Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have become an indelible feature of the international trading landscape. Most, if not all, RTAs contain provisions that establish procedures for resolving disputes among their signatory members. Yet, the... more
Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have become an indelible feature of the international trading landscape. Most, if not all, RTAs contain provisions that establish procedures for resolving disputes among their signatory members. Yet, the design and functioning of these dispute settlement mechanisms (DSMs) and, more specifically, how they differ from the WTO dispute settlement system remain relatively unexplored. Existing academic literature has primarily focused on the narrow issue of jurisdictional conflict between DSMs of RTAs and the WTO dispute settlement system. Literature mapping out and classifying systematically the DSMs of RTAs is more limited. This research paper goes beyond considering the issue of jurisdictional conflict between the multilateral and "regional" regimes. We map out the DSMs in RTAs that have been notified to the WTO and were in force at the end of 2012, and consider a typology of these DSMs based on their nature and design. We also use the data obtained from our mapping exercise in two ways. First, we identify trends and patterns of use, either regionally or by individual countries, of the different types of DSMs in RTAs. Trends are analysed in relation to five key factors: (i) evolution over time, (ii) level of economic development, (iii) regional characteristics, (iv) level of integration (partial scope agreement, free trade agreement or customs union), and (v) configuration (bilateral or plurilateral). Second, we undertake a "nuts and bolts" analysis of the DSMs of RTAs by examining their approach to various issues in international dispute settlement. Our aim is to draw conclusions about the extent to which the predominant type of DSM in RTAs has features that are different from those of the WTO dispute settlement system.
In this chapter, the authors examine the nature of the exception for regional trade agreements (RTAs) under Article XXIV:5 of GATT 1994. This exception, which aims to maximize the internal trade-liberalizing effects of an RTA while... more
In this chapter, the authors examine the nature of the exception for regional trade agreements (RTAs) under Article XXIV:5 of GATT 1994. This exception, which aims to maximize the internal trade-liberalizing effects of an RTA while minimizing its external trade-restricting effects, applies specifically to measures adopted upon the formation of customs unions and free-trade areas. It can be used to justify a departure from other provisions of GATT 1994 (such as the obligation to provide most-favored-nation treatment to all WTO Members under Article I) and, in certain circumstances, the provisions of other WTO agreements. However, the exception is subject to detailed conditions. In particular, in broad terms, the restrictions that parties to an RTA impose on trade within the RTA must be eliminated, while restrictions on trade outside the RTA should not be higher than before the RTA was formed. In the case of a customs union, external trade restrictions should be substantially harmonized. In determining whether a given RTA meets these conditions, several questions arise, many of which are yet to be fully explored in dispute settlement or resolved by negotiation among the WTO Membership.
Recent progress in worst case timing analysis of programs has made it possible to perform accurate timing analysis of pipelined execution and instruction caching, which is necessary when a RISC processor is used as the target processor of... more
Recent progress in worst case timing analysis of programs has made it possible to perform accurate timing analysis of pipelined execution and instruction caching, which is necessary when a RISC processor is used as the target processor of a real-time system. However, there has not been much progress in worst case timing analysis of data caching. This is mainly due to load/store instructions that reference multiple memory locations such as those used to implement array and pointer-based references. These load/store instructions are called dynamic load/store instructions and most current analysis techniques take a very conservative approach to their timing analysis. In many cases, it is assumed that each of the references from a dynamic load/store instruction will miss in the cache and replace a cache block that would otherwise lead to a cache hit. This conservative approach results in severe overestimation of the worst case execution time (WCET). This paper proposes two techniques to...
Abstract: In this chapter, the authors examine the nature of the exception for regional trade agreements (RTAs) under Article XXIV: 5 of GATT 1994. This exception, which aims to maximize the internal trade-liberalizing effects of an RTA... more
Abstract: In this chapter, the authors examine the nature of the exception for regional trade agreements (RTAs) under Article XXIV: 5 of GATT 1994. This exception, which aims to maximize the internal trade-liberalizing effects of an RTA while minimizing its external ...
Real-time programmer sh ave to deal with the problem of relating timing constraints associated with source code to sequences of machine instructions. This paper describes an en vironment to assist user si nt he specification and analysis... more
Real-time programmer sh ave to deal with the problem of relating timing constraints associated with source code to sequences of machine instructions. This paper describes an en vironment to assist user si nt he specification and analysis of timing constraints. A user is allowed specify timing constraints within the source code of a C pr ogram. Au ser interface for a timing analyzer was developed to depict whether these constraints wer ev iolated or met. In addition, the interface allows portions of programs to be quickly selected with the corresponding bounded times, source code lines, and machine instructions automatically displayed. The result is a user-friendly environment that supports the user specification and analysis of timing con- straints at a high (source code) level and retains the accu- racy of low (machine code) level analysis.
We present results from modeling and evaluating the JEWEL instrumentation system (IS), which is being used for runtime data collection from a distributed, real-time application. Our modeling and evaluation effort addresses two objectives:... more
We present results from modeling and evaluating the JEWEL instrumentation system (IS), which is being used for runtime data collection from a distributed, real-time application. Our modeling and evaluation effort addresses two objectives: (1) providing early feedback to the system developers regarding the JEWEL IS configuration options for this application; and (2) evaluation of the design alternatives for an adaptive controller to control the overhead and intrusion of the JEWEL IS to a real-time video conferencing application. For JEWEL IS design, we compare two data collection and forwarding policies (collect-and-forward and batch-and-forward). For the design of the adaptive controller, we compare two adaptation policies (static and dynamic adaptation) and two policies to schedule the implementation of the control decisions (distributed and centralized scheduling). Results reported in this paper indicate that the batch-and-forward policy for IS design static adaptation policy with distributed scheduling for the adaptive controller design meet the domain-specific requirements
Real-time signal processing applications are commonly designed using a data flow software architecture. The author attempts to understand fundamental real-time properties of such an architecture-the Navy's coarse-grain processing graph... more
Real-time signal processing applications are commonly designed using a data flow software architecture. The author attempts to understand fundamental real-time properties of such an architecture-the Navy's coarse-grain processing graph method (PGM). By applying recent results in real-time scheduling theory to the subset of PGM employed by the ARPA RASSP Synthetic Aperture Radar benchmark application, he identifies inherent real-time properties of nodes in a PGM data flow graph, and demonstrates how these properties can be exploited to perform useful and important system-level analyses such as schedulability analysis, end-to-end latency analysis, and memory requirements analysis. More importantly, he develops relationships between properties such as latency and buffer bounds and show how one may be traded-off for the other. The results assume only the existence of a simple EDF scheduler and thus can be easily applied in practice.http://www.fortuneinfotech.co.uk/
The demand for efficient scalable and cost effective mobile information access systems is rapidly growing. Radiofrequency broadcast plays a major role in mobile computing, and there is a need to provide service models for broadcasting... more
The demand for efficient scalable and cost effective mobile information access systems is rapidly growing. Radiofrequency broadcast plays a major role in mobile computing, and there is a need to provide service models for broadcasting information according to mobile users' needs. The authors present a model called broadcast on demand (BoD), which provides timely broadcasts according to requests from users. Compared to static broadcast, this approach has a different emphasis: it is based on a demand driven framework, aimed at satisfying the temporal constraints of the requests, and uses scheduling techniques at the server side to utilize the limited bandwidth dynamically and efficiently. Several broadcast transmission scheduling policies for BoD are examined. The study indicates that EDF-based policies combined with batching of requests achieve good performance. The results show that BoD is successful in satisfying the temporal constraints of the requests and is a viable service model for wireless broadcast stations
