Search results for "TRADE"

Outward Foreign Direct Investment by Chinese National Oil Companies

2015

Developed countries have become increasingly suspicious about the rapid growth of Chinese investments in their home countries and abroad, commonly citing potential threats to national security and global governance as the main sources of anxieties. As a result, policy measures in some developed markets have been put in place to create additional regulation and oversight, specifically in highly regulated and strategic industries, such as the oil sector. This article refutes a number of popular myths about Chinese investments in the global oil industry, and suggests a more rigorous dialogue with the Chinese authorities relating to their integration into international institutions.

Managing a boreal forest landscape for providing timber, storing and sequestering carbon

2015

Human well-being highly depends on ecosystem services and this dependence is expected to increase in the future with increasing population and economic growth. Studies that investigate trade-offs between ecosystem services are urgently needed for informing policy-makers. We examine the trade-offs between a provisioning (revenues from timber selling) and regulating (carbon storage and sequestration) ecosystem services among seven alternative forest management regimes in a large boreal forest production landscape. First, we estimate the potential of the landscape to produce harvest revenues and store/sequester carbon across a 50-year time period. Then, we identify conflicts between harvest re…

Taxi Deregulation in Poland

2014

This text is part of the New European Study project to identify and analyze the best practices and strengths of industrial relations of self-employed workers: representation beyond administration, and the possible leadership of SMEs. It analyzes how the self-employed can create and take part in the process of social dialogue in Poland. Traditionally, social dialogue is defined as interaction and mutual negotiations by the government, employers’ organizations and trade unions. This traditional definition of social dialogue emerged in an economic reality very different from the current one — when large enterprises played a major role in national economies. In recent years, the economic struct…

An Aqueous Extract of Ilex paraguariensis Reduces Carrageenan-Induced Edema and Inhibits the Expression of Cyclooxygenase-2 and Inducible Nitric Oxid…

2014

Mate (Ilex paraguariensis) is a highly popular herbal beverage in South America due to its high content of caffeine. Its hypolipidemic and antioxidant properties are of increasing interest in the treatment of cardiovascular disorders and for weight control. In the present study, we show for the first time both the local and systemic anti-inflammatory effects of an aqueous extract of mate in three classic in vivo models, namely acute and chronic 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol 13-acetate-induced mouse ear edema and acute carrageenan-induced mouse paw edema. Caffeine, rutin, chlorogenic acid, 3,5-dicafeoyl quinic acid, and 4,5-dicafeoyl quinic acid, accompanied by a complex mixture of other simple …

The implications of the EU Labour law in Latvia

2013

Morphological determination of the phototrophic community composition of biological soil crusts in coastal sand dunes in northern Germany

2022

This dataset comprises the microbial community composition of biological soil crusts in north-German sand dunes. For this we obtained enrichment cultures of phototrophic microorganisms, by placing fragments of biocrusts of the same Petri dishes as used for sequencing, in Petri dishes with Bold Basal (1N BBM) agarized medium (Bischoff and Bold 1963). Cultures were grown under standard laboratory conditions: with a 12-hour alteration of light and dark phases and irradiation of 25 μmol photons m-2 s-1 at a temperature 20 ± 5 ºС. Microscopic study of these raw cultures began in the third week of cultivation. Morphological examinations were performed using Olympus BX53 light microscope with Noma…

Cost uncertainty and trade liberalization in international oligopoly

1998

Abstract Trade liberalization has been shown to be unfavourable for firms of at least one country for the homogeneous goods case in an environment of certainty. We show that, in the presence of private cost information and for ex ante identical firms, oligopolistic firms will prefer to operate under free trade rather than under autarky in homogeneous goods industries provided there exists a certain degree of firms' heterogeneity and a sufficiently large amount of uncertainty. For the particular case of symmetry both in demand and industry sizes, the firms of at least one country prefer to operate under autarky rather than under free trade.

Traffic simulation models calibration using speed–density relationship: An automated procedure based on genetic algorithm

2016

Calibration of traffic models.Calibration as optimization problem.Use of genetic algorithm. This paper presents the first results of a research which applied a genetic algorithm to calibrate a microscopic traffic simulation model based on speed-density relationships. A large set of traffic data collected from the A22 Freeway, Italy, was used and a comparison was performed between the field measurements and the simulation outputs obtained for a test freeway segment by using the Aimsun microscopic simulator.The calibration was formulated as an optimization problem to be solved based on a genetic algorithm; the objective function was defined in order to minimize the differences between the sim…

A PSO algorithm for designing 3d highway alignments adopting polynomial solutions

2017

Intelligent optimization algorithms for highway alignments have produced good results so far. However, considering the numerous constraints and factors directly implied in the infrastructure design, the researchers' efforts usually focus only on simplifying the alignment choice, supporting engineers in the design phase. Implementing strategic considerations regarding comfort and safety would be also very important. In this paper, the authors propose a method for designing improved 3D highway alignments using a specific optimization algorithm, based on a Swarm Intelligence technique, adopting an innovative polynomial transition curve as the unique horizontal curvature element, called PPC (Po…

Mitigating forest biodiversity and ecosystem service losses in the era of bio-based economy

2018

Forests play a crucial role in the transition towards a bioeconomy by providing biomass to substitute for fossil-based materials and energy. However, a policy-policy conflict exists between the desire to increase the utilization of bio based renewable resources and the desire to protect and conserve biodiversity. Increasing forest harvest levels to meet the needs of the bioeconomy may conflict with biodiversity protection and ecosystem services provided by forests. Through an optimization framework, we examined trade-offs between increasing the extraction of timber resources, and the impacts on biodiversity and non-wood ecosystem services, and investigated possibilities to reconcile trade-o…