An exploration of the need for and cost of selected trade facilitation measures in Asia-Pacific in the context of the WTO negotiations

This chapter concludes case studies on trade facilitation measures implementation in Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, India, and Nepaltrade facilitation measures, Bangladesh, China, Indoesnia, India, Nepal

An exploration of the need for and cost of selected trade facilitation measures in Asia-Pacific in the context of the WTO negotiations

limitation, Asia Pacific, trade facilitation, WTO agreement

Remarks on the Minimizing Geodesic Problem in Inviscid Incompressible Fluid Mechanics

We consider $L^2$ minimizing geodesics along the group of volume preserving maps $SDiff(D)$ of a given 3-dimensional domain $D$. The corresponding curves describe the motion of an ideal incompressible fluid inside $D$ and are (formally) solutions of the Euler equations. It is known that there is a unique possible pressure gradient for these curves whenever their end points are fixed. In addition, this pressure field has a limited but unconditional (internal) regularity. The present paper completes these results by showing: 1) the uniqueness property can be viewed as an infinite dimensional phenomenon (related to the possibility of relaxing the corresponding minimization problem by convex optimization), which is false for finite dimensional configuration spaces such as O(3) for the motion of rigid bodies; 2) the unconditional partial regularity is necessarily limited

Constraining the volatile fraction of planets from transit observations

The determination of the abundance of volatiles in extrasolar planets is very important as it can provide constraints on transport in protoplanetary disks and on the formation location of planets. However, constraining the internal structure of low-mass planets from transit measurements is known to be a degenerate problem. Using planetary structure and evolution models, we show how observations of transiting planets can be used to constrain their internal composition, in particular the amount of volatiles in the planetary interior, and consequently the amount of gas (defined in this paper to be only H and He) that the planet harbors. We show for low-mass gas-poor planets that are located close to their central star that assuming evaporation has efficiently removed the entire gas envelope, it is possible to constrain the volatile fraction of close-in transiting planets. We illustrate this method on the example of 55 Cnc e and show that under the assumption of the absence of gas, the measured mass and radius imply at least 20 % of volatiles in the interior. For planets at larger distances, we show that the observation of transiting planets at different evolutionary ages can be used to set statistical constraints on the volatile content of planets. These results can be used in the context of future missions like PLATO to better understand the internal composition of planets.Comment: accepted in Astronomy and Astrophysic