European Integration: Partisan Motives or Economic Benefits?

In this paper we examine the influence of economic factors to explain partisan support for European integration over the last three decades. We find that partisan support is larger in `poorer' countries with direct economic bene fits from EU membership. On the contrary, parties in countries aff ected by the Maastricht criteria are more Euro-sceptical. Moreover, we find weak evidence for larger partisan support in countries with more developed welfare states, and that the support for European integration fluctuates in parallel with the business cycle. Finally, our results indicate that the importance of economic factors in determining partisan support for European integration has grown in recent periods. JEL classi fication: F15, F42, F53, F55, H60. Key words: European Integration; Partisan Ideology; Maastricht Criteria; European Budget; Benefi ts from Trade.

Selection strategies of segregant soybean populations for resistance to Asian rust

The objective of this work was to identify the best selection strategies for the more promising parental combinations to obtain lines with good resistance to soybean Asian rust (Phakopsora pachyrhizi). Two experiments were carried out in the field during the 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 growing seasons, to determine the percentage of infected leaf area of individual plants of five parents and their segregant F2 and F3 populations. The data obtained indicates that additive genetic variance predominates in the control of soybean resistance to Asian rust, and that the year and time of assessment do not significantly influence the estimates of the genetic parameters obtained. The narrow-sense heritability (h²r) ranged from 23.12 to 55.83%, and indicates the possibility of successful selection of resistant individuals in the early generations of the breeding program. All the procedures used to select the most promising populations to generate superior inbred lines for resistance to P. pachyrhizi presented similar results and identified the BR01-18437 x BRS 232 population as the best for inbred line selection.

The global welfare impact of China: Trade integration and technological change

This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of China's trade integration and technological change in a multi-country quantitative Ricardian-Heckscher-Ohlin model.We simulate two alternative growth scenarios: a "balanced" one in which China's productivity grows at the same rate in each sector, and an "unbalanced" one in whichChina's comparative disadvantage sectors catch up disproportionately faster to theworld productivity frontier. Contrary to a well-known conjecture (Samuelson 2004),the large majority of countries experience significantly larger welfare gains whenChina's productivity growth is biased towards its comparative disadvantage sectors.This finding is driven by the inherently multilateral nature of world trade.