When tariff cuts don't boost import variety

Sustained growth of international trade since World War II has coincided with an array of trade agreements and gradual reduction of tariffs. How much declining tariffs boosted commerce and the impact of liberalized trade rules on a country's standard of living have been a central focus of trade-policy economic research. The welfare effects of trade liberalization can be quite different when viewed from either of two perspectives--from the intensive margin, where liberalizing countries import more of the same goods, or from the extensive margin, where countries import a greater variety of items. If a trade policy's impact on the extensive margin is significant, the benefits of liberalization, or the costs of protection, are potentially much higher. ; The distinction between intensive and extensive margins is quite important since countries' exports vary across industries and among trading partners, with commercial patterns changing over time. The range of goods countries trade tended to increase substantially following implementation of some preferential trading agreements that eliminated barriers. However, the actual contribution of lower tariffs may be, in fact, quite modest relative to growth in the variety of exports constituting the extensive margin. ; The range of goods exported to the U.S. has increased substantially, with little evidence that tariff liberalization is a primary cause. While these findings may be specific to the U.S. and the small tariff decreases in recent years, other factors related to productivity and economic growth appear to be more important in explaining increased export variety.Tariff ; International trade ; Imports

Expanding variety of goods underscores battle for competitive advantage

The variety of goods imported to the U.S. has dramatically increased in the past two decades. This growth reflects a widening circle of nations delivering the same goods to this country. In some cases, the U.S. makes its own version of these products--such as Hershey's chocolate, which is consumed within the U.S. and exported. At the same time, a growing number of competing brands originating from numerous other countries are sold here. ; Such increasing variety of trade has been characteristic of many goods. Analyzing this type of commercial activity helps explain how countries and firms gain a competitive advantage, how they organize their production internationally and how quickly they can expand into new product lines.International trade ; Imports ; Consumer behavior ; Productivity

Conceptual Modeling of the Impact of Smart Cities on Household Energy Consumption

AbstractSmart cities provide citizens with information on various urban services and allow them to track the impact of their resource consumption on the overall sustainability of their city. The premise of smart cities is that with improved access to information on resource consumption, residents make better use of those resources, resulting in increased sustainability of the city.This paper explores the influence of the smart city technologies on individuals’ resource consumption behavior, in particular on energy consumption, aiming at achieving environmentally sustainable development. This approach combines systems thinking with existing social science theories, such as cognitive and learning theories, to explore the impact of smart city information on individual decision-making and behavioral change. Using a CLIOS (complex, large-scale, interconnected, open, and sociotechnical) model, a conceptual soft systems model, the paper explores the impact of smart city technologies on behavioral change of households with regards to energy consumption

Vertical specialization, intermediate tariffs, and the pattern of trade: assessing the role of tariff liberalization to U.S. bilateral trade 1989-2001

How important are intermediate tariffs in determining trade patterns? Empirical work measuring the impact of tariff liberalization most commonly focuses on the effects of barriers imposed by importers, but exporter trade policy should also matter when exports are produced with imported intermediates. Guided by extensions of the Eaton and Kortum (2002) model, I study the impact of trade liberalizations on U.S. bilateral trade from 1989-2001. I estimate the impact on U.S. bilateral trade flows of both intermediate tariffs imposed by countries exporting to the United States and U.S. tariffs. My empirical estimates suggest that, especially for less developed countries, their own liberalizations have been quantitatively much more important in explaining changes in bilateral trade patterns, on average 4.2 times larger than the impact of US liberalizations. For the entire sample of countries, countries' own liberalizations have been 2.2 times more important.Tariff ; Trade barriers

Review of value and lean in complex product development

Approaches are being developed to improve complex product development from the perspective of value generation. However, the ideas and their relationships are still not fully articulated. We provide a structured literature review, with a primary but not exclusive focus on value ideas relating to lean in complex system product development. A framework organizes the concepts, methods, and their relationships. It clarifies the value delivery mechanism and could help to understand and thus improve value systems. Areas deserving further research attention are identified.We wish to thank the reviewers and editor for their valuable feedback, which helped to substantially improve early ver-sions of this articleThis is the accepted manuscript for a paper published in Systems Engineering Volume 18, Issue 2, pages 192–207, March 2015, DOI: 10.1002/sys.2129

Health care provider communication training in rural Tanzania empowers HIV-infected patients on antiretroviral therapy to discuss adherence problems

Objectives: Self-reported adherence assessment in HIV-infected patients on antiretroviral therapy (ART) is challenging and may overestimate adherence. The aim of this study was to improve the ability of health care providers to elicit patients’ reports of nonadherence using a “patient-centred” approach in a rural sub-Saharan African setting. Methods: A prospective interventional cohort study of HIV-infected patients on ART for ≥ 6 months attending an HIV clinic in rural Tanzania was carried out. The intervention consisted of a 2-day workshop for health care providers on patient-centred communication and the provision of an adherence assessment checklist for use in the consultations. Patients’ self-reports of nonadherence (≥ 1 missed ART dose/4 weeks), subtherapeutic plasma ART concentrations (< 2.5th percentile of published population-based pharmacokinetic models), and virological and immunological failure according to the World Health Organization definition were assessed before and after (1–3 and 6–9 months after) the intervention. Results: Before the intervention, only 3.3% of 299 patients included in the study reported nonadherence. Subtherapeutic plasma ART drug concentrations and virological and immunological failure were recorded in 6.5%, 7.7% and 14.5% of the patients, respectively. Two months after the intervention, health care providers detected significantly more patients reporting nonadherence compared with baseline (10.7 vs. 3.3%, respectively; P < 0.001), decreasing to 5.7% after 6–9 months. A time trend towards higher drug concentrations was observed for efavirenz but not for other drugs. The virological failure rate remained unchanged whereas the immunological failure rate decreased from 14.4 to 8.7% at the last visit (P = 0.002). Conclusions: Patient-centred communication can successfully be implemented with a simple intervention in rural Africa. It increases the likelihood of HIV-infected patients reporting problems with adherence to ART; however, sustainability remains a challenge

Identification of Class I HLA T Cell Control Epitopes for West Nile Virus

The recent West Nile virus (WNV) outbreak in the United States underscores the importance of understanding human immune responses to this pathogen. Via the presentation of viral peptide ligands at the cell surface, class I HLA mediate the T cell recognition and killing of WNV infected cells. At this time, there are two key unknowns in regards to understanding protective T cell immunity: 1) the number of viral ligands presented by the HLA of infected cells, and 2) the distribution of T cell responses to these available HLA/viral complexes. Here, comparative mass spectroscopy was applied to determine the number of WNV peptides presented by the HLA-A*11:01 of infected cells after which T cell responses to these HLA/WNV complexes were assessed. Six viral peptides derived from capsid, NS3, NS4b, and NS5 were presented. When T cells from infected individuals were tested for reactivity to these six viral ligands, polyfunctional T cells were focused on the GTL9 WNV capsid peptide, ligands from NS3, NS4b, and NS5 were less immunogenic, and two ligands were largely inert, demonstrating that class I HLA reduce the WNV polyprotein to a handful of immune targets and that polyfunctional T cells recognize infections by zeroing in on particular HLA/WNV epitopes. Such dominant HLA/peptide epitopes are poised to drive the development of WNV vaccines that elicit protective T cells as well as providing key antigens for immunoassays that establish correlates of viral immunity. © 2013 Kaabinejadian et al

Stakeholder-assisted modeling and policy design for engineering systems

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, 2005.Page 462 blank.Includes bibliographical references.There is a growing realization that stakeholder involvement in decision-making for large- scale engineering systems is necessary and crucial, both from an ethical perspective, as well as for improving the chances of success for an engineering systems project. Traditionally however, stakeholders have only been involved after decision-makers and experts have completed the initial decision-making process with little or no input from stakeholders. This has resulted in conflict and delays for engineering systems with brilliant technical designs that do not address the larger context of the broader social goals. One of the fears of experts is that the involvement of stakeholders will result in technical solutions that are of poor quality. The hypothesis of this research is that an effective involvement of stakeholders in the decision-making process for engineering systems from the problem definition stage through the system representation can produce a system representation that is superior to representations produced in an expert-centered process. This dissertation proposes a Stakeholder-Assisted Modeling and Policy Design (SAM-PD) process for effectively involving stakeholders in engineering systems with wide-ranging social and environmental impact. The SAM-PD process is designed based on insights from existing engineering systems methodologies and alternative dispute resolution literature. Starting with a comprehensive analysis of engineering systems methodologies, the role of experts in engineering systems decision-making and existing stakeholder involvement mechanisms, this research explores the role of cognitive biases of engineering systems representation through actual experiments,(cont.) and concludes that the process of defining a system through its boundaries, components and linkages is quite subjective, and prone to implicit value judgments of those participating in the system representation process. Therefore to account for stakeholder interests, concerns and knowledge in engineering systems decision-making, it is important to have a collaborative process that enables stakeholders to jointly shape the problem definition and model outputs necessary for decision-making. Based on insights from the literature, this research developed a collaborative process for engineering systems decision-making, and explored its merits and drawbacks in applying it to the Cape Wind offshore wind energy project involving actual stakeholders in the system representation process. It further explored the potential application of such a process to the Mexico City transportation/air pollution system and the Cape and Islands Renewable Energy Planning project. The Cape Wind case study showed that a stakeholder-assisted system representation was superior to the equivalent expert-centered system representation used by the permitting agency as a basis for decision-making, in that it served as a thought expander for stakeholders, captured some effects that the expert-centered representation could not capture, better took into account social, economic and political feasibility and was more useful in suggesting better alternative strategies for the system. The case studies also highlighted the importance of the convening organization, institutional readiness for collaborative processes, the importance of stakeholder selection and process facilitation, the potentials of system representation as a basis for stakeholder dialogue and the importance of quantification versus evaluation of system representations.(cont.) The basic implication of this research is that it would be myopic of engineering systems professionals to shift the burden of stakeholder involvement to decision-makers, and keep the analysis a merely expert-centered process. Due to the many subjective choices that have to be made with regards to system boundaries, choice of components, inclusion of linkages, nature of outputs and performance metrics and assumptions about data and relationships, system analysts are in fact not producing the analysis that will help the decision-making process. The best airport designs done with multi-tradeoff analysis and intricate options analysis may lead to nowhere if stakeholders affected by the project do not see their interests reflected in the analysis. The notion is that a good systems analysis is not one that impresses other engineering systems professionals with its complexity, but one that can actually address the problems at hand.by Ali Mostashari.Ph.D

A risk assessment approach to improve the resilience of a seaport system using Bayesian networks

Over the years, many efforts have been focused on developing methods to design seaport systems, yet disruption still occur because of various human, technical and random natural events. Much of the available data to design these systems are highly uncertain and difficult to obtain due to the number of events with vague and imprecise parameters that need to be modelled. A systematic approach that handles both quantitative and qualitative data, as well as means of updating existing information when new knowledge becomes available is required. Resilience, which is the ability of complex systems to recover quickly after severe disruptions, has been recognised as an important characteristic of maritime operations. This paper presents a modelling approach that employs Bayesian belief networks to model various influencing variables in a seaport system. The use of Bayesian belief networks allows the influencing variables to be represented in a hierarchical structure for collaborative design and modelling of the system. Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is utilised to evaluate the relative influence of each influencing variable. It is envisaged that the proposed methodology could provide safety analysts with a flexible tool to implement strategies that would contribute to the resilience of maritime systems