The well-known question whether regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the multilateral trading system (MTS) are “strangers, friends, or foes” (Bhagwati and Panagariya, 1996) has gained new importance with the widespread proliferation of RTAs in recent years. Based on an extensive data set which covers most of world trade over the past 60 years and about 240 regional trade agreements, we analyze ...

AIM To determine the relationship between some visual functions: colour vision defects, abnormal stereopsis, visual acuity and the occurrence of road traffic accident (RTAs) among commercial vehicle drivers in the central region of Ghana, and to assess their knowledge of these anomalies. METHOD A descriptive cross-sectional study employing a multi-stage random sampling approach was conducted ...

BACKGROUND Psychiatric liaison services are rare in trauma units of various hospitals in Nigeria and other sub-Saharan African countries. The occurrence of road traffic accidents (RTAs) resulting from low standard of road construction and inadequate maintenance have been on the increase in Nigeria. While the physical consequences of such RTAs are obvious, the psychological consequences are ofte...

Already, the formation of the WTO did not halt the proliferation of new RTAs. There has been an enormous increase in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) in the last twenty years. In fact, RTAs legitimacy is well recognised under GATT/WTO. By their very nature, such arrangements favour imports from members of the grouping and discriminate against imports from other countries. This departure fro...

Geographical and economic characteristics help to predict Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs), we here argue that Global Value Chains (GVCs) are one of these predictors. We estimate the time-varying probability a country pair share trade agreement, identify pairs who should sign an RTA have not yet done so, among potential RTAs those mostly driven by participation in GVCs. Using General-Equilibriu...

BACKGROUND Road traffic injuries (RTIs) are the main causes of death and disability in Iran. However, very few studies about the temporal variations of RTIs have been published to date. OBJECTIVES This study was conducted to investigate the temporal pattern of RTIs in Iran in 2012. MATERIALS AND METHODS All road traffic accidents (RTAs) reported to traffic police during a one-year period (M...

In rat tail artery (RTA), spinal cord injury (SCI) increases nerve-evoked contractions and the contribution of L-type Ca2+ channels to these responses. In RTAs from unoperated rats, these channels play a minor role in contractions and Bay K8644 (L-type channel agonist) mimics the effects of SCI. Here we investigated the mechanisms underlying the facilitatory actions of SCI and Bay K8644 on nerv...

BACKGROUND The present study aimed to evaluate the force delivery of removable thermoplastic appliances (RTAs), modified by different sized incisal cuts, during tipping of a maxillary central incisor in palatal and vestibular direction. METHODS Forty-five RTAs from three different materials (Biolon®, Erkodur®, Ideal Clear®) of the same thickness (1 mm) were used. Analysis was performed on a s...

Rigid Tree Automata (RTAs) are a strict super-class of Regular Tree Automata (TAs), additionally capable of recognizing certain nonlinear patterns such as {f⟨x,x⟩ ∣ x ∈X}. RTAs were developed for use in tree-automata-based model checking; we hope to use them as part of a static analysis system for a logic programming language. In developing that system, we noted that RTAs are not closed under K...