regarding the recent development in lng production and transportation, lng exports would exhibit a pivotal role in the future of global gas trade. by analyzing the geographical pattern of the world lng trade and the structure of its transportation costs, the lng cost matrix for forum's exporters to main lng importers is presented. using this matrix, the cooperation amongst the forum's...

In an international oligopoly model, this paper investigates interaction between trade liberalization in goods and liberalization in service FDI. Since some services are market-specific and have non-tradable nature, a foreign firm has a higher cost in service provisions compared to its domestic competitor and it can overcome the disadvantage by either outsourcing services to the domestic compet...

Cloud computing delivers IT solutions as a utility to users. A common economic objective for both cloud consumers and providers is to minimise their total deployment and operational costs while achieving satisfactory system performance to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Therefore, the trade-off between cost and system performance is needed to be managed to achieve the best cost effectiven...

Domestic innovations and technology imports play important roles in boosting relative demand for skilled labor force. These factors are in turn influenced by domestic R&D investments and international trade. Using a translog cost function, this paper studies the effect of technology imports and other factors including output level and physical capital stock on the shares of skilled labor force ...

We analyse the trade-off between the speed with which a gene can propagate information, the noise of its output and its metabolic cost. Our main finding is that for any given level of metabolic cost there is an optimal trade-off between noise and processing speed. Any system with a non-vanishing leak expression rate is suboptimal, i.e. it will exhibit higher noise and/or slower speed than leak-...

Living organisms can perform computations through various mechanisms. Understanding the limitations of these computations is not only of practical relevance (for example in the context of synthetic biology) but will most of all provide new insights into the design principles of living systems. This thesis investigates the conditions under which genes can perform logical computations and how thi...