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Flexible Trade Policies in Agriculture Sectors of Developing Countries: Proposing a Technical Approach for Sri Lanka

After two decades of liberalized economic policies together with early accession to WTO, Sri Lanka could not achieve the exp ected fast economic growth. Agriculture growth in particular fell sharply. WTO Doha round expects a deeper liberalization. Instead, we will benefit more from being a friend of the "Development Box" and securing flexibility in tariff revisions. In asserting this, the paper analyzes impacts of liberalized policies on agriculture, stress the need for flexible trade policies and formulate a design for self designating Special Products (SP) and Special Safeguard Mechanisms (SSM). The past economic growth favoured mostly urbanised population. Sluggish rural agricultural growth, hurt with increased food imports, was the main cause of this unbalance development. Therefore the sustainable growth of the agriculture sector, facilitated by some protection, is necessary for equitable economic development. As the country budget restricts domestic support, the SP and SSM modalities would be the most suitable protective tools. WTO Hong Kong meeting allows flexibility in tariff schedules to address rural development (RD), food security (FS) and livelihood security (LS) needs through protection. The study identified appropriate criteria to designate agriculture products contributing to RD, FS, and LS for protection from dumping and import surges. The study recommends SP and also Volume and Price triggers for products as appropriate to invoke SSM for Sri Lanka.Sri Lanka, trade liberalization, market access, special products, special safeguard mechanisms, International Relations/Trade,

Market-Based Approaches to Pollution Control in the Lake Taupo Catchment in New Zealand

There are at least five general reasons why market-based policies fail to address some of the most basic environmental objectives. This study evaluates the available biophysical and economic data against these criteria and concludes that market-based approaches should be employed cautiously in pollution control under the present system and the available technology for farming in the lake area. The most effective market-based instrument to control pollution, in this case, seems to be negative incentives, as the public net cost of farming is extremely higher than the private net benefits. However, the intensity of taxes that would be effective in this regard would definitely results negative net farm benefits. The principle alternative, emission trading, would be effective with a highly regulated system given long-term political willingness to address the problem effectively.Pollution, Market-based policies, Emission trading, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Real Estate Market Efficiency: A Survey of Literature

In this paper, we discuss the question whether or not the real estate market is efficient. We define market efficiency and the efficient market hypothesis as it had been developed in the literature on financial markets. Then, we discuss the empirical evidence that exists concerning the efficiency or inefficiency of financial markets, usually seen as the reference markets as far as market efficiency is concerned. In a separate section, we turn to the real estate market. There, we define the real estate market and discuss various aspects that are decisive for the efficiency of that market. As it turns out, the result found in the literature is inconclusive. Majority of studies provide evidence supporting inefficiency of the real estate market while several studies maintain the notion of real estate market efficiency.

The Size of the Government and Economic Growth: An Empirical Study of Sri Lanka

The new growth theory establishes, among other things, that government expenditure can manipulate economic growth of a country. This study attempts to explain whether government expenditure increases or decreases economic growth in the context of Sri Lanka. Results obtained applying an analytical framework based on time series and second degree polynomial regressions are generally consistent with previous findings: government expenditure and economic growth are positively correlated; excessive government expenditure is negatively correlated with economic growth; and an open economy promotes growth. In a separate section, the paper examines Armey’s (1995) idea of a quadratic curve that explains the level of government expenditure in an economy and the corresponding level of economic growth. The findings confirm the possibility of constructing the Armey curve for Sri Lanka, and it estimates the optimal level of government expenditure to be approximately 27 per cent. This paper adds to the literature indicating that the Armey curve is a reality not only for developed economies, but also for developing economies.government expenditure, economic growth, time series regression, polynomial regression, Armey curve

TRANSACTION COSTS, ECONOMIC INSTRUMENTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES

This study has attempted to distinguish the alternative forms of transaction costs referred to the environmental policy literature and to bring these transaction costs into a unified theory. The optimal choice of economic instrument between Pigouvian taxes and tradable permits is shown to depend on the level of transaction costs as opposed to the standard model where both emission taxes and permits are first best policies to achieve a level of emissions. It is demonstrated that inclusion of transaction costs decreases the socially optimal emission level as compared to the standard model. Instrument selection is affected by the functional specification for instrument costs for both firm and regulator level. Depending on the nature of these costs optimal economic instruments will be different.Transaction Costs, Economic Instrument Selection, Environmental Economics and Policy, Industrial Organization,

A stochastic analysis of goods allocation by queuing and the prevention of violence

When demand for a good exceeds its supply, queuing mechanisms are commonly used to allocate the good in question to citizens. However, very long queues result in excessive wait times and this can lead to violence. As such, the purpose of this paper is to analyze two stochastic models of goods allocation with queuing and the possibility of violence. In the first model, there is no capacity constraint. Using this model, we compute the long run delay per citizen in allocating the pertinent good. Next, we discuss the computation of the equilibrium probabilities for our discrete-time Markov chain theoretic model. In the second model, we capture the violence aspect of the underlying story explicitly with a capacity constraint. Then, we compute the long run fraction of citizens who are not provided the relevant good and the long run fraction of time the good allocating public official is busy.Capacity Constraint, Goods Allocation, Queuing Mechanism, Scarcity, Violence

Going Deeper into Action Recognition: A Survey

Understanding human actions in visual data is tied to advances in complementary research areas including object recognition, human dynamics, domain adaptation and semantic segmentation. Over the last decade, human action analysis evolved from earlier schemes that are often limited to controlled environments to nowadays advanced solutions that can learn from millions of videos and apply to almost all daily activities. Given the broad range of applications from video surveillance to human-computer interaction, scientific milestones in action recognition are achieved more rapidly, eventually leading to the demise of what used to be good in a short time. This motivated us to provide a comprehensive review of the notable steps taken towards recognizing human actions. To this end, we start our discussion with the pioneering methods that use handcrafted representations, and then, navigate into the realm of deep learning based approaches. We aim to remain objective throughout this survey, touching upon encouraging improvements as well as inevitable fallbacks, in the hope of raising fresh questions and motivating new research directions for the reader

Spatial Dynamics of the Livestock Sector in the United States: Do Environmental Regulations Matter?

This study examines the factors affecting state annual share of national inventory for each of the hog, dairy, and fed-cattle sectors using data from the 48 contiguous states for 1976 to 2000. The paper develops a state specific, time-series environmental stringency measure and introduces instrumental variables to control for the possible endogeneity bias between livestock production decisions and regulatory stringency. The results indicate that differences in the severity of environmental regulations facing livestock producers have had a significant influence on production decisions in the dairy, and particularly the hog sector.environmental regulation stringency, fixed-effects model, instrumental variable, livestock production, location choice, panel data analysis, pollution havens, Environmental Economics and Policy,