ECONOMIC BOOM, FINANCIAL BUST, AND THE FATE OF THAI AGRICULTURE: WAS GROWTH IN THE 1990S TOO FAST?

Thailand's economic boom since 1987 resulted in absolute agricultural employment and land use declines. Both were caused by rapid wage growth due to nonagricultural investment. Irreversible land use changes and rapid agricultural mechanization have followed. Following the 1987 financial crisis, agriculture may no longer be able to absorb excess labor or dramatically increase output as in the past.Labor and Human Capital, Land Economics/Use, Productivity Analysis,

Technical progress in agriculture, income distribution and economic policy : the Philippines, 1950-80

Successive Philippine governments since world war II have pursued a development strategy predicated upon industrial growth. Through such policy instruments as exchange rate overvaluation, tariffs on imports of consumer goods, and export taxes on agriculture, capital has been directed into industry - and especially the manufacturing sector - both from abroad and from out of agriculture. The growth of the protected industrial sector has been achieved at the cost of periodic trade balance crises, and a persistent maldistribution of income between rural households (which are largely dependent on agriculture) and their urban counterparts. Within the agricultural sector, public investment, subsidies, credit programs, research and extension have been focused on food crop producers in the most favourable (irrigated) agricultural areas, especially those in the Manila hinterland regions of Central Luzon and Southern Tagalog. Agricultural producers in less well developed regions have been doubly taxed: once by the economy-wide bias against agriculture, and a second time relative to other agricultural producers by the "irrigation bias" of public spending on agricultural development. A faster rate of technical progress in the areas favoured with better quality land endowments and public policy support has further disadvantaged producers in other agricultural areas by driving down real product prices and raising the real prices of mobile factors. Empirical partial equilibrium analyses of the distributional effects of new technologies have failed to capture these indirect costs of technological innovation. In this thesis a simple Johansen-style general equilibrium model is developed for the analysis of changes in prices and technology in stylised well-irrigated and poorlyirrigated agricultural environments. The model’s parameters of agricultural factor demand, supply response and technical change are estimated from Philippine data. Hypothetical and empirically measured technical change shocks are applied to the model. In this way the ceteris paribus effects of technical progress are assessed for their impact on wages, sectoral employment and factor intensity, and the functional and household distributions of income

Regulation of CHK1 inhibitor resistance by a c-Rel and USP1 dependent pathway

AbstractWe previously discovered that deletion of c-Rel in the Eμ-Myc mouse model of lymphoma results in earlier onset of disease, a finding that contrasted with the expected function of this NF-κB subunit in B-cell malignancies. Here we report that c-rel -/- Eµ-Myc cells have an unexpected and major defect in the CHK1 pathway, with almost undetectable levels of CHK1 and CLSPN protein leading to therapeutic resistance to the highly specific CHK1 inhibitor (CHK1i) CCT244747. Similar downregulation of CHK1 levels was also seen in CCT244747 resistant U20S osteosarcoma cells. Further investigation revealed that downregulation of the deubiquitinase USP1 is responsible, at least in part, for these effects. Importantly, we demonstrate that c-rel -/- Eµ-Myc lymphoma cells survive though upregulation of compensatory PI3K/AKT pathway activity. Moreover, targeting this pathway with Pictilisib (GDC-0941) effectively killed c-rel -/- Eµ-Myc in vivo, while having no effect on wild type Eμ-Myc cells. This data reveals an NF-κB regulated pathway controlling CHK1 activity in cancer cells and identifies a potential mechanism for both acquiring and overcoming CHK1i resistance in cancer patients.</jats:p

Single-cell multi-omics analysis of the immune response in COVID-19

Funder: Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine; doi: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001255Funder: University College London, Birkbeck MRC Doctoral Training ProgrammeFunder: The Jikei University School of MedicineFunder: Action Medical Research (GN2779)Funder: NIHR Clinical Lectureship (CL-2017-01-004)Funder: NIHR (ACF-2018-01-004) and the BMA FoundationFunder: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (grant 2017-174169) and from Wellcome (WT211276/Z/18/Z and Sanger core grant WT206194)Funder: UKRI Innovation/Rutherford Fund Fellowship allocated by the MRC and the UK Regenerative Medicine Platform (MR/5005579/1 to M.Z.N.). M.Z.N. and K.B.M. have been funded by the Rosetrees Trust (M944)Funder: Barbour FoundationFunder: ERC Consolidator and EU MRG-Grammar awardsFunder: Versus Arthritis Cure Challenge Research Grant (21777), and an NIHR Research Professorship (RP-2017-08-ST2-002)Funder: European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)Abstract: Analysis of human blood immune cells provides insights into the coordinated response to viral infections such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, which causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We performed single-cell transcriptome, surface proteome and T and B lymphocyte antigen receptor analyses of over 780,000 peripheral blood mononuclear cells from a cross-sectional cohort of 130 patients with varying severities of COVID-19. We identified expansion of nonclassical monocytes expressing complement transcripts (CD16+C1QA/B/C+) that sequester platelets and were predicted to replenish the alveolar macrophage pool in COVID-19. Early, uncommitted CD34+ hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells were primed toward megakaryopoiesis, accompanied by expanded megakaryocyte-committed progenitors and increased platelet activation. Clonally expanded CD8+ T cells and an increased ratio of CD8+ effector T cells to effector memory T cells characterized severe disease, while circulating follicular helper T cells accompanied mild disease. We observed a relative loss of IgA2 in symptomatic disease despite an overall expansion of plasmablasts and plasma cells. Our study highlights the coordinated immune response that contributes to COVID-19 pathogenesis and reveals discrete cellular components that can be targeted for therapy

TAX REFORM AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN DEVELOPING ECONOMIES: IS A DOUBLE DIVIDEND POSSIBLE?

We reconsider some analytical arguments on the double dividend, focusing on the small open developing economy case. Compared with the large, mature industrial economies usually considered, such economies differ in several respects, including the structure of tax revenues, commodity pricing and sectoral factor intensities. While a double dividend from environmentally-motivated taxes is not assured, the range of conditions for its existence seems broader than usually implied. Empirically, the scope for achieving both environmental improvements and diminished excess burden in developing economies may be greater as a side-effect of the reform of existing taxes than from imposition of explicit environmental taxes

Induced innovation and land degradation in developing country agriculture

With few exceptions, induced innovation theories give little consideration either to the role of distortions as determinants of the factor biases of innovations, or to the influence of technical progress – with or without distortions – on the sectoral structure of production. This analysis identifies demand for innovations as a function of a specific policy setting which both conditions and is conditioned by the structure of production. In this context, when some sectors contribute more than others to environmental externalities, private and social optima in the allocation of research resources may diverge. In some circumstances it may be optimal to use research budget allocations as second‐best substitutes for Pigouvian taxes

DEVELOPMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN ASIA: A SURVEY OF RECENT LITERATURE

Economic growth and environmental damage are associated, but the relationship is neither linear nor even monotonic. This is clearly seen in the diverse experiences of tropical Asian economies over recent decades. The nature of the growth-environment link depends on the changing composition of production and on growth-related changes in techniques and environmental policies; the enforcement of property rights over natural resources and over air and water quality is another important element. Moreover, environmental and economic policies interact: in effect, every economic policy that affects resource allocation is a de facto environmental measure. One important implication is that the environmental consequences of major policy shifts, such as the 'globalization' of many tropical Asian economies since about 1980, have been profound. The analytical literature on growth and the environment in Asia tends to agree that environmental damage is costly to regional economies, and has begun to identify and quantify some of the many causal linkages now recognized between economic development and the valuation and use of environmental and natural resource assets

International Trade and the Natural Resource 'Curse' in Southeast Asia: Does China's Growth Threaten Regional Development

China's growth, along with its increasing integration with world markets through WTO accession, abolition of Multifiber Arrangement (MFA) quotas, and reduced trade barriers with ASEAN, is expected to have significant effects on the structure of regional production and trade. Through bilateral trade growth as well as through competition with China in global markets, Southeast Asia's resource-abundant economies will become more intensive in natural resource-based exports and much less so in low-end, labor-intensive manufacturing such as garments. Both these effects will tend to increase demand for natural resources, one through a direct product market effect, the other by driving down the price of a complementary input, low-skill labor. A question that then arises is how these trends will interact with the other major phenomenon currently sweeping through Southeast Asia, namely decentralization. With reduced national government power and little or no accountability at the local level, the potential for disastrous rates of resource exploitation is high. If sufficiently severe, the combination of increased demand for natural resources and diminished constraints on their could expose the region to reduced rates of economic growth, a variant of the "natural resource curse" argument, which maintains that resource-abundant economies grow more slowly than others

ECONOMIC BOOM, FINANCIAL BUST, AND THE FATE OF THAI AGRICULTURE: WAS GROWTH IN THE 1990S TOO FAST?

Thailand's economic boom since 1987 resulted in absolute agricultural employment and land use declines. Both were caused by rapid wage growth due to nonagricultural investment. Irreversible land use changes and rapid agricultural mechanization have followed. Following the 1987 financial crisis, agriculture may no longer be able to absorb excess labor or dramatically increase output as in the past