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Artificial intelligence (AI) represents technologies with human-like cognitive abilities to learn, perform, and make decisions. AI in precision agriculture (PA) enables farmers and farm managers to deploy highly targeted and precise farming practices based on site-specific agroclimatic field measurements. The foundational and applied development of AI has matured considerably over the last 30 years. The time is now right to engage seriously with the ethics and responsible practice of AI for the well-being of farmers and farm managers. In this paper, we identify and discuss both challenges and opportunities for improving farmers' trust in those providing AI solutions for PA. We highlight that farmers' trust can be moderated by how the benefits and risks of AI are perceived, shared, and distributed. We propose four recommendations for improving farmers' trust. First, AI developers should improve model transparency and explainability. Second, clear responsibility and accountability should be assigned to AI decisions. Third, concerns about the fairness of AI need to be overcome to improve human-machine partnerships in agriculture. Finally, regulation and voluntary compliance of data ownership, privacy, and security are needed, if AI systems are to become accepted and used by farmers. National Science Foundation [2202706, 2026431] Published version ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 2202706 and 2026431. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers and journal editor for their valuable suggestions to improve the manuscript. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Let A and B be C*-algebras, and let ? be a derivation on the tensor product A ? B endowed with a uniform cross norm. In this paper, we present a decomposition for ? as ? = ? ? id + id ? ?, where id stands for the identity operator and ? and ? are derivations on A and B, respectively. Moreover, the concept of flow on the tensor product of C*-algebras and some properties of tensor sum are investigated.

Surveillance and security cameras help security forces in public places such as airports, railway stations, universities and office buildings to perform high-level surveillance tasks such as detecting suspicious activity or anticipating undesirable events. Re-Identification (Re-ID) is defined as the process of communicating between images of the person in different cameras in a surveillance environment. Changing the field of view of any camera presents challenges such as changing body posture, changing brightness, noise and blockage. This article focuses on extracting the most distinctive features to overcome these challenges. The features of Hu moment, Zernike moment in 9th order and Legendre moment in 9th order for each image are extracted and merged into a single feature vector to form a single feature vector for each image. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the vector dimensionality and finally the Mahalanobis distance criterion was used for identification. The proposed method in the VIPeR database has achieved a re-ID rate of 96.5. Although the presented method is simple, the outcome has been superior compared to many of the state-of-the-art methods.

It has long been established in theory that uncertainty impacts on firm behaviour. However, the empirical basis for quantifying the uncertainty-reducing effects of trade agreements has not been firmly established. In this paper, we develop estimates of the effect of reducing uncertainty regarding regulation of foreign services markets by making commitments that are bound under a trade agreement. Specifically, we identify the effect on services trade of services trade restrictions, as measured by the OECD's Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI), and the separate effect of ‘water’ in binding commitments, as assessed by the difference between countries’ commitments under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) or free trade agreements (FTAs) and applied levels of market access, as captured by STRI scores. Using a gravity model, we find that services trade responds positively but inelastically to reductions in services trade barriers, as measured by the STRI and, in our preferred regression, the response to actual restrictions is more than twice – specifically 2.4 times – as strong as the response to comparable reductions in uncertainty, as measured by water. Moving from GATS commitments to FTA commitments leads to a 4.7% increase in services trade because of the reduction in uncertainty.

This study develops a quantitative analysis of the impact of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), originally signed on 30 November 2018, and amended by the Protocol of Amendment signed in Mexico City on 10 December 2019. The USMCA provides a major overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) based largely on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) text. It introduces only minor changes to market access, intensifies trade and investment diversion, increases uncertainty by weakening the institutional framework of the NAFTA, and seeks to shift the net benefits of the NAFTA towards the United States. The evaluation of the USMCA is developed using simulations on a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, based on a dynamic specification of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model, modified to directly represent goods and services trade conducted through foreign affiliates, as well as on a cross-border basis, and to reflect the impact of liberalization of FDI. The impact of the USMCA is assessed against a baseline that reflects an in-force NAFTA. These results are compared to the impacts of NAFTA lapsing to infer the difference between the USMCA and a “hard” NAFTA exit scenario.

This study assesses the potential gains from unilateral trade liberalization for the UK, against the background of a hard Brexit in which a hard border and tariff wall is erected between the UK and the European Union. Unilateral trade liberalization would allow the UK to expeditiously offset at least some of the trade costs incurred in leaving the EU Single Market without a deal as it does not depend on negotiation with third parties, and hence is not limited by trade negotiating capacity in the UK or its prospective free trade partners. At the same time, unilateral liberalization faces the political economy challenge of removing protection in the most sensitive sectors, which is where most of the liberalization gains come from, while also giving up leverage to conclude future trade agreements. A highly ambitious unilateral liberalization scenario represents, in terms of trade structure and costs, a substantial gain but falls short of offsetting a hard Brexit (when both the unilateral scenario and the hard Brexit scenario are modelled on a common set of modelling assumptions and protocols). Based on the modelling results, the main political economy challenge to unilateral liberalization for the UK in a post-EU trade policy context would be the deep negative impacts on UK agriculture.

This study analyses the impacts of the European Union - Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) on the United Kingdom and Canada, under alternative scenarios, applying a dynamic general equilibrium model that incorporates foreign direct investment.

Canadian participation in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) was called into question by Canada’s hold-up on signing the draft agreement among the remaining eleven negotiating parties following US withdrawal. This raised the possibility of the CPTPP going ahead as a 10-member agreement without Canada. We ran the numbers on the opportunity costs for Canada compared to the gains of participation. This note builds on our previous studies of the TPP which quantify the TPP12 and TPP11. This helps inform the discussion surrounding the announcement that the TPP11 will go ahead, with Canada’s participation. We report comparable figures for the TPP12, TPP11 (without the United States) and TPP10 (without Canada).

We assess the outcomes for the negotiating parties in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) if the TPP11 go ahead with the agreement as negotiated without the United States, as compared to the outcomes under the TPP12 agreement as signed in October 2016. Both the TPP11 and TPP12 are assessed on the basis of commitments in the actual text and liberalization schedules, supplemented by the technical summaries provided by various governments interpreting the outcome of the negotiations. The difference is the US withdrawal. This assessment is based on a dynamic specification of the Global Trade Analysis Project model, modified to directly represent goods and services trade conducted through foreign affiliates, as well as on a cross-border basis, and to reflect the impact of foreign direct investment liberalization. We find that the TPP11 is a much smaller deal in aggregate than the TPP12, but that some parties do better without the United States in the deal, in particular the TPP11 parties in the Western Hemisphere – Canada, Mexico, Chile, and Peru. This sets up a complex negotiating situation for all parties going forward, as the United States seeks to re-negotiate one-on-one outside the TPP framework what it had already negotiated one-on-one inside the TPP framework. For the politically relevant medium term, the United States stands to be less well-off without the TPP12 than with the TPP11 in force and the Eleven stand to be better off. Since provisional deals can be in place for a long time, the results of this study suggest that the Eleven are better off to continue with the deal without the United States on a provisional basis, leaving aside the controversial governance elements, the implications of which for national interests are unclear and, in any event, may be substantially affected by parallel bilateral negotiations between individual TPP parties and the United States.

This note develops four alternative estimates of the trade-related impacts of the United Kingdom seceding from the European Union. We contrast an exit that re-sets the UK’s relationship with the rest of the EU to a WTO-rules most favoured nation basis (“Brexit”) with a negotiated change in the UK’s status that largely preserves the UK’s integration with the rest of the EU at a level similar to that of the European Free Trade Association (“Brefta”). While these two scenarios model the EU disaggregated into sixteen regions, a third scenario shows the implications for outcomes of modelling the Brexit scenario treating the rest of the EU (EU27) on an aggregated basis, where we introduce a “single market” effect that reflects EU27 preference for EU27 products. A fourth scenario introduces a UK free trade agreement with the United States in the context of the TTIP not going ahead, which reflects the emerging political economy of trans-Atlantic trade relations.

The literature on the impact of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) on foreign direct investment (FDI) has had difficulty establishing a robust effect of BITs on FDI flows. This conclusion extends to FDI chapters in free trade agreements (FTAs), which feature the same substantive content as BITs. The lack of an empirically identifiable effect may reflect econometric difficulties, a minimal role of BITs/FTAs in corporate FDI decisions, or the lack of liberalizing content in the treaties. We consider the latter issue by mapping the legal commitments in FTAs onto the OECD’s Foreign Direct Investment Restrictiveness (FDIR) Index, while drawing on the Mode 3 component of the OECD’s Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) to enable greater granularity of treatment of the measures in FTAs. The modified index, which we label the FDI-RI to distinguish it from the FDIR, has the same broad policy areas and the same weighting scheme as the FDIR but the measures under each horizontal policy area (i.e., policies that apply to FDI in general without distinguishing sectors) that are covered in more detail by the STRI have been disaggregated into measures that correspond to those in the STRI. The FDI-RI thus covers both goods and services on a consistent basis, but with greater detail for goods sectors than available under the FDIR. Importantly, we take into account the impact of FTA measures in improving upon each party’s bindings under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). In principle, empirically quantified NTBs reflect both applied restrictions and uncertainty. We identify uncertainty with “water” in the bound commitments and construct a composite NTB that reflects applied measures and water. This approach allows a determination of whether and how much FTAs liberalize investment by either reducing applied barriers, decreasing uncertainty, or both. Given measures of tax equivalents for non-tariff measures affecting investment, this approach also allows the calculation of a tax equivalent shock for use in quantitative models. We comment on the impact of FDI liberalization in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement using this approach.

We assess the outcomes for the negotiating parties in the Trans-Pacific Partnership if the remaining eleven parties go ahead with the agreement as negotiated without the United States, as compared to the outcomes under the original twelve-member agreement signed in October 2016. We find that the eleven-party agreement, now renamed as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), is a much smaller deal than the twelve-party one, but that some parties do better without the United States in the deal, in particular those in the Western Hemisphere-Canada, Mexico, Chile, and Peru. For the politically relevant medium term, the United States stands to be less well-off outside the TPP than inside. Since provisional deals can be in place for a long time, the results of this study suggest that the eleven parties are better off to implement the CPTPP, leaving aside the controversial governance elements, the implications of which for national interests are unclear and which, in any event, may be substantially affected by parallel bilateral negotiations between individual CPTPP parties and the United States.

This paper quantifies the trade and economic impacts of the US terminating its NAFTA commitments under three alternative scenarios: NAFTA lapses with all three trading relationships reverting to WTO rules; NAFTA lapses but Canada and the United States retain bilateral free trade under the Canada-US FTA (CUSFTA); and Canada and Mexico trade remains under their bilateral NAFTA commitments. The impacts are evaluated using a computable general equilibrium model and takes into account the implications of imposing new tariff walls and removing the services and investment commitments under the NAFTA.

In this research, a method based on base-catalysed decomposition (BCD) was developed using sodium hydroxide and glycerol for dechlorination of transformer oils with low levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). PCB removal and dechlorination efficiencies were measured by gas chromatography and the silver nitrate titration method, respectively. PCB dechlorination and removal efficiencies after 4 h at 250°C and in the presence of iron were 97.4% and 99.8%, respectively. However, in the absence of iron the same efficiencies were calculated to be 79.4 and 99.7%, respectively. The dielectric loss factor of oil refined at 250°C was 0.0064 and did not meet the required standards to be reused in the transformers. However, that refined at 200°C satisfied the standards with acceptable conversion rates. Use of iron, besides increasing conversion rates, changed the mechanism of the reaction from nucleophilic substitution to a combination of hydrodechlorination and nucleophilic substitution. In the presence of iron, highly chlorinated PCBs were converted to less chlorinated PCBs, and this caused the concentration of less chlorinated PCBs to reach a peak and then decline thereafter. The production of PCB 36 confirmed this. However, in the absence of iron particles, all changes in the PCB concentration curves were downward.

We assess the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as negotiated, based on the actual text and liberalization schedules, supplemented by the technical summaries provided by various governments interpreting the outcome of the negotiations. In addition to the impact of tariff reductions and the expansion of agricultural market access through tariff rate quota concessions, we take into account estimates of likely preference utilization, and the impact of non-tariff barriers on trade in goods and services and on investment. We evaluate the latter on the basis of the extent to which the TPP reduces the parties’ scores on indexes measuring restrictiveness of the parties’ regimes for goods, services, and investment. We also take into account the value of binding market access commitments for services trade. We consider the potential spillovers on third parties of higher labour and environmental standards as well as of standards harmonization. We comment on the welfare costs stemming from the administrative burden of preferential trade and from compensating agricultural subsidies promised in some parties’ sensitive sectors; and discuss the implications of the TPP intellectual property regime. The assessment is based on a dynamic specification of the Global Trade Analysis Project model, modified to directly represent goods and services trade conducted through foreign affiliates, as well as on a cross-border basis, and to reflect the impact of liberalization of foreign direct investment.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) promises to have a modest impact on Canada, according to ground breaking research from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Better in than Out? Canada and the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” authors Dan Ciuriak, Ali Dadkhah, and Jingliang Xiao, find that some sectors will benefit from the TPP, while for others, the TPP will not go far enough. However, Canada would forgo any gains, and experience additional modest losses from not ratifying the TPP.

The possibility of a Canada-China Free Trade Agreement has been under discussion for some time. China has reportedly offered to negotiate an FTA with Canada, although this has not been officially confirmed by the Canadian Government. A tentative step towards a negotiation was taken in the 2012 Canada-China Complementarities Study. This note seeks to quantify the impact of such an agreement on Canada and China. We deploy a dynamic computable general equilibrium model that incorporates foreign direct investment and develop a realistic scenario based on the recently concluded China-Australia FTA. We find the main gains from a Canada-China FTA would come from tariff reductions and the binding of services commitments.

The infrastructure for services trade analysis has improved considerably with the development of databases on services trade for modelling purposes by the World Bank in its Trade in Services Database; on Mode 3 commercial presence trade in the form of foreign affiliate sales (FAS) data sets; on the prevalence of services trade barriers in the OECD’s and World bank’s Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) databases; new work at the OECD measuring uncertainty of market access in the form of a GATS Trade Restrictiveness Index, (GTRI) which measures bound commitments and can be used to derive “water” in the bindings, a measure of the extent to which existing market access restrictions could be increased without violating WTO commitments; and relatively comprehensive measures of the ad valorem equivalents (AVEs) of services trade barriers. We exploit these resources to develop estimates of the impact of liberalization of both cross-border and commercial presence trade in financial services on Canada’s financial services sector, taking into account both the extent of liberalization that is likely under a model, high-quality financial services chapter of an FTA and the effect of the FTA on binding existing market access commitments.

This note develops estimates of the trade-related costs of an exit by the United Kingdom from the European Union and compares these to the potential benefits of the alternative trade policies to which a fully independent UK would have access. An exit scenario that re-sets the UK’s relationship with the rest of the EU to a WTO-rules most favoured nation basis (“Brexit”) would involve significant costs. A negotiated change in the UK’s status that largely preserves UK integration with the rest of the EU at a level similar to that of the European Free Trade Association (“Brefta”) is much less costly relative to the status quo. The trade policy options available to the UK post-exit would not cover Brexit-level costs, but, in our estimation, provide sufficient liberalization potential to cover the Brefta-level costs. While unilateral liberalization alone would fall short, if it is coupled with an ambitious post-exit trade policy focussed on securing free trade agreements with major trading partners, it would leave the UK essentially neutral and possibly modestly ahead on trade policy grounds. This depends on exactly how low the costs of the post-Brefta UK-REU trade border would be and on the level of ambition that the alternative trade policies would actually achieve. In a long-term perspective, if the world moves to a similar free trade equilibrium, the EU included, the first mover advantages to the UK of full liberalization against the rest of the world would eventually be eroded. In this case, the present value of the benefits of continued participation in the borderless single market would likely dominate, since the additional trade costs imposed by a Brefta border would continue to be incurred indefinitely.

Canadians will likely enjoy $2.1 billion in additional household income by 2035 as a result of the Canada-Korea Free Trade Deal (CKFTA), which entered into force January 1, 2015, according to a new C.D. Howe Institute report. In “The Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement: What it Means for Canada,” authors Dan Ciuriak, Jingliang Xiao and Ali Dadkhah provide the first in-depth analysis of Canada’s first trade agreement with an Asian economy.

This paper assesses the economic impact of the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement (CKFTA) on the basis of the published text and agreed schedule of commitments. We introduce new estimates of the impact of the services measures based on the extent to which they change the Services Trade Restrictiveness Index for Canada and Korea. The study contributes to the literature by making more precise the evaluation of services trade liberalization measures.

A new class of Lorentz-invariant equations for a particle of unique mass m and spin 1/2 and corresponding to the Lorentz-group representation (1,1/2) direct-sum (0,1/2) direct-sum (1/2,0) direct-sum (1/2,1) is derived. These equations are irreducible and are obtainable from a Lagrangian. The g factor is found to be 2/3+(4/3) vertical-bar1-2f vertical-bar/sup 2/, where f is an arbitrary nonzero complex parameter. Although the total charge is positive definite in the free-field case, thereby allowing consistent second quantization, the minimally coupled field exhibits the problems of the indefinite metric.