14 research outputs found
Special and Differential Treatment: A Mechanism to Promote Development?
No full textMuch has been made of "special and differential" treatment in the Doha Development Round of WTO negotiations. In particular, a conscious effort has been made to infer that special and differential treatment will promote development. While special and differential treatment may be a necessary evil given developing countries' higher adjustment costs, dignifying it as a development mechanism plays into the hands of protectionist interests. In particular, by allowing a general increase in the ability of developing countries to isolate their economies, it may reduce the efficacy of important forces that prod institutional reforms in developing countries. As institutional reform is one of the keys to economic development, lionizing special and differential treatment in the WTO is likely to be counterproductive.development, institutional reform, protectionism, special and differential treatment, WTO, International Development,
Investigating the extent to which inverse reinforcement learning can learn Rrewards from noisy demonstrations
No full textInverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function from expert demonstrations in a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The objective is to understand the underlying intentions and behaviors of experts and derive a reward function based on their reasoning, rather than their exact actions. However, expert demonstrations can be influenced by various types of noise (e.g., from random behavior) which can affect their accuracy and effectiveness in solving the MDP. This research investigates the capability of IRL to recover reward functions from noisy demonstrations. Three types of noises, namely Random Action Noise, Random Bias Noise, and Sparse Noise, are introduced and modeled. Demonstrations are generated with these noises, and the corresponding reward functions are recovered. Comparisons are made between the noisy and optimal recovered rewards using various metrics. The results indicate that IRL exhibits certain tolerance level against Random Events and Sparse Noise, while being more vulnerable to Random Bias Noise.CSE3000 Research ProjectComputer Science and Engineerin
An empirical study of the role of knowledge characteristics and tools on knowledge transfer in China-based Multinationals.: .
No full textInternational audienc
Vested Interests in Queuing and the Loss of the WTO's Club Good: The Long-run Costs of US Bilateralism
No full textIn recent years the United States has actively begun to engage in the negotiation of bilateral and regional trade agreements, a significant change from its long-standing commitment to the exclusive use of multilateral institutions for trade liberalization. While the "unequal economic power" effects of the strategic use of trade policy are well understood, the long-run implications of the creation of a queue for bilateral negotiations have been less fully explored. It is argued here that queuing creates vested interests that are antipathetic to multilateralism and threaten to erode the value of the WTO's "club good." As a result, the new two-track approach of the United States to trade negotiations may not be a sustainable policy.bilateralism, club good, queuing, International Relations/Trade,
The effects of organizational structure and job characteristics on export sales managers' job satisfaction and organizational commitment
No full textThis study draws on the job-modification framework and the job characteristics model to investigate the relationship between organizational structure, job characteristics, and work outcomes in export sales organizations. The study offers a conceptual framework and an empirical test using data collected from 160 UK exporters. The results indicate that formalization and centralization have a positive impact on job feedback. Moreover, centralization relates negatively to job autonomy and job variety. Higher levels of job autonomy, job variety and job feedback enhance the job satisfaction of export sales managers. In turn, export sales managers' job satisfaction relates positively to organizational commitment. Managerial implications are presented and future research avenues are identified.Organizational structure Job characteristics Export sales manager Work outcomes
Who Should Make the Rules of Trade? - The Complex Issue of Multilateral Environmental Agreements
No full textIn recent years, governments have negotiated a number of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) that include clauses regarding trade measures that conflict with their WTO obligations. As yet, there has been no formal dispute regarding which obligations should prevail, but the threat of conflict is perceived to be sufficiently grave for the parties to the Doha Ministerial to agree to examine the issue. Those who have strong preferences for environmental amenities have put considerable effort into fostering MEAs and are lobbying hard for them to prevail over the WTO in their areas of competence. The current lack of transparency caused by conflicting rules increases the degree of risk perceived in the international commercial environment. As MEAs allow trading partners to impose trade barriers on ratifying partners when the WTO rules would not, a perverse set of incentives is created that may lead to sub-optimal levels of environmental protection as well as sub-optimal amounts of investment in trade-related activities. The use of trade measures in MEAs is examined and suggestions are provided for removing the conflicting rules of trade.Doha, MEA, negotiations, ratification, trade measures, WTO, International Relations/Trade,
The effects of organizational structure and job characteristics on export sales managers’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment
No full textThis study draws on the job-modification framework and the job characteristics model to investigate the relationship between organizational structure, job characteristics, and work outcomes in export sales organizations. The study offers a conceptual framework and an empirical test using data collected from 160 UK exporters. The results indicate that formalization and centralization have a positive impact on job feedback. Moreover, centralization relates negatively to job autonomy and job variety. Higher levels of job autonomy, job variety and job feedback enhance the job satisfaction of export sales managers. In turn, export sales managers’ job satisfaction relates positively to organizational commitment. Managerial implications are presented and future research avenues are identified
Political Precaution, Pandemics and Protectionism
No full textDespite strong scientific evidence and representations made by international scientific organizations, a considerable number of countries have imposed import bans on pork in response to the H1N1 pandemic. The imposition of these barriers is contrary to WTO rules. The motivation for the imposition of these barriers does not appear to have arisen from producers’ requests or consumer lobbying – political precaution provides the motivation. There appears to be little control over political precaution in the rules of international trade. Hence, the balance between the strong rules of trade desired by firms wishing to engage in international commerce and the need, at times, for politicians to respond to requests for protection may be changing in favour of more protection. Keywords: H1N1, import bans, pork, precaution, protection, swineH1N1, import bans, pork, precaution, protection, swine, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Health Economics and Policy, International Relations/Trade, Livestock Production/Industries, Political Economy, Public Economics, Risk and Uncertainty,
Recession, International Trade and the Fallacies of Composition
No full textA truly global recession has not been manifest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As a result, the multilateral institutions put in place at the end of the Second World War to ensure that a major depression never happened again have not been tested. One of the lessons of the Great Depression was that governments had a major role to play in managing the economy. The use of subsidies to affect economic outcomes was one manifestation of this expanded role. In a recession, sector specific subsidies will likely be requested by firms. Subsidies can distort trade, leading to the potential for beggar thy neighbour subsidy wars. Subsidies will be difficult to discipline in a global recession.beggar thy neighbour, deficits, paradox of thrift, recession, subsidies, International Relations/Trade,
Beyond Within-Subject Performance: A Multi-Dataset Study of Fine-Tuning in the EEG Domain
No full textThere is a critical demand for BCI systems that can swiftly adapt to a new user and at the same time function with any user. We propose a fine-tuning approach for neural networks that serves a dual purpose; first, to minimize calibration times through requiring considerably less data - up to one-sixth - from the target subject than training from scratch, and second, to alleviate cases of user illiteracy by providing a substantial performance boost of over 11% in absolute accuracy from the features learned from other subjects. Ultimately, our adaptation method surpasses standard within-subject performance by a large margin in all subjects. We present ablation studies across three datasets, in which we demonstrate that fine-tuning outperforms other adaptation methods for BCI systems and that what matters most is the quantity of pre-training subjects, rather than their BCI-ability, achieving over 8% absolute increase in classification accuracy when scaling up the order of magnitude. Finally, we compare our approach to the state-of-the-art in EEG-based motor imagery and find it comparable, if not superior, to methods employing far more complex neural networks, obtaining 82.60% and 85.64% within-subject accuracy in the four-class BCIC IV-2a and binary MMI datasets respectively
