Suchergebnisse

Population aging is known to have significant social, political, and economic effects. One of the main concerns of population aging is that lower labor force participation and productivity of older workers lead to slower economic growth. Park and Shin (2012), examining the impact of population aging on 12 developing Asian economies, find that advanced population aging will have a sizable adverse impact on economic growth. In addition to slower economic growth, the industrial structure is likely to change as the overall demand will be altered by demographic shifts. Due to higher demands for healthcare and medical services, the share of these sectors will expand while others may fall in proportion.

While the negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have not shown much progress, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become the main tool for pursuing liberalization in international trade for decades. Modern PTAs have evolved, including not only liberalization in trade in goods, but also in investment, services and many other aspects of trade. Moreover, regulatory coherence and harmonization has been emphasized, due to the prevalence of multinationals and global value chains. Under the WTO regime, the tariffs of China, Japan and Korea are relatively low. Given the active supply chain in the region and the low level of tariff rates, it is in the three countries' interest to pursue deeper integration: harmonization of domestic economic policies removing behind-the-border barriers. Modern PTAs include deep integration provisions to increase compatibility across different member countries, to facilitate international trade. Deep integration PTAs go beyond the existing WTO agreements and include provisions dealing with new trade issues.

Investigation of North Korean military capability to conduct a war on its own. Possibility of warfare on the Korean peninsula. The substantial build-up of the North Korean army. Military balance between North and South Koreas. (DÜI-Sen)

In this paper, we analyze the contents of all preferential trade agreements (PTAs) of China, Japan, and Korea whose date of entry into force is prior to February 2015, on the basis of sectoral coverage and legal enforceability. Korea and Japan show a broader sectoral coverage and contain higher number of legally enforceable provisions in recent PTAs. While China's PTAs have shown low coverage of deep provisions in the past, more recent PTAs are converging to the depth of Korea's and Japan's PTAs as China began negotiating PTAs with developed countries. Overall, the three countries' legal inflation rate is below the world's PTAs and the EU PTAs average, but higher than the average of US PTAs.

Organics is the one of the fastest growing segments in food sales. Though the amount of certified organic land is increasing, the supply of organic foods lags behind demand in the United States. The reasons for this gap include a lack of government support for organics, and the peculiarities of organics as an innovation. In an attempt to close this gap, and increase the environmental sustainability of U.S. agriculture, this paper has two objectives. The first is to document the structural and institutional constraints to organic adoption. This is accomplished through a review of organic programs and policies in the U.S., in particular the National Organic Program. The second objective is to investigate the predictors of interest and the perceived barriers to organic adoption among pragmatic conventional producers in Texas, compared to organic and conventional producers. This is accomplished through a survey of a representative sample of producers in Texas. The results indicate that more than forty percent of producers who currently have conventional operations have at least some interest in organic production (pragmatic conventional producers). There are significant differences among the three groups in their structural and attitudinal characteristics related to organic adoption. For the pragmatic conventional producers, an increase in revenue would be a major facilitator of organic adoption. Their high levels of uncertainty regarding organic production and marketing, and especially organic certification constrain organic adoption. The results also reveal that the institutional setting in the U.S. hindered adoption. The paper concludes that increased institutional support would facilitate organic adoption.

Anonymous Connections asks how the Victorians understood the ethical, epistemological, and biological implications of social belonging and participation. Specifically, Tina Choi considers the ways nineteenth-century journalists, novelists, medical writers, and social reformers took advantage of spatial frames-of-reference in a social landscape transforming due to intense urbanization and expansion. New modes of transportation, shifting urban demographics, and the threat of epidemics emerged during this period as anonymous and involuntary forms of contact between unseen multitudes. While previous work on the early Victorian social body have tended to describe the nineteenth-century social sphere in static political and class terms, Chois work charts new critical terrain, redirecting attention to the productive--and unpredictable--spaces between individual bodies as well as to the new narrative forms that emerged to represent them. Anonymous Connections makes a significant contribution to scholarship on nineteenth-century literature and British cultural and medical history while offering a timely examination of the historical forebears to modern concerns about the cultural and political impact of globalization.--