Global Rules Research Articles

The Gender Disparity in COVID-19 Case Severity

SARS-CoV-2 has made the world come to a halt, causing unprecedented global protocols and rules being implemented. Many different characteristics of this virus emerged early on. A notable characteristic that was noticed was the disparity in COVID-19 severity between the two biological genders, with males having a significantly higher fatality rate in comparison to females. As studies continue to understand this disparity, this literature review intends to summarize a few of these findings. Research on these studies were found on public research engines like ScienceDirect, Biology Medcentral, and PubMed. Papers were all peer reviewed. Another tool that was used was from the Global Health 50/50 research initiative which provided sex dis-aggregated data on COVID-19 in all countries that had accessible data. Studies have indicated that genetic factors, lifestyle factors, and “other” factors are all reasons for the disparity. T-Cell and ACE2 protein amount difference in males and females have been suggested as possible reasons for the discrepancy. Studies have also suggested that increased COVID-19 viral load also increases infection severity. This is relevant as male attitudes towards COVID-19 public health guidelines are more relaxed compared to females. Other possible factors that could play into this disparity is smoking, with active smokers having increased COVID-19 infection severity. This relates to the fact that the percent of male smokers is much higher than females. These lifestyle factors are further supported by the fact that males have higher fatality rates in respiratory tract diseases including SARS and influenza.

Global supply chains, trade agreements and rules of origin

AbstractFree Trade Agreements (FTAs) usually come with restrictions on the use of intermediate inputs in order for final goods to qualify for free trade. I focus on Rules of Origin (RoO), which limit expenses on nonmember country's intermediate inputs. In a three‐country FTA formation game, I introduce international trade in intermediate inputs and RoO restrictions. In the case of symmetric countries, I show that as countries become more involved in global supply chains, measured by their input shares in foreign final goods production, global free trade is less likely to be a stable equilibrium outcome. Free riding is the main problem preventing countries from liberalising trade. Countries are better off being nonmembers of FTAs between the other two countries relative to global free trade. Rules of Origin can solve this problem by limiting the benefits countries get from other countries' free trade agreements. In the case of asymmetric countries, an additional incentive exists for the smaller country not to join: such a country gives up more than it gains from joining an FTA for a sufficiently high degree of asymmetry in country sizes. I show that global free trade is a stable Nash equilibrium under a larger region of asymmetric country parameter space in the case of RoO than without it. Therefore, it is shown that RoO is essential in order to attain global free trade.

The Intellectual Property Turn in Global Health

International intellectual property (IP) law for pharmaceuticals has fundamentally shifted in the twenty-first century from a property-centric to a human rights view. Scholars tend to explain this transformation in the context of both the power struggle between developing and developed countries, and the influence of a social movement that criticized IP rights as hindering access to essential medicines. Yet, these explanations leave out the central role of two international organizations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), and particularly their permanent staffs, whose boundary disputes have shaped international IP law at the intersection of trade and global health. Bringing into conversation historical and legal literatures on global health and IP, this article traces how a human rights perspective on IP emerged as a strategy to reconcile the WHO staff’s sociomedical views of health with an increasingly dominant set of global IP rules. It shows how the WHO staff used the language of economics—an analytical frame favored by the WTO—to advance a then unorthodox economic understanding of IP as a type of governmental regulation. This allowed the WHO to argue that states should enjoy regulatory autonomy to curtail IP rights in order to meet broader state objectives, such as human rights protection. Paradoxically, despite their divergent views on the nature of IP, both WTO and WHO engagement with it heralded the emergence of a new technocratic view of global health that focuses on patentable medicines and technologies, and that has ultimately turned away from the WHO’s sociomedical roots.

Two-stage rule extraction method based on tree ensemble model for interpretable loan evaluation

The tree ensemble model has been widely employed as a loan evaluation method in credit risk assessment due to its high accuracy and robustness. However, the tree ensemble model is complex and incomprehensible, which restricts its adoption for decision-making in loan evaluation. In this paper, we propose a novel rule extraction method for improving the ensemble model by balancing predictive performance and interpretability in two stages: a local rule extraction method followed by a global rule extraction method. The local method simplifies each rule by removing its redundant constraints, while the global method optimizes the complete rule set based on the multiobjective optimization method. An interpretable rule-based model is extracted from the tree ensemble model via the proposed method. Comparing the performance to six other methods on three loan evaluation datasets, the proposed method shows superior interpretability and realizes similar predictive performance to the tree ensemble model. For practical loan evaluation, the proposed method provides decision-makers with an interpretable rule-based model, which could replace the opaque tree ensemble model in high-stakes decision-making. In addition, the proposed method could facilitate decision-makers in explaining the tree ensemble model by analyzing the important and valuable rules that are extracted from the original opaque model.

Globalization, first-foods systems transformations and corporate power: a synthesis of literature and data on the market and political practices of the transnational baby food industry

BackgroundThe global milk formula market has ‘boomed’ in recent decades, raising serious concerns for breastfeeding, and child and maternal health. Despite these developments, few studies have investigated the global expansion of the baby food industry, nor the market and political practices corporations have used to grow and sustain their markets. In this paper, our aim is to understand the strategies used by the baby food industry to shape ‘first-foods systems’ across its diverse markets, and in doing so, drive milk formula consumption on a global scale. We used a theoretically guided synthesis review method, which integrated diverse qualitative and quantitative data sources.ResultsGlobal milk formula sales grew from ~US$1.5 billion in 1978 to US$55.6 billion in 2019. This remarkable expansion has occurred along two main historical axes. First, the widening geographical reach of the baby food industry and its marketing practices, both globally and within countries, as corporations have pursued new growth opportunities, especially in the Global South. Second, the broadening of product ranges beyond infant formula, to include an array of follow-up, toddler and specialized formulas for a wider range of age groups and conditions, thereby widening the scope of mother-child populations subject to commodification. Sophisticated marketing techniques have been used to grow and sustain milk formula consumption, including marketing through health systems, mass-media and digital advertising, and novel product innovations backed by corporate science. To enable and sustain this marketing, the industry has engaged in diverse political practices to foster favourable policy, regulatory and knowledge environments. This has included lobbying international and national policy-makers, generating and deploying favourable science, leveraging global trade rules and adopting corporate policies to counter regulatory action by governments.ConclusionThe baby food industry uses integrated market and political strategies to shape first-foods systems in ways that drive and sustain milk formula market expansion, on a global scale. Such practices are a major impediment to global implementation of the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes, and other policy actions to protect, promote and support breastfeeding. New modalities of public health action are needed to negate the political practices of the industry in particular, and ultimately to constrain corporate power over the mother-child breastfeeding dyad.

Mystery of Bloom-Gilman duality: A light-front holographic QCD perspective

Light-front wave functions motivated by holographic constructions are used to study Bloom-Gilman duality, a feature of deep inelastic scattering. Separate expressions for structure functions in terms of quark and hadronic degrees of freedom (involving transition form factors) are presented, with an ultimate goal of obtaining a relationship between the two expressions. A specific two-parton model is defined and resonance transition form factors are computed using previously derived light-front wave functions. A new form of global duality (integral over all values of $x$ between 0 and 1) is derived from the valence quark-number sum rule. Using a complete set of hadronic states is necessary for this new global duality to be achieved, and the previous original work does not provide such a set. This feature is remedied by amending the model to include a longitudinal confining potential, and the resulting complete set is sufficient to carry out the study of Bloom-Gilman duality. Specific expressions for transition form factors are obtained and all are shown to fall as $1/{Q}^{2}$, at asymptotically large values. This is because the Feynman mechanism dominates the asymptotic behavior of the model. These transition form factors are used to assess the validity of the global and local duality sum rules, with the result that both are not satisfied within the given model. Evaluations of the hadronic expression for $q(x,{Q}^{2})$ provide more details about this lack. This result is not a failure of the current model because it shows that the observed validity of both global and local forms of duality for deep inelastic scattering must be related to a feature of QCD that is deeper than completeness. Our simple present model suggests a prediction that Bloom-Gilman duality would not be observed if deep inelastic scattering experiments were to be made on the pion. The underlying origin of the duality phenomenon in deep inelastic scattering is deeply buried within the confinement aspects of QCD, and its origin remains a mystery.

Global E-Commerce Talks at the WTO: Positions on Selected Issues of the United States, European Union, China, and Japan

AbstractThere is a broad consensus that global electronic commerce needs the World Trade Organization (WTO) trade rules to govern it. The current mandate of the WTO is merely to examine the various trade-related aspects of e-commerce. Nevertheless, in recent years, some WTO members have put forward a proposal to begin negotiations for global e-commerce rules which was impeded due to the differing positions of developed and developing members. This paper examines the positions of the United States, the European Union, Japan, and China on the e-commerce multilateral rules negotiation issues. It then takes a look at the prospect of the WTO being able to reach an agreement on e-commerce. The analysis shows that the United States and the European Union have varying views on consumer privacy, information protection, and internet taxation. Although Japan sides with the United States on these issues and China is on the same page as the European Union regarding consumer privacy, China holds a different position from the United States and the European Union on the other two matters. China is not making commitments on data localization, free data flow, and forced transfer of source codes. Therefore, the outlook of the current e-commerce talks is not favorable for concluding WTO e-commerce agreements.

A hybrid percolation transition at a finite transition point in scale-free networks.

Percolation transition (PT) means the formation of a macroscopic-scale large cluster, which exhibits a continuous transition. However, when the growth of large clusters is globally suppressed, the type of PT is changed to a discontinuous transition for random networks. A question arises as to whether the type of PT is also changed for scale-free (SF) network, because the existence of hubs incites the formation of a giant cluster. Here, we apply a global suppression rule to the static model for SF networks and investigate properties of the PT. We find that even for SF networks with the degree exponent 2<λ<3, a hybrid PT occurs at a finite transition point tc, which we can control by the suppression strength. The order parameter jumps at tc - and exhibits a critical behavior at tc +.

Defending lands and forests: NGO histories, everyday struggles, and extraordinary violence in the Philippines

ABSTRACT Across the Global South, authoritarian rule and extractivist agendas have intensified the harassment and murder of activists protecting remnant forest frontiers. In 2017, Global Witness documented the brutal murders of 207 defenders, the deadliest year on record. In the Philippines, violence against defenders has recently accelerated under the increasingly authoritarian regime of President Rodrigo Duterte. Excluding drug-related extrajudicial killings, an additional 30 murders were documented in the country in 2018, the highest number of such killings in any country that year. Largely because of expanding plantations and mines, the frontier province of Palawan has experienced a surge in land grabbing and illegal logging, driving defender harassment, intimidation, and death. While scholars have explored the trends and patterns behind violence against defenders in Southeast Asia, few have considered how the rural poor emerge as activists, the role of NGOs in this process, and how defenders negotiate their activism with everyday life and livelihood. This study fills this gap by ethnographically examining how NGOs on Palawan island mobilize rural communities to shape defender practices and by exploring why defenders do what they do amid mounting threats against them, their loved ones, and their comrades across the island.

James Taylor Ranney, World Peace Through Law: Replacing War with the Global Rule of Law

James Taylor Ranney, World Peace Through Law: Replacing War with the Global Rule of Law

China’s Policy Choices and Effects in Response to the Economic Impact of CPTPP

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership（CPTPP）has officially entered into force and is in the expansion stage. It will have a profound impact on the Asia-Pacific economic and trade structure and global economic and trade investment rules in the future.Outside of CPTPP, China needs to take active measures to respond, build or join more regional trading systems, and expand the “friend circle” of economic and trade cooperation. China’s measures to deal with the economic impact of CPTPP can be divided into three categories: One is China’s policy choice for directly responding to CPTPP, the other is China’s policy choice for joining CPTPP, and the third is China’s policy choice for responding to the U.S. returning to CPTPP.This paper constructs a large-scale general equilibrium numerical model system to simulate the effects of different measures in China’s response to CPTPP. The value chain and value-added trade are embedded in the model, and the imbalanced trade structure of “inside money” is introduced to optimize the stability of the model. In terms of data, the model parameters are calibrated and estimated using the latest 2018 data, a numerical model system is constructed, and the effects of the three types of response measures are quantitatively simulated.The simulation results find that the policy effects of China’s unilateral measures to cope with the impact of CPTPP, from high to low, are in order: construction of a China-Japan-Korea free trade zone, implementation of RCEP, no measures, and further opening up. Under the two scenarios of China joining CPTPP, the measures to join the agreement together with the first batch of countries to expand the capacity will be more effective. After the U.S. returns to CPTPP, under the three scenarios of China’s policy choices, the policy effects from high to low are optimizing the business environment, not taking measures, and joining CPTPP with the U.S. Among the three different options, the economic effect of actively joining CPTPP is the best; the effect of unilateral measures to deal with CPTPP is the second; and once the U.S. returns to CPTPP, it will have an adverse impact on China. The effective measure to deal with is to optimize the business environment to reduce trade costs.The results of the analysis enlighten China in terms of policies to accelerate the development of free trade agreement and expand the scope of the economic and trade “friend circle”. At the same time, we should speed up domestic reform and opening up, optimize the business environment, and promote domestic system reform with new international economic and trade rules. In addition, we should actively consider joining CPTPP in an appropriate way to further promote domestic reforms and opening up to the outside world, and promote win-win cooperation and economic development in the Asia-Pacific region. The research of this paper will provide decision-making reference for China’s policy choices in response to CPTPP.

Why Reform is Needed: WTO ‘Public Body’ Jurisprudence

AbstractWTO jurisprudence on what constitutes a ‘public body’ has provoked one of the most controversial debates on the legitimacy and integrity of the WTO dispute settlement system and the WTO in general. Dispute settlement panels and the Appellate Body disagree on the interpretation and application of the public body concept, especially when applied to Chinese SOEs. In fact, the interpretation of ‘public body’ in the WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures tackles a more fundamental question of whether the WTO system can handle the state capitalism of China and other non‐market economies within the framework of global trade rules that are primarily designed to deal with free market economies. The fate of the WTO system critically hinges on how legal interpretation of ‘public body’ can address structural differences of members’ economic systems. Addressing this challenge requires WTO members to implement long overdue legal and institutional reforms.

Permanently Repealing the Global Gag Rule Will Internationally Advance Reproductive and Sexual Health

The Global Gag Rule bans foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive U.S. global health assistance funding from providing abortion services and referrals, advocating for abortion rights, or funding other organizations that provide abortion-related services. The rule presents a double bind: if NGOs elect to continue providing abortion-related care, they must forgo U.S. funding, requiring them to roll back services across the board. This reduces access to contraceptives, family planning resources, and maternal and child healthcare. The alternate option is to shut down abortion-related care to retain U.S. funding. Thus, the rule is ineffective in its purpose as it creates barriers to comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare, leading to increases in unintended pregnancies, abortions, and newborn and maternal death rates. In addition, restricted funding has negative implications for HIV/AIDS and reproductive cancer screening and treatment. The rule is currently implemented and repealed by each incoming president using executive orders. The United States Congress should pass the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights Act and repeal the Helms Amendment. This will permanently revoke the Global Gag Rule and reduce unintended pregnancies, abortions, and child and maternal mortality rates across the world.

New global optimization algorithms based on multi-loop distributed control systems with serial structure and ring structure for solving global optimization problems

In this paper, new optimization algorithms using multi-loop distributed control systems with serial structure and ring structure are proposed for solving global optimization problems, where the control plant of the subsystem is replaced by the objective function of a given optimization problem.When the control plant of each sub-loop control system is known, some simplified methods of the control plant are first proposed. These approaches change a complex control plant into a simple function without changing global optimization solution to find the global optimization solution more easily by using multi-loop distributed control systems that has two kinds of serial structure and ring structure.When the control plant of each sub-loop control system is unknown, the objective function is identified by a neural network. In addition, a proposed special neural network as a local search rule is divided to m neural network subsystems by different sizes of the effective change interval of the transformation function. In other words, the smaller the index number of a subsystem is, the stronger the local search ability of the subsystem is, otherwise, the stronger the global search ability of the subsystem is.And the current best optimization solution between all neural network subsystems is used to guide each neural network subsystem. Simultaneously, a new filled function is proposed as a global search rule. It can jump out of a local minimum point and move to another local minimum point with smaller objective function value. Finally, 17 experimental examples show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Cross-modal predictive processing depends on context rather than local contingencies.

Visual symbols or events may provide predictive information on to-be-expected sound events. When the perceived sound does not confirm the visual prediction, the incongruency response (IR), a prediction error signal of the event-related brain potentials, is elicited. It is unclear whether predictions are derived from lower-level local contingencies (e.g., recent events or repetitions) or from higher-level global rules applied top-down. In a recent study, sound pitch was predicted by a preceding note symbol. IR elicitation was confined to the condition where one of two sounds was presented more frequently and was not present with equal probability of both sounds. These findings suggest that local repetitions support predictive cross-modal processing. On the other hand, IR has also been observed with equal stimulus probabilities, where visual patterns predicted the upcoming sound sequence. This suggests the application of global rules. Here, we investigated the influence of stimulus repetition on the elicitation of the IR by presenting identical trial trains of a particular visual note symbol cueing a particular sound resulting either in a congruent or an incongruent pair. Trains of four different lengths: 1, 2, 4, or 7 were presented. The IR was observed already after a single presentation of a congruent visual-cue-sound combination and did not change in amplitude as trial train length increased. We conclude that higher-level associations applied in a top-down manner are involved in elicitation of the prediction error signal reflected by the IR, independent from local contingencies.

“If you don’t help me, I’m going to take my life”: the devastating impact of the US’s global gag rule and the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s sexual and reproductive health in Kenya

The 17-year-old girl walked into the facility seeking access to the abortion pill to terminate her pregnancy and uttered these words to the director: “If you don’t help me, I’m going to take my lif...

Model reduction for fractional elliptic problems using Kato's formula

&lt;p style='text-indent:20px;'&gt;We propose a novel numerical algorithm utilizing model reduction for computing solutions to stationary partial differential equations involving the spectral fractional Laplacian. Our approach utilizes a known characterization of the solution in terms of an integral of solutions to local (classical) elliptic problems. We reformulate this integral into an expression whose continuous and discrete formulations are stable; the discrete formulations are stable independent of all discretization parameters. We subsequently apply the reduced basis method to accomplish model order reduction for the integrand. Our choice of quadrature in discretization of the integral is a global Gaussian quadrature rule that we observe is more efficient than previously proposed quadrature rules. Finally, the model reduction approach enables one to compute solutions to multi-query fractional Laplace problems with orders of magnitude less cost than a traditional solver.&lt;/p&gt;

Mobility driven coexistence of living organisms

We propose a minimal off-lattice model of living organisms where just a very few dynamical rules of growth are assumed. The stable coexistence of many clusters is detected when we replace the global restriction rule by a locally applied one. A rich variety of evolving patterns is revealed where players movement has a decisive role on the evolutionary outcome. For example, intensive individual mobility may jeopardize the survival of the population, but if we increase players movement further then it can save the population. Notably, the collective drive of population members is capable to compensate the negative consequence of intensive movement and keeps the system alive. When the drive becomes biased then the resulting unidirectional flow alters the stable pattern and produce a stripe-like state instead of the previously observed hexagonal arrangement of clusters. Interestingly, the rotation of stripes can be flipped if the individual movement exceeds a threshold value.

The Concept of Electronic Terrorist Acts in International Criminal Law

The study aimed to identify the role of technology in spreading terrorism, Identify cybercrime sanctions in international public law, and Identify gaps in international public law in reducing cyber terrorism by identifying weaknesses. Of the most important findings of the study include: current global developments show that terrorism is unlikely to be terminated in the coming few years, despite the cooperative efforts by the United Nations, the international community and its Member States. Through the "war on terror", the United States has taken the lead in this regard.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was carried out as consequence of the terrorist strikes of September 11 in the United States America. Since then constant unrest continued in the Middle East. The case law on terrorist organizations in these three authorities, and particularly the legal values resulting from the proportion or jurisdiction of these provisions, indicates that, despite tariff variances, there seems to be a similarity of legitimate values arising from jurisprudence. A relative examination of the judicial principles arising from the proportions of each of the Supreme Court's rulings on terrorism discloses an extensive variety of principles of law which, in some cases, apply in particular to the legal system of their State. What is more clear is that these lawful principles are similar, and if they are considered as a whole, they are perfectly consistent. These legal values seem to show a similarity rather than a difference in this area of crucial importance to domestic criminal law. This supports both transnational and global counterterrorism policies, laws and strategies because it suggests that what seems to be developing is a public comprehending of what creates terrorism, at least through these three main jurisdictions of public law.&nbsp;&nbsp; The Supreme Courts recognize the obligation to abide by legitimate principles and domestic and global rules when applied.

Clash of Geofutures and the Remaking of Planetary Order: Faultlines underlying Conflicts over Geoengineering Governance

AbstractClimate engineering (geoengineering) is rising up the global policy agenda, partly because international divisions pose deep challenges to collective climate mitigation. However, geoengineering is similarly subject to clashing interests, knowledge‐traditions and geopolitics. Modelling and technical assessments of geoengineering are facilitated by assumptions of a single global planner (or some as yet unspecified rational governance), but the practicality of international governance remains mostly speculative. Using evidence gathered from state delegates, climate activists and modellers, we reveal three underlying and clashing ‘geofutures’: an idealised understanding of governable geoengineering that abstracts from technical and political realities; a situated understanding of geoengineering emphasising power hierarchies in world order; and a pragmatist precautionary understanding emerging in spaces of negotiation such as UN Environment Assembly (UNEA). Set in the wider historical context of climate politics, the failure to agree even to a study of geoengineering at UNEA indicates underlying obstacles to global rules and institutions for geoengineering posed by divergent interests and underlying epistemic and political differences. Technology assessments should recognise that geoengineering will not be exempt from international fractures; that deployment of geoengineering through imposition is a serious risk; and that contestations over geofutures pertain, not only to climate policy, but also the future of planetary order.