infonet-economy

The effective market access granted to textiles and apparel under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is estimated, taking into account the presence of rules of origin. First, estimates are provided of the effect of tariff preferences combined with rules of origin on the border prices of Mexican final goods exported to the United States and of U.S. intermediate goods...

This paper reports panel gravity estimates of aggregate bilateral trade for 130 countries over the period 1962-96 in which the coefficient of distance is allowed to change over time. In a standard specification in which transport costs are proxied by distance only, it is found paradoxically that the absolute value of the elasticity of bilateral trade to distance has been...

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine household market inequality, redistribution, and the relationship between market inequality and redistribution in affluent OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. We observe sizeable increases in market household inequality in most countries. This development appears to have been driven largely, though not exclusively, by changes...

This paper proposes the notion of Specification-Carrying Code as an interaction mechanism for self-assembly of au- tonomous decentralised software components. Each au- tonomoussoftware entity incorporates more informationthan its operational behaviour, and publishes more data than its signature. The idea is to provide separately, for each en- tity, a functional part implementing its...

Inevitably, healthcare goes mobile. Recently developed mobile healthcare (i.e. m-health) services allow healthcare professionals to monitor mobile patient's vital signs and provide feedback to this patient anywhere at any time. Due to the nature of current supporting mobile service platforms, m-health services are delivered with a best-effort, i.e., there are no guarantees on...