Note Symbols of United Nations documents are composed of capital letters with figures. Mention of such a symbol indicates a reference to a United Nations document. The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country,...

Part II of the Survey examines the question of vulnerability. Some countries feel that their economic fortunes are hostage to the interplay of impersonal market forces. Some are frequent victims of natural disasters, such as floods and earthquakes. Many others, such as landlocked nations or countries with economies in transition, face more specific obstacles to full engagement in world financia...

The classical secretary problem investigates the question of how to hire the best secretary from n candidates who come in a uniformly random order. In this work we investigate a parallel generalizations of this problem introduced by Feldman and Tennenholtz [14]. We call it shared Q-queue J-choice K-best secretary problem. In this problem, n candidates are evenly distributed into Q queues, and i...

It is my great pleasure to present this book. For the first time since the adoption of the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV Convention), in 1961, a systematic study on the effects of plant variety protection has been accomplished. The overall result is that plant variety protection according to the UPOV Convention brings about remarkable and substanti...

This report is devoted to the follow-up activities of the 50th UN General Assembly pertaining to Copenhagen's World Summit for Social Development's Program of Action, which was adopted by the Conference on March 12, 1995. Summaries are provided of the background history to the Summit, the activities of the UN Commission for Social Development, the Economic and Social Council meetings, and Gener...