129,685 research outputs found
Fighting cartels: some economics of council regulation (EC) 1/2003
No full textThis paper investigates the effectiveness of the new Council Regulation (EC) 1/2003 which replaces the mandatory notification and authorization system by a legal exception system. Effectiveness is operationalized via the two subcriteria compliance to Art. 81 EC Treaty and the probabilities of type I and type II errors committed by the European Commission. We identify four different types of Perfect Bayesian Nash Equilibria: fullcompliance, zero-compliance, positive-compliance and full-deterrence. We show that the Commission can, in principle, hit the full-compliance equilibrium, where the cartelizing firms fully obey the requirements of Art 81(3) EC Treaty and both error probabilities are zero. --competition law,cartel law enforcement,legal exception,imperfect
The impact of EC-92 on developing countries'trade : a dissenting view
No full textMost benefits of the European Community (EC-92) program will probably not come from marginal changes in trade flows. Those changes are important to European policymakers, but are of remote interest to developing countries. The main threats to developing countries are the diversion of investment funds to EC countries and continued external barriers, especially nontariff barriers. The EC expects higher growth and lower prices as a result of EC-92. The net effect on developing countries of the removal of internal trade barriers depends on the country's income and price elasticities with the EC. Current estimates suggest the effect will be small. If new external barriers emerge, or if EC-wide barriers replace national barriers, EC firms may collaborate more with large US or Japanese firms. None of these developments will improve developing countries'trade in manufactures and services. Investment in EC countries may increase to meet the extra demand, growth, or trade diversion resulting from EC-92. This could lead to increased investments in developing countries but given heavy indebtedness in developing countries, is more likely to divert investment funds, thus limiting their future production and growth. Technical standards in EC-92 may also be tougher than national standards in member countries, which could hurt developing country exporters. Is"Fortress Europe"likely? The EC Commission says no, but the Community's record is not good.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Trade and Regional Integration,Trade Policy
The establishment of foreign companies in Greece with particular reference to the compliance by Greece with EC law
No full textThis thesis deals with the conditions for the recognition and establishment of branches, agencies, off-shore units and subsidiaries of foreign public companies limited by shares in Greece. The relevant Greek laws are analysed in the first chapter, whereas chapter two deals with the comparative analysis of the Greek regime with the relevant provisions of EC law. In the third chapter (which is of particular interest due to the lack of relevant bibliography) reference is made to special Greek laws, that impose limitations on the activities of foreign companies in Greece, thus hindering their free establishment. Chapter four is devoted to the presentation of Greek law on the establishment of foreign maritime companies and the comparative analysis of the Greek regime with the regulations of the Treaty of Rome on this sphere. This analysis was considered necessary due to the vital importance of maritime companies and trade for the Greek economy and the particularly restrictive Greek regime on the establishment of foreign companies. Having concluded that Greek law violates the relevant EC regulations, an attempt is made to provide answers to the following questions: why did the EC fail to enforce its regulations in Greece and what is the protection offered to foreign companies that are prohibited from establishing there. The results of the thesis justify this research. Greece does not comply with EC law on the establishment of foreign companies. Furthermore, the enforcement of EC law in Greece seems impossible both on a Community and a national level. I only hope that the publication of more relevant analyses on the laws of member states will persuade the respective EC and national authorities that the passing of EC legislation does not suffice for the unification of Europe and the successful realization of the European ideal
EC Bananarama 1992 : the sequel - the EC Commission proposal
No full textSome European Community (EC) countries give preferred market access and high prices to bananas from selected developing countries or EC regional suppliers. This preferential status is regarded as a form of aid to these countries, most of which are developing small island economies. EC marketers of bananas from these preferred suppliers also benefit because of the high retail prices. Nonpreferred suppliers - mainly developing countries of Latin America - are hurt by the policies because access is denied or restricted and the lower demand depresses the world price for bananas. The Community's commitment to establish a single unified EC banana market on December 31, 1992 provides a timely opportunity to reform existing distortionary trade policies. The recently announced proposal of the Commission of ECs to regulate banana trade within a unified market relies on quotas to control imports. The proposal is extremely complicated. It is designed to severely restrict competition and to maintain the advantages of selected groups. The authors update their earlier analysis of world banana trade to reflect the market in 1993. They evaluate the implications of the Commission's proposal alongside existing and alternative policies. They find that current policies cost EC consumers about 0.3 billion a year to preferred suppliers. So, it costs EC consumers about 1.00 of aid toselect developing countries or regions. Additionally, every dollar of aid reaching preferred suppliers costs other developing country suppliers 5.30 cost to EC consumers, over 1.00 is lost in outright waste. Several plausible versions of the Commission's proposal are modelled. At best they are found to be slightly less costly than existing policies and at worst, considerably more costly. A 3.5 percent reduction in the quota allocation is estimated to lead to a 30 percent increase in the cost of the proposal. The authors conclude that the Commission's proposal for a unified EC banana policy appears to be little more than a way of replacing existing distortionary national policies with an almost equally distortionary single policy and market. The only difference: the costs would be borne by consumers in all EC countries rather than consumers in only some countries. Worse still, costs could increase. Markets that now gain the benefits of mostly open and competitive marketing such as Germany would face closed and uncompetitive conditions. For developing countries exporting bananas, the proposal offers little. At best conditions may be no worse than they are now. At worst the policy could hurt Latin American suppliers even more than current policies and introduce considerable confusion about the level of support to preferred suppliers. Under the proposed quota system aid will not be well targeted. A more efficient way of achieving the EC's aid commitment is through a small tariff of about 17 percent, used to fund a system of well-targeted deficiency payments or direct aid. The only reason for choosing the Commission's proposal over simpler, tariff-based options seems to be to maintain the vested interests of protected EC markteters. But this is contrary to the objectives of unification, which are to seek gains from increased competition and trade.Environmental Economics&Policies,Access to Markets,Markets and Market Access,Economic Theory&Research,Consumption
Politically Acceptable Trade Compromises Between The EC and The US: A Game Theory Approach
No full textA model is developed to quantify the special status of agriculture in the US and the EC trade negotiations. The role of special interests are measured by a policy goals function (PGF) whose weights are estimated for each special interest group. The analysis searches for mutually acceptable, mutually advantageous trade agreements between the US and the EC using a partial equilibrium world trade model coupled with game theory. Results suggest that it is in the best interest of the US (resp. EC) 'for the EC (resp. US) to liberalize whi1e the other follows the status quo policies of 1986. Mutual gains in PGF values to both countries pursuing "large" liberalizations are unlikely to exist, although "small" liberalizations may give rise to "small" mutual gains. Altering each country's action space, and permitting compensatory payments to the most influencial groups yields trade liberalization, but free trade does not result.game theory, trade liberalization, trade negotiations, International Relations/Trade,
Changing Views of Competition and EC Antitrust Law
No full textDuring the last few years the application of EC antitrust law has been subject to a number of changes, aiming at giving a greater role to economic analysis. This is leading to the abandonment of the traditional ordoliberal inspiration of EC competition law. This paper explores how justi ed is this change. In particular it argues that economic analysis provides di erent views of how competition works and thet it may a ect the application of antitrust at di erent stages. From this point of view a more economic approach is not necessarily incompatible with a reformed ordoliberal paradigm. What appears incompatible is an approach which substitutes eciency for competition. Such an approach has gained a role in the US antitrust, but its extension to the EC legal context is bound to produce a number of problems, and to lead to results di erent from the desired ones.antitrust,models of competition,ordoliberal paradigm,EC competition law
Libertà economiche e Internet
No full textLo sviluppo tecnologico apportato da Internet è tra i principali fattori di trasformazione dell’economia, già a partire dagli anni Novanta – molto prima che i governi nazionali comprendessero tali mutamenti – l’economia cambia e travolge gli Stati, realizzando una trasformazione radicale di modelli e soggetti protagonisti dell’ordine mondiale. A partire da tale premessa, il contributo propone una rilettura delle libertà economiche espanse dall'avvento della rete, in particolare, mettendo in evidenza opportunità e limiti
EC agricultural trade policies towards developing countries
No full textApart from demand and supply conditions, todays EC trade in agricultural products is determined not only by classical trade policy instruments, e.g. customs or quotas, but in addition by numerous internal instruments influencing consumption, production and storage. The protective character originates from specific sectoral policy goals having a long tradition in most of the six founding members of the EC. With the first and second enlargement of the EC the protective effects on third countries (trade diversion) aggravated not only because of the geographical extension, but because more and more products had been included in the protective system, respectively protection rates for some products had been increased due to demands of new member countries. During this process conflicts in objectives between internal producer demands and that of trade partners, being not members of the EC, became apparent. They were tackled in different ways, depending on the commodities and countries involved. Trade relations with developed countries, competing on markets for basic food commodities, e.g. grains, sugar, beef and milk products became increasingly impaired and the first serious attempt for a general reduction of trade barriers is only now undertaken in the GATT-Uruguay Round. Trade policy towards DCs was characterized by more cooperative approaches. The reasons are twofold. First, and most importantly, agricultural commodities produced in DCs are substitutes to EC-produced goods only to a small extent, either in production or in consumption. Secondly, there are some political commitments towards DCs in general or with respect to specific country groups such as the former colonies of France and the UK (now ACP-countries) or the mediterranean countries, where in the latter case geopolitical objectives are on the background of trade concessions.
RoMEO Studies 2: How academics wish to protect their open-access research paper
No full textThis paper is the second in a series of studies (see Gadd, E., C. Oppenheim, and S. Probets. RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving. Journal of Documentation. 59(3) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licences. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions, and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. Concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal licence agreement
Is EC class predictable from reaction mechanism?
No full textWe thank the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance (SULSA) and the Scottish Overseas Research Student Awards Scheme of the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) for financial support.Background: We investigate the relationships between the EC (Enzyme Commission) class, the associated chemical reaction, and the reaction mechanism by building predictive models using Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF) and k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN). We consider two ways of encoding the reaction mechanism in descriptors, and also three approaches that encode only the overall chemical reaction. Both cross-validation and also an external test set are used. Results: The three descriptor sets encoding overall chemical transformation perform better than the two descriptions of mechanism. SVM and RF models perform comparably well; kNN is less successful. Oxidoreductases and hydrolases are relatively well predicted by all types of descriptor; isomerases are well predicted by overall reaction descriptors but not by mechanistic ones. Conclusions: Our results suggest that pairs of similar enzyme reactions tend to proceed by different mechanisms. Oxidoreductases, hydrolases, and to some extent isomerases and ligases, have clear chemical signatures, making them easier to predict than transferases and lyases. We find evidence that isomerases as a class are notably mechanistically diverse and that their one shared property, of substrate and product being isomers, can arise in various unrelated ways. The performance of the different machine learning algorithms is in line with many cheminformatics applications, with SVM and RF being roughly equally effective. kNN is less successful, given the role that non-local information plays in successful classification. We note also that, despite a lack of clarity in the literature, EC number prediction is not a single problem; the challenge of predicting protein function from available sequence data is quite different from assigning an EC classification from a cheminformatics representation of a reaction.Peer reviewe
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