Africa's Silk Road Broadman, Harry G; Isik, Gozde
2006, 11-02-2006, 2007
eBook, Book
Open access
China and India's new-found interest in trade and investment with Africa - home to 300 million of the globe's poorest people and the world's most formidable development challenge - presents a ...significant opportunity for growth and integration of the Sub-Saharan continent into the global economy. Africa's Silk Road finds that China and India's South-South commerce with Africa is about far more than natural resources, opening the way for Africa to become a processor of commodities and a competitive supplier of goods and services to these countries - a major departure from its long established relations with the North. A growing number of Chinese and Indian businesses active in Africa operate on a global scale, work with world-class technologies, produce products and services according to the most demanding standards, and foster the integration of African businesses into advanced markets. There are significant imbalances, however, in these emerging commercial relationships. These can be addressed through a series of reforms in all countries:"At-the-border" reforms, such as elimination of China and India's escalating tariffs on Africa's leading exports, and elimination of Africa's tariffs on certain inputs that make exports uncompetitive "Behind-the-border" reforms in Africa, to unleash competitive market forces and strengthen its basic market institutions "Between-the-border" improvements in trade facilitation mechanisms to decrease transactions costs Reforms that leverage linkages between investment and trade, to allow African businesses to participate in global production networks that investments by Chinese and Indian firms can generate.
What type of trade agreement is the public willing to accept? Instead of focusing on individual concerns about market access and trade barriers, we argue that specific treaty design and, in ...particular, the characteristics of the dispute settlement mechanism, play a critical role in shaping public support for trade agreements. To examine this theoretical expectation, we conduct a conjoint experiment that varies diverse treaty-design elements and estimate preferences over multiple dimensions of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) based on a nationally representative sample in Germany. We find that compared to other alternatives, private arbitration, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), generates strong opposition to the trade agreement. As the single most important factor, this effect of dispute settlement characteristic is strikingly large and consistent across individuals’ key attributes, including skill levels, information, and national sentiment, among others.
How can a state with dysfunctional trade politics spur the negotiation of major free trade agreements (FTAs)? Using the case of Japan's participation in the trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), we ...develop an analytical framework on FTA diffusion that takes into account multidimensional (economic, legal and political) competitive pressures, and the ability of states to act as pivots in triggering FTA cascades. We disaggregate the makeup of a pivotal state into two main components - capability and credibility - and underscore Japan's significant latent capabilities, but also its serious credibility shortcomings. The TPP's boost to Japan's credibility raised the possibility of significant economic, legal and political externalities for specific countries which responded by accelerating FTA initiatives that had long stalled: the trilateral China-Japan-Korea FTA, a 16-state East Asian FTA and the Japan-European Union trade negotiations. This study extends the theoretical frontier in policy diffusion studies by clarifying the combination of factors that allows some states, but not others, to activate the externalities behind the dissemination of defensive FTAs.
In this book, Omer Preminger investigates how the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement is enforced by the grammar. Preminger argues that an empirically adequate theory of ...predicate-argument agreement requires recourse to an operation, whose obligatoriness is a grammatical primitive not reducible to representational properties, but whose successful culmination is not enforced by the grammar. Preminger's argument counters contemporary approaches that find the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement enforced through representational means. The most prominent of these is Chomsky's "interpretability"-based proposal, in which the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement is enforced through derivational time bombs. Preminger presents an empirical argument against contemporary approaches that seek to derive the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement exclusively fromderivational time bombs. He offers instead an alternative account based on the notion ofobligatory operationsbetter suited to the facts. The crucial data involves utterances that inescapably involve attempted-but-failed agreement and are nonetheless fully grammatical. Preminger combines a detailed empirical investigation of agreement phenomena in the Kichean (Mayan) languages, Zulu (Bantu), Basque, Icelandic, and French with an extensive and rigorous theoretical exploration of the far-reaching consequences of these data. The result is a novel proposal that has profound implications for the formalism that the theory of grammar uses to derive obligatory processes and properties.
The Genesis of the GATT Irwin, Douglas A.; Mavroidis, Petros C.; Sykes, Alan O.
06/2008
eBook
This book is part of a wider project on the economic logic behind the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This volume asks: What does the historical record indicate about the aims and ...objectives of the framers of the GATT? Where did the provisions of the GATT come from and how did they evolve through various international meetings and drafts? To what extent does the historical record provide support for one or more of the economic rationales for the GATT? This book examines the motivations and contributions of the two main framers of the GATT, the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as the smaller role of other countries. The framers desired a commercial agreement on trade practices as well as negotiated reductions in trade barriers. Both were sought as a way to expand international trade to promote world prosperity, restrict the use of discriminatory policies to reduce conflict over trade, and thereby establish economic foundations for maintaining world peace.
Aims
Studies in various cancer types have demonstrated discordance between results from different programmed death‐ligand 1 (PD‐L1) assays. Here, we compare the reproducibility and analytical ...concordance of four clinically developed assays for assessing PD‐L1‐positivity in tumour‐infiltrating immune cells in the tumour area (PD‐L1‐IC‐positivity) in triple‐negative breast cancer (TNBC).
Methods and results
Primary TNBC resection specimens (n = 30) were selected based on their PD‐L1‐IC‐positivity per VENTANA SP142 (<1%: 15 cases; 1–5%: seven cases; >5%: eight cases). Serial histological sections were stained for PD‐L1 using VENTANA SP142, VENTANA SP263, DAKO 22C3 and DAKO 28‐8. PD‐L1‐IC‐positivity and tumour cell expression (≥1 versus <1%) were scored by trained readers from seven sites using online virtual microscopy. The adjusted mean of PD‐L1‐IC‐positivity for SP263 (7.8%) was significantly higher than those for the other three assays (3.7–4.9%). Differences in adjusted means were statistically significant between SP263 and the other three assays (P < 0.0001) but not between the three remaining assays when excluding SP263 (P = 0.0961–0.6522). Intra‐class correlation coefficients revealed moderate‐to‐strong inter‐reader agreement for each assay (0.460–0.805) and poor‐to‐strong inter‐assay agreement for each reader (0.298–0.678) on PD‐L1‐IC‐positivity.
Conclusions
In this first multicentre study of different PD‐L1 assays in TNBC, we show that PD‐L1‐IC‐positivity for SP142, 22C3 and 28‐8 was reproducible and analytically concordant, indicating that these three assays may be analytically interchangeable. The relevance of the higher PD‐L1‐IC‐positivity for SP263 should be further investigated.
This article reviews and assesses the outcome of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris in December 2015. It ...argues that the Paris Agreement breaks new ground in international climate policy, by acknowledging the primacy of domestic politics in climate change and allowing countries to set their own level of ambition for climate change mitigation. It creates a framework for making voluntary pledges that can be compared and reviewed internationally, in the hope that global ambition can be increased through a process of 'naming and shaming'. By sidestepping distributional conflicts, the Paris Agreement manages to remove one of the biggest barriers to international climate cooperation. It recognizes that none of the major powers can be forced into drastic emissions cuts. However, instead of leaving mitigation efforts to an entirely bottom-up logic, it embeds country pledges in an international system of climate accountability and a 'ratchet mechanism', thus offering the chance of more durable international cooperation. At the same time, it is far from clear whether the treaty can actually deliver on the urgent need to de-carbonize the global economy. The past record of climate policies suggests that governments have a tendency to express lofty aspirations but avoid tough decisions. For the Paris Agreement to make a difference, the new logic of 'pledge and review' will need to mobilize international and domestic pressure and generate political momentum behind more substantial climate policies world-wide. It matters, therefore, whether the Paris Agreement's new approach can be made to work.
Mega-regional trade agreements progressively became a mechanism for the European Union (EU) to include a wide range of commitments in interregional negotiations. There is a well-developed scholarly ...debate on the EU's normative power, but we have not seen a similar weight of research on how third countries react to European influence. We suggest that the focus on the macro analysis of state-level interests hides that domestic groups are impacted by EU rules and mobilise to respond to what is perceived as an imposition of European norms. This article explores the EU-Mercosur Agreement and, considering the pivotal role of Brazil in potentially obstructing it, we conducted documentary research to analyse how Brazilian stakeholders have reacted to the EU norm-spreading. We mapped influential individuals and organisations engaged in disclosing their positions and influencing the negotiation outcome. The results demonstrate that while supporters are those directly benefiting from trade liberalisation, opposition comes mainly from sectors impacted by the beyond-trade norms.
Objectives:
Studies in adults have suggested that high‐resolution technology increases the diagnostic yield of antroduodenal manometry (ADM). However, there is no study comparing high‐resolution with ...low‐resolution ADM recordings as well as comparing the 2 types of high‐resolution display conventional line plot (CLP) and pressure topographic plots (PTP). We hypothesized that high‐resolution ADM is a superior diagnostic modality with higher inter‐observer and intra‐observer agreement compared with low‐resolution recordings.
Methods:
Twenty‐four anonymized ADM studies were blindly analyzed by 3 experienced pediatric neurogastroenterologists. All studies had been performed using a low‐compliance water‐perfused system with a 20‐channels catheter. Data were displayed as CLP, as both high‐resolution and low‐resolution, and PTP in different sessions with at least 6‐week interval. Accuracy was evaluated using previous established diagnosis and specific pre‐prandial and post‐prandial manometric patterns. Inter‐observer and intra‐observer agreements were calculated.
Results:
Analysis with high‐resolution CLP revealed a substantial inter‐observer agreement among the 3 observers regarding the diagnosis (Krippendorff’s alpha: 0.832; average pairwise percentage agreement: 88.9%). Conversely, PTP and low‐resolution CLP showed poor agreement for diagnoses (Krippendorff’s alpha: 0.600; average pairwise percentage agreement: 75.3%; Krippendorff’s alpha: 0.390; average pairwise percentage agreement: 60.2%, respectively). For the intra‐observer agreement, Krippendorff’s alpha ranges were 0.891–1 for CLP and 0.19393–0.34621 for PTP.
Conclusions:
Our study demonstrated higher diagnostic accuracy for high‐resolution ADM compared to the low‐resolution recordings. However, although it is well established for other motility investigations, PTP is not yet reliable in assessing foregut motor patterns. Advanced and more sophisticated software are clearly required for analyzing PTP display.
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