Over the last few decades, countries belonging to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) all had to revise their intellectual property systems. These revisions resulted at first from bilateral pressure of major trading partners such as the US and EU, then from the WTO-TRIPS Agreement and more recently from bilateral Free Trade Agreements. To observe the IP developments in ASEAN over...

Advances in computing technology have allowed researchers across many fields of endeavor to collect and maintain vast amounts of observational statistical data such as clinical data, biological patient data, data regarding access of web sites, financial data, and the like. This paper addresses some of the challenging issues on brain magnetic resonance (MR) image tumor segmentation caused by the...

This paper suggests a [email protected] of composable specification of concurrent programs that permits: (1) verification of program code for a given specification, and (2) composition of the specifications of the components to yield the specification of a program. The specification consists of both terminal properties that hold at the end of a program execution (if the execution terminate...

This paper endogenizes the timing of bilateral contracting between one principal and multiple agents in the presence of externalities. Contracting simultaneously with all agents is optimal for the principal if externalities become weaker the more an agent trades. If instead externalities become stronger, sequential negotiations might benefit the principal as they lower the agents’ outside optio...

This paper examines the issue of state contingency in interest rate linkages across the G7 economies by employing Kalman (1960,1963) filter techniques to estimate time varying parameter models of bilateral dependence. Our results show that there is convincing evidence that international linkages in interest rates vary considerably over time. There are periods when international interest rate mo...

in Washington DC. I am grateful to H.M.Treasury, and also to the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, for supplying financial support and data. However all views expressed here are my own.

Results: We find that China’s aggregate trade costs are declining, but it is still 1/3 higher than that of developed countries of 10 years ago; bilateral trade costs between China and some countries even risen instead; aggregate trade costs are the determinants, not only of “global” and “local” comparative advantages, but also of export share of China’s manufacturing products, and its effect is...

To analyze the effects on prices of simultaneous tariff reductions by multiple importing countries, we construct a simple three-country model where a good is produced by a monopolist with non-constant marginal cost and imported by two countries. We specifically compare two representative tariff-reduction formulas: the "fixed-amount" and the "uniform percentage" reductions. The uniform percentag...

The bilateral filter plays a key role in image processing applications due to its intuitive parameterization and its high quality filter result, smoothing homogeneous regions while preserving the edges of the objects. Considering the image as a topological relief, seeing pixel intensities as peaks and valleys, we introduce a way to control the tonal weighting coefficients, the flowing bilateral...