International Assistance and Cooperation for Access to Essential Medicines

Access to essential medicines is a critical problem that plagues many developing countries. With a daunting number of domestic constraints technologically, economically, and otherwise developing countries are faced with a steep uphill battle to meet the human rights obligation of providing essential medicines immediately. To meet these challenges, the international human rights obligations of international assistance and cooperation can play a key role to help developing countries fulfill the need for access to essential medicines. This article seeks to highlight and expand upon the current understanding of international assistance and cooperation for access to essential medicines through a review of obligations identified in international human rights law and a synthesis of official guidance provided on the matter

Regional monopoly and interregional and intraregional competition: the parallel trade in Coca-Cola between Shanghai and Hangzhou in China

This article uses a “principal-agent-subagent” analytical framework and data that were collected from field surveys in China to (1) investigate the nature and causes of the parallel trade in Coca-Cola between Shanghai and Hangzhou and (2) assess the geographic and theoretical implications for the regional monopolies that have been artificially created by Coca-Cola in China. The parallel trade in Coca-Cola is sustained by its intraregional rivalry with Pepsi-Cola in Shanghai, where Coca-Cola (China) (the principal) seeks to maximize its share of the Shanghai soft-drinks market. This goal effectively supersedes the market-division strategy of Coca-Cola (China), since the gap in wholesale prices between the Shanghai and Hangzhou markets is higher than the transaction costs of engaging in parallel trade. The exclusive distributor of Coca-Cola in the Shanghai market (the subagent) makes opportunistic use of a situation in which it does not have to bear the financial consequences of the major residual claimants (the principal and other agents) and has an incentive to enter the nondesignated Coca-Cola market of Hangzhou by crossing the geographic boundary between the two regional monopolies devised by Coca-Cola. The existence of parallel trade in Coca-Cola promotes interregional competition between the Shanghai and Hangzhou bottlers (the agents). This article enhances an understanding of the economic geography of spatial equilibrium, disequilibrium, and quasi-equilibrium of a transnational corporation's distribution system and its artificially created market boundary in China

Simulations of Prominence Formation in the Magnetized Solar Corona by Chromospheric Heating

Starting from a realistically sheared magnetic arcade connecting chromospheric, transition region to coronal plasma, we simulate the in-situ formation and sustained growth of a quiescent prominence in the solar corona. Contrary to previous works, our model captures all phases of the prominence formation, including the loss of thermal equilibrium, its successive growth in height and width to macroscopic dimensions, and the gradual bending of the arched loops into dipped loops, as a result of the mass accumulation. Our 2.5-dimensional, fully thermodynamically and magnetohydrodynamically consistent model mimics the magnetic topology of normal-polarity prominences above a photospheric neutral line, and results in a curtain-like prominence above the neutral line through which the ultimately dipped magnetic field lines protrude at a finite angle. The formation results from concentrated heating in the chromosphere, followed by plasma evaporation and later rapid condensation in the corona due to thermal instability, as verified by linear instability criteria. Concentrated heating in the lower atmosphere evaporates plasma from below to accumulate at the top of coronal loops and supply mass to the later prominence constantly. This is the first evaporation-condensation model study where we can demonstrate how the formed prominence stays in a force balanced state, which can be compared to the Kippenhahn-Schluter type magnetohydrostatic model, all in a finite low-beta corona

Rigidity of irreducible Hermitian symmetric spaces of the compact type under K"ahler deformation

We study deformations of irreducible Hermitian symmetric spaces $S$ of the compact type, known to be locally rigid, as projective-algberaic manifolds and prove that no jump of complex structures can occur. For each $S$ of rank $\ge 2$ there is an associated reductive linear group $G$ such that $S$ admits a holomorphic $G$-structure, corresponding to a reduction of the structure group of the tangent bundle. $S$ is characterized as the unique simply-connected compact complex manifold admitting such a $G$-structure which is at the same time integrable. To prove the deformation rigidity of $S$ it suffices that the corresponding integrable $G$-structures converge. We argue by contradiction using the deformation theory of rational curves. Assuming that a jump of complex structures occurs, cones of vectors tangent to degree-1 rational curves on the special fiber $X_0$ are linearly degenerate, thus defining a proper meromorphic distribution $W$ on $X_0$. We prove that such $W$ cannot possibly exist. On the one hand, integrability of $W$ would contradict the fact that $b_2(X)=1$. On the other hand, we prove that $W$ would be automatically integrable by producing families of integral complex surfaces of $W$ as pencils of degree-1 rational curves. For the verification that there are enough integral surfaces we need a description of generic cones on the special fiber. We show that they are in fact images of standard cones under linear projections. We achieve this by studying deformations of normalizations of Chow spaces of minimal rational curves marked at a point, which are themselves Hermitian symmetric, irreducible except in the case of Grassmannians