

COVID-19 has caused an unprecedented health crisis in the United States and the world. The article calls for legal and institutional reform to better manage present and future pandemics

POST-IRRADIATION ANALYSES OF U-MO DISPERSION FUEL RODS OF KOMO TESTS AT HANARO

Since 2001, a series of five irradiation test campaigns for atomized U-Mo dispersion fuel rods, KOMO-1, -2, -3, -4, and -5, has been conducted at HANARO (Korea) in order to develop high performance low enriched uranium dispersion fuel for research reactors. The KOMO irradiation tests provided valuable information on the irradiation behavior of U-Mo fuel that results from the distinct fuel design and irradiation conditions of the rod fuel for HANARO. Full size U-Mo dispersion fuel rods of 4–5 g-U/cm3 were irradiated at a maximum linear power of approximately 105 kW/m up to 85% of the initial U-235 depletion burnup without breakaway swelling or fuel cladding failure. Electron probe microanalyses of the irradiated samples showed localized distribution of the silicon that was added in the matrix during fuel fabrication and confirmed its beneficial effect on interaction layer growth during irradiation. The modifications of U-Mo fuel particles by the addition of a ternary alloying element (Ti or Zr), additional protective coatings (silicide or nitride), and the use of larger fuel particles resulted in significantly reduced interaction layers between fuel particles and Al

Temperature-dependent Raman spectroscopy in BaRuO3_3 systems

We investigated the temperature-dependence of the Raman spectra of a nine-layer BaRuO$_3$ single crystal and a four-layer BaRuO$_3$ epitaxial film, which show pseudogap formations in their metallic states. From the polarized and depolarized spectra, the observed phonon modes are assigned properly according to the predictions of group theory analysis. In both compounds, with decreasing temperature, while $A_{1g}$ modes show a strong hardening, $E_g$ (or $E_{2g}$) modes experience a softening or no significant shift. Their different temperature-dependent behaviors could be related to a direct Ru metal-bonding through the face-sharing of RuO$_6$. It is also observed that another $E_{2g}$ mode of the oxygen participating in the face-sharing becomes split at low temperatures in the four layer BaRuO$_3$. And, the temperature-dependence of the Raman continua between 250 $\sim$ 600 cm$^{-1}$ is strongly correlated to the square of the plasma frequency. Our observations imply that there should be a structural instability in the face-shared structure, which could be closely related to the pseudogap formation of BaRuO$_3$ systems.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. to be published in Phys. Rev.

Slowly rotating black holes in the Horava-Lifshitz gravity

We investigate slowly rotating black holes in the Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz (HL) gravity. For $\Lambda_W=0$ and $\lambda=1$, we find a slowly rotating black hole of the Kehagias-Sfetsos solution in asymptotically flat spacetimes. We discuss their thermodynamic properties by computing mass, temperature, angular momentum, and angular velocity on the horizon.Comment: 12 pages, no figures, version to appear in EPJ

An Improved CVDD Bur Used in Ultrasonic Dental System for Enamel Removal

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to increase enamel removal rate of dental diamond bur used in ultrasonic system so as to realize and promote its clinical applications. The cutting performances of the burs made by the electroplated diamond and by the chemical vapor deposition diamond (CVDD) are compared by experiment. It is found that the CVDD bur can achieve a higher removal rate. Detailed observation of the microphotograph of cut surface reveals that the superior performance of the CVDD bur is related to the morphology of the CVDD bur and the chips it produced. There are large amount of small cutting edges on the top of large size diamonds of the CVDD burs which results in tiny cutting chips. The materials along the plowed grooves left by the large size diamonds are removed by the adjacent small cutting edges. This action enables the cutting process to be carried out continuously rather than clogging the downward movement of the tool as experienced by the use of the electroplated diamond bur. But on the other hand, the too small chips also restrict the enamel removal rate. Hence a novel design of improved CVDD bur with fewer small cutting edges is proposed. The amount of cutting edges is reduced by heating the existing bur at 700°C for various time periods. It is found that the enamel removal rate along and perpendicular to enamel prism directions can be increased by 60% and 30%, respectively as compared with the untreated CVDD bur when it is heated in the nitrogen environment for 10minutes

The absence of the Kerr black hole in the Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity

We show that the Kerr metric does not exist as a fully rotating black hole solution to the modified Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz (HL) gravity with $\Lambda_W=0$ and $\lambda=1$ case. We perform it by showing that the Kerr metric does not satisfy full equations derived from the modified HL gravity.Comment: 35 pages, no figure

Numerical study on run-up heights of solitary wave with hydrodynamic pressure model

For many shallow water flows, it is sufficient to consider the depth-averaged equations, referred as the shallow water equations, which are two-dimensional in the horizontal plane, since the length scale of the vertical direction is much smaller than that of the horizontal directions. Assuming that the pressure distribution is hydrostatic, the mathematical formulation and its numerical implementation are considerably simplified. In this study, a numerical model is newly developed to investigate various free surface fl ow problems. The governing equations are the Navier???Stokes equations with the pressure decomposed into the sum of a hydrostatic and a hydrodynamic components. The equation for the free surface movement is a depth???averaged continuity equation which is a free surface equation. These governing equations are simultaneously solved by using a finite difference method with a semi???implicit method and fractional step method. At the first step, the vertical momentum equations are discretized by using an implicit method over the vertical direction. In the second step, the discrete horizontal momentum equations are projected on to the free surface equation. Finally, the hydrodynamic pressure and final velocity field are calculated. To verify the accuracy and stability, the present numerical model is applied to move practical problems such as the run???up process of solitary waves attacking a circular island. The numerically obtained maximum run???up heights around a circular island are compared with available laboratory measurements. A very reasonable agreement is observed