Regional integration agreements (RIAs) are examples of second best and have an ambiguous impact on welfare. This paper builds a model where RIAs unambiguously raise welfare by correcting for externalities. It assumes that trade between neighboring countries raises trust between them and reduce the likelihood of conflict. The optimum intervention in that case is a subsidy on imports from the nei...

The immune system's quieter side went unnoticed for some time, while inflammation inducing proteins soaked up all the attention. Fiona Powrie stepped in just after the concept of inflammation-reducing " suppressor " cells had emerged. In Don Mason's laboratory at the MRC Cellular Immunology Unit in Oxford, Powrie and her colleagues lent the vaguely described cells definition, by showing that on...

CAN VACCINATIONS HELP TO RESOLVE CONFLICTS AND NURTURE DIPLOMACY? LATER THIS MONTH, Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic country, will host U.S. President Obama, a visit that could establish important scientifi c ties between the United States and Indonesia and implement a potentially powerful piece of vaccine diplomacy. The oral polio vaccine is a substantive example of how vaccination...

BACKGROUND Global health diplomacy (GHD) is a burgeoning field bridging the priorities of global health and foreign affairs. Given the increasing need to mobilize disparate global health stakeholders coupled with the need to design complex public health partnerships to tackle issues of international concern, effective and timely cooperation among state actors is critical. Health Attachés repres...

Modern systems-on-chip (SoCs) incorporate a large and growing number of specialized hardware units that must be integrated into a unified address space via a shared bus topology. This process is labor-intensive and error-prone because the interface requirements of all connected blocks must bemutually satisfied. The design productivity gains derived from the modularity of RISC-V are bottlenecked...

Poverty reduction and health became central in the agendas of Southern regional organisations in the last two decades. Yet, little is known about how these organisations address poverty, inclusion and social inequality, and how Southern regional formations are engaging in power constellations, institutions, processes, interests and ideological positions within different spheres of governance. T...