169,765 research outputs found
Novel Indicators of the Trade and Welfare Effects of Agricultural Distortions in OECD Countries.
No full textAgricultural markets in OECD countries have long been highly distorted by government policies. Traditional weighted average aggregates of the price distortions they involve, such as producer and consumer support estimates (PSEs and CSEs), can be poor indicators of the trade restrictiveness and economic welfare losses associated with them, especially if a countryÂ’s support estimates vary a lot across the product range. Supplementing those measures with estimates of trade and welfare effects of price supports requires the use of a sectoral or economy wide model and price elasticity data. This paper shows that, in the absence of such a model, and a willingness to make simple assumptions about elasticities, it is possible to generate more satisfactory indicators than PSEs and CSEs using no more than the price and quantity data used to generate them. These new indexes provide an attractive supplement to the current policy monitoring regime developed by the OECD Secretariat.Distorted incentives, agricultural price and trade policies, trade restrictiveness index
Novel indicators of the trade and welfare effects of agricultural distortions in OECD countries
No full textAgricultural markets in OECD countries have long been highly distorted by government policies. Traditional weighted average aggregates of the price distortions involved, such as producer and consumer support estimates can be poor indicators of the trade restrictiveness and economic welfare losses associated with them, especially if a country's support estimates vary a lot across the product range. Certainly estimates of trade and welfare effects of price supports can be obtained from sector or economy-wide models using price elasticity estimates, but the results can be contentiousif there is no consensus on what model specification and elasticity parameters to use. This paper shows that, if there is a willingness to accept simple assumptions about elasticities, it is possible to generate indicators of the welfare and trade restrictiveness of agricultural policies using no more than the price and quantity data needed to generate producer and consumer support estimates. These new indexes thus provide an attractive supplement to the current policy monitoring regime developed by the OECD Secretariat.Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Emerging Markets,Crops&Crop Management Systems,Free Trade
CroSeR: Cross-language Semantic Retrieval of Open Government Data
No full textCroSer (Cross-language Semantic Retrieval) is an IR system able to discover links between e-gov services described in different languages. CroSeR supports public administrators to link their own source catalogs of e-gov services described in any language to a target catalog whose services are described in English and are available in the Linked
Open Data (LOD) cloud. Our system is based on a cross-language semantic matching method that i) translates service labels in English using a machine translation tool, ii) extracts a Wikipedia-based semantic repre
sentation from the translated service labels using Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA), iii) evaluates the similarity between two services using their Wikipedia-based representations. The user selects a service in a source
catalog and exploits the ranked list of matches suggested by CroSeR to
establish a relation (of type narrower, equivalent, or broader match) with
other services in the English catalog. The method is independent from
the language adopted in the source catalog and it does not assume the availability of information about the services other than very short text
descriptions used as service labels. CroSeR is a web application accessible
via http://siti-rack.siti.disco.unimib.it:8080/croser/
Welfare- and trade-based indicators of national distortions to agricultural incentives
No full textDistorted incentives, agricultural and trade policy reforms, national agricultural development, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade, F13, F14, Q17, Q18,
Agricultural distortions in Sub-Saharan Africa : trade and welfare indicators, 1961 to 2004
No full textFor decades, agricultural price and trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa have hampered farmers’ contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction. Although there has been much policy reform over the past two decades, the injections of agricultural development funding, together with ongoing regional and global trade negotiations, have brought distortionary policies under the spotlight once again. A key question asked of those policies is: How much are they still reducing national economic welfare and trade? Economy-wide models are able to address that question, but they are not available for many poor countries. Even where they are, typically they apply to just one particular previous year and so are unable to provide trends in effects over time. This paper provides a partial-equilibrium alternative to economy-wide modeling, by drawing on a modification of so-called trade restrictiveness indexes to provide theoretically precise indicators of the trade and welfare effects of agricultural policy distortions to producer and consumer prices over the past half-century. The authors generate time series of country level indexes, as well as Africa-wide aggregates. They also provide annual commodity market indexes for the region, and a sense of the relative importance of the key policy instruments used.Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Emerging Markets,Trade Policy,Free Trade
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Mitomycin C in highly myopic eyes - Author reply
No full textOphthalmology. 2005 Feb;112(2):208-18; discussion 219.
Mitomycin C modulation of corneal wound healing after photorefractive keratectomy in highly myopic eyes.
Gambato C, Ghirlando A, Moretto E, Busato F, Midena E.
SourceRefractive Surgery Service and Antimetabolite Therapy Research Unit, Department of Ophthalmology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Abstract
PURPOSE: To evaluate the role of topical mitomycin C in corneal wound healing (CWH) after photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) in highly myopic eyes.
DESIGN: Prospective, double-masked, randomized clinical trial.
PARTICIPANTS: Seventy-two eyes of 36 patients affected by high (>7 diopters) myopia.
METHODS: In each patient, one eye was randomly assigned to PRK with intraoperative topical 0.02% mitomycin C application, and the fellow eye was treated with a placebo. Postoperatively, mitomycin C-treated eyes received artificial tears (3 times daily, tapered in 3 months), whereas the fellow eye was treated with fluorometholone sodium 2% and artificial tears (3 times daily, tapered in 3 months).
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Uncorrected visual acuity (UCVA) and best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), contrast sensitivity, manifest refraction, and biomicroscopy. Contrast sensitivity was determined using the Pelli-Robson chart. Corneal confocal microscopy documented CWH.
RESULTS: Mean follow-up was 18 months (range, 12-36). No side effects or toxic effects were documented. At 12-month follow-up examination, UCVAs (logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution) were 0.4+/-0.48 and 0.5+/-0.53 (P = .03) in mitomycin C-treated eyes and corticosteroid-treated eyes, respectively. At 1 year, corneal haze developed in 20% of corticosteroid-treated eyes, versus 0% of mitomycin C-treated eyes. At 12, 24, and 36 months, corneal confocal microscopy showed activated keratocytes and extracellular matrix significantly more evident in untreated eyes (Ps = 0.004, 0.024, and 0.046, respectively).
CONCLUSION: Topical intraoperative application of 0.02% mitomycin C can reduce haze formation in highly myopic eyes undergoing PRK.
Comment in
Ophthalmology. 2006 Feb;113(2):357; author reply 357-8
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
A Multi-Language Comparison of Influences on Author Verification using Character N-Grams
No full textWe create a new multi-language corpus for author verification based on Wikipedia talkpages, and evaluate the influence that differences in topic and time have on character n-gram author profiles. Topic alignment between two texts is found to increase author verification precision, and an authors writing style is found to change over time, but not more significantly after 3 years than after 1 year.Information ArchitectureWISElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Agricultural Distortion Patterns Since the 1950s: What Needs Explaining?
No full textThis paper summarizes a new database that sheds light on the impact of trade-related policy developments over the past half century on distortions to agricultural incentives and thus also to consumer prices for food in 75 countries spanning the per capita income spectrum. Price-support policies of advanced economies hurt not only domestic consumers and exporters of other products but also foreign producers and traders of farm products, and they reduce national and global economic welfare. On the other hand, the governments of many developing countries have directly taxed their farmers over the past half-century, both directly (e.g., export taxes) and also indirectly via overvaluing their currency and restricting imports of manufactures. Thus the price incentives facing farmers in many developing countries have been depressed by both own-country and other countriesÂ’ agricultural price and international trade policies. We summarize these and realted stylized facts that can be drawn from a new World Bank database that is worthy of the attention of political economy theorists, historians and econometricians. These indicators can be helpful in addressing such questions as the following: Where is there still a policy bias against agricultural production? To what extent has there been overshooting in the sense that some developing-country food producers are now being protected from import competition along the lines of the examples of earlier-industrializing Europe and Japan? What are the political economy forces behind the more-successful reformers, and how do they compare with those in less-successful countries where major distortions in agricultural incentives remain? And what explains the pattern of distortions across not only countries but also industries and in the choice of support or tax instruments within the agricultural sector of each country?Political economy, agricultural price and trade policies
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