Analysis of the prospects for updating the trade pillar of the European Union-Chile Association Agreement

The perception of the present state of trade relations with Chile is obscured by a lack of adequate understanding of its legal framework as well as of the policy behind it. This study attempts to clarify the present state of and future prospects for trade between the EU and Chile through an examination of previous agreements and the EU’s new approach to trade liberalisation. The authors agree with the large consensus existing on both the EU and Chilean sides regarding the efficacy of the Association Agreement, but note that any extension of an agreement with Chile should capture the spirit of older EU agreements rather than simply following the ‘NAFTA route’. The study also includes a comparative analysis between the EU-Chile agreement and current trade agreements being negotiated by the EU and Chile with third countries.

Analysis of the upcoming Modernisation of the Trade Pillar of the European Union-Mexico Global Agreement

Study for the EU Parliament co-authored by Rodrigo Polanco: The 1997 Global Agreement between the EC and its Member States and Mexico, together with the set of decisions taken in its framework, has been effective, and thus modifications of the agreement are mainly motivated by changes in the global landscape since it was first enacted. Therefore, broad considerations on how the European Union (EU) trade policy is shaped are extremely relevant for the upcoming negotiations with Mexico. In this context, the needs and expectations, both from the EU and Mexico, regarding any further agreements are examined, focusing in particular on areas beyond trade in goods and services such as procurement, investment, and regulatory cooperation. It is argued that the 'old' Association Agreements should be taken as models for any modifications, given their emphasis on EU-specific issues and their ability to accommodate the needs of Mexico in any deepened agreement.

Non-failure analysis for logic programs

We provide a method whereby, given mode and (upper approximation) type information, we can detect procedures and goals that can be guaranteed to not fail (i.e., to produce at least one solution or not termínate). The technique is based on an intuitively very simple notion, that of a (set of) tests "covering" the type of a set of variables. We show that the problem of determining a covering is undecidable in general, and give decidability and complexity results for the Herbrand and linear arithmetic constraint systems. We give sound algorithms for determining covering that are precise and efiicient in practice. Based on this information, we show how to identify goals and procedures that can be guaranteed to not fail at runtime. Applications of such non-failure information include programming error detection, program transiormations and parallel execution optimization, avoiding speculative parallelism and estimating lower bounds on the computational costs of goals, which can be used for granularity control. Finally, we report on an implementation of our method and show that better results are obtained than with previously proposed approaches.

Extracting non-strict independent and-parallelism using sharing and freeness information

Logic programming systems which exploit and-parallelism among non-deterministic goals rely on notions of independence among those goals in order to ensure certain efficiency properties. "Non-strict" independence (NSI) is a more relaxed notion than the traditional notion of "strict" independence (SI) which still ensures the relevant efficiency properties and can allow considerable more parallelism than SI. However, all compilation technology developed to date has been based on SI, because of the intrinsic complexity of exploiting NSI. This is related to the fact that NSI cannot be determined "a priori" as SI. This paper filis this gap by developing a technique for compile-time detection and annotation of NSI. It also proposes algorithms for combined compiletime/ run-time detection, presenting novel run-time checks for this type of parallelism. Also, a transformation procedure to eliminate shared variables among parallel goals is presented, aimed at performing as much work as possible at compile-time. The approach is based on the knowledge of certain properties regarding the run-time instantiations of program variables —sharing and freeness— for which compile-time technology is available, with new approaches being currently proposed. Thus, the paper does not deal with the analysis itself, but rather with how the analysis results can be used to parallelize programs.

Automatic exploitation of non-determinate independent and-parallelism in the basic andorra model

Andorra-I is the first implementation of a language based on the Andorra Principie, which states that determinate goals can (and shonld) be run before other goals, and even in a parallel fashion. This principie has materialized in a framework called the Basic Andorra model, which allows or-parallelism as well as (dependent) and-parallelism for determinate goals. In this report we show that it is possible to further extend this model in order to allow general independent and-parallelism for nondeterminate goals, withont greatly modifying the underlying implementation machinery. A simple an easy way to realize such an extensión is to make each (nondeterminate) independent goal determinate, by using a special "bagof" constract. We also show that this can be achieved antomatically by compile-time translation from original Prolog programs. A transformation that fulfüls this objective and which can be easily antomated is presented in this report.

Independent AND-parallel implementation of narrowing

We present a parallel graph narrowing machine, which is used to implement a functional logic language on a shared memory multiprocessor. It is an extensión of an abstract machine for a purely functional language. The result is a programmed graph reduction machine which integrates the mechanisms of unification, backtracking, and independent and-parallelism. In the machine, the subexpressions of an expression can run in parallel. In the case of backtracking, the structure of an expression is used to avoid the reevaluation of subexpressions as far as possible. Deterministic computations are detected. Their results are maintained and need not be reevaluated after backtracking.