Regional Trade Agreements and domestic labour market regulation

This chapter discusses the relationship between labour market regulation and regional trade agreements from both a legal and an economic angle. We examine empirically whether regional trade liberalisation is associated with deterioration (“race to the bottom”) of domestic labour standards beyond those reflected in the 1998 ILO Declaration on the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Using a panel of 90 developed and developing countries, covering the years from 1980 to 2005, we find that after the entry into force of a regional trade agreement (RTA), labour standards applying to employment protection and unemployment benefits are significantly weakened. We show that such a lowering of protection levels tends to occur in high income countries and that this effect mainly stems from RTAs among such countries rather than with low or middle income countries. Concern about competitive pressure to weaken domestic labour regulation is reflected in a variety of undertakings in RTAs not to administer labour laws with a view to improving one’s competitive position in trade or foreign direct investment (FDI). The above-mentioned empirical findings indicate that such provisions could potentially become relevant, and that this is more likely to be the case for high income members of RTAs. Our analysis, from a legal point of view, of relevant institutional and procedural mechanisms indicates however that enforceability of the relevant provisions is weak for most of the existing legal texts.

The Chilean Experience in South-South Trade and Investment Agreements

This paper analyzes the main features of Chilean trade and investment treaties, examining if there is a Chilean pattern in the regulation of trade and investment flows or if it is influenced by agreements signed by Chile with developed countries. The article also examines if there are differences between the treaties signed by Chile and other “Southern” developing countries and those negotiated with “Northern” developed economies, and if sustainable development concerns are part of the negotiations of trade and investment agreements by Chile.

Service Level Agreements-Driven Management of Distributed Applications in Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud Computing enables provisioning and distribution of highly scalable services in a reliable, on-demand and sustainable manner. However, objectives of managing enterprise distributed applications in cloud environments under Service Level Agreement (SLA) constraints lead to challenges for maintaining optimal resource control. Furthermore, conflicting objectives in management of cloud infrastructure and distributed applications might lead to violations of SLAs and inefficient use of hardware and software resources. This dissertation focusses on how SLAs can be used as an input to the cloud management system, increasing the efficiency of allocating resources, as well as that of infrastructure scaling. First, we present an extended SLA semantic model for modelling complex service-dependencies in distributed applications, and for enabling automated cloud infrastructure management operations. Second, we describe a multi-objective VM allocation algorithm for optimised resource allocation in infrastructure clouds. Third, we describe a method of discovering relations between the performance indicators of services belonging to distributed applications and then using these relations for building scaling rules that a CMS can use for automated management of VMs. Fourth, we introduce two novel VM-scaling algorithms, which optimally scale systems composed of VMs, based on given SLA performance constraints. All presented research works were implemented and tested using enterprise distributed applications.

The Dialectical Relationship of Preferential and Multilateral Trade Agreements

Preferentialism and multilateralism are not two independent and succinct avenues in the pur-suit of market access and regulatory policies. They historically build upon each other in a dialectical process, closely related and linked through regulatory bridges and references. They influence and direct each other in various ways. The paper mainly focuses on the evolution of international protection of intellectual property rights and of services. The multilateral regulation of the TRIPS and others derive from years of regulatory experience and high numbers of preferential agreements across the globe. The GATS and others, on the other hand, have entered the pluri- or multilateral stage early. Once regulation has reached the mul-tilateral stage, preferentialism focuses on WTO-plus and -extra commitments. Both areas, however, show close interaction. The principle of MFN ensures that multilateralism and preferentialism do not evolve independently from each other. It produces significant spill-over effects of preferential agreements. Such effects and the need to develop uniform and coherent regulatory standards have led in parallel to a number of preferential, plurilateral and multilateral regulatory initiatives. We submit that the process will eventually encourage the return to multilateralism and negotiations in international fora, in particular the WTO while traditional market access may stay with preferential relations among Nations. Such burden-sharing between different regulatory fora should be reflected in future WTO rules providing the overall backbone of the system.

Shaping EU trade agreements to support human rights

Trade between Europe and developing countries should be shaped such that market shares are just and trade flows foster sustainable development. But this is not always the case. While developing countries have much to gain from trade, they can also suffer serious losses. This is especially apparent with regard to food security, which often depends largely on smallholders and informal markets in poorer countries. This policy brief sketches the link between trade and the right to food, and describes how integration of Human Rights Impact Assessments in EU trade policy can help ensure sustainable trade regimes that do not cause undue harm.

Service level agreements-driven management of distributed applications in cloud computing environments

Advancements in cloud computing have enabled the proliferation of distributed applications, which require management and control of multiple services. However, without an efficient mechanism for scaling services in response to changing workload conditions, such as number of connected users, application performance might suffer, leading to violations of Service Level Agreements (SLA) and possible inefficient use of hardware resources. Combining dynamic application requirements with the increased use of virtualised computing resources creates a challenging resource Management context for application and cloud-infrastructure owners. In such complex environments, business entities use SLAs as a means for specifying quantitative and qualitative requirements of services. There are several challenges in running distributed enterprise applications in cloud environments, ranging from the instantiation of service VMs in the correct order using an adequate quantity of computing resources, to adapting the number of running services in response to varying external loads, such as number of users. The application owner is interested in finding the optimum amount of computing and network resources to use for ensuring that the performance requirements of all her/his applications are met. She/he is also interested in appropriately scaling the distributed services so that application performance guarantees are maintained even under dynamic workload conditions. Similarly, the infrastructure Providers are interested in optimally provisioning the virtual resources onto the available physical infrastructure so that her/his operational costs are minimized, while maximizing the performance of tenants’ applications. Motivated by the complexities associated with the management and scaling of distributed applications, while satisfying multiple objectives (related to both consumers and providers of cloud resources), this thesis proposes a cloud resource management platform able to dynamically provision and coordinate the various lifecycle actions on both virtual and physical cloud resources using semantically enriched SLAs. The system focuses on dynamic sizing (scaling) of virtual infrastructures composed of virtual machines (VM) bounded application services. We describe several algorithms for adapting the number of VMs allocated to the distributed application in response to changing workload conditions, based on SLA-defined performance guarantees. We also present a framework for dynamic composition of scaling rules for distributed service, which used benchmark-generated application Monitoring traces. We show how these scaling rules can be combined and included into semantic SLAs for controlling allocation of services. We also provide a detailed description of the multi-objective infrastructure resource allocation problem and various approaches to satisfying this problem. We present a resource management system based on a genetic algorithm, which performs allocation of virtual resources, while considering the optimization of multiple criteria. We prove that our approach significantly outperforms reactive VM-scaling algorithms as well as heuristic-based VM-allocation approaches.

The silent services of the world ocean

The most recent comprehensive assessment carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that “Human influence on the climate system is clear,” a headline statement that was approved by all governments in consensus. This influence will have long-lasting consequences for ecosystems, and the resulting impacts will continue to be felt millennia from now. Although the terrestrial impacts of climate change are readily apparent now and have received widespread public attention, the effects of climate change on the oceans have been relatively invisible. However, the world ocean provides a number of crucial services that are of global significance, all of which come with an increasing price caused by human activities. This needs to be taken into account when considering adaptation to and mitigation of anthropogenic climate change.

Collective Voluntary Agreements and the Production of Less Polluting Products

Recently, some industries have collectively agreed not to produce models that do not meet an energy efficiency (and hence an environmental) standard. This paper presents a simple model that can be used to examine a voluntary collective agreement to limit or completely eliminate the low efficiency model of a given product (e.g., a low efficiency washing machine). We show that, when there is competition between firms, a collective agreement to limit or even eliminate production of the polluting model can actually increase profits for all firms in the industry. This suggests that a collective agreement of this type might actually be beneficial to firms, while at the same time improving environmental quality. However, the implicit enforcement that comes from the public nature of the commitment is necessary to ensure this outcome. This suggests that, by promoting such agreements, policymakers may be able to achieve substantial environmental gains with relatively little inducement. The impact on social welfare will then depend on whether these gains are sufficiently large to offset consumer losses from reductions in product variety and the associated price increases.