A business agenda for APEC

Business needs to take the lead as APEC evolves into a genuine force for freer trade that will greatly increase business opportunities and improve living standards in the region, says Minoru Murofushi, CEO of Itochu Corporation. Although tariff and non‐tariff barriers have been falling, drastic steps must still be taken for APEC to reach its goals, he says. Government and business must cooperate closely to eliminate the many trade impediments that remain among APEC members, and together they must also address deregulation, intellectual property rights, the environment, and infrastructure development.     

Discrimination of transparent polyethylene films based on identification of inorganic antiblocking agents

Several nondestructive and semidestructive analyses were used to discriminate colorless transparent polyethylene bags. Transparent plastic bags made from low-density and linear low-density polyethylene usually contain antiblocking agents to prevent sticking of the film, which makes it difficult to open the mouths of plastic bags. Inorganic antiblocking agents are uniformly dispersed in polyethylene films, so they are easily observed using optical microscopy. The particle size distributions of the antiblocking agents were compared by statistical tests. Particle composition was examined by elemental analysis using energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry with a scanning electron microscope and by molecular vibration analysis using a sensitive microscopic Raman spectrometer. The compositions could be determined nondestructively on the basis of the results. These data reinforce the morphological discrimination. Morphological discrimination of the dispersed antiblocking agent powders, statistical comparison of particle size distributions, and compositional analysis of the antiblocking agents strengthen the ability to discriminate polyethylene films.     

Molecular analysis of the human esterase D gene ESD(*)Q0(yonago) responsible for incompatibility in a Japanese paternity case

In a Japanese paternity test, an alleged father was excluded only by reverse homozygosity of esterase D (ESD) phenotypes (mother, ESD 1; child, ESD 1; alleged father, ESD 2) out of 43 classical and DNA markers investigated. To solve the aberrant inheritance of the ESD phenotypes observed between them, fragments for all eight coding exons amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) were subjected to DNA analysis. The child and alleged father shared a null allele, originating from ESD(*)1. It was characterized by having TGA for the stop codon instead of TCA for serine at codon 63. Thus, the sharing of a rare null gene, ESD(*)Q0(yonago), increased the probability of paternity.     

Distributional Conflicts and the Timing of Environmental Policy

This paper examines the timing of adopting a policy for tackling an environmental issue such as climate change from a viewpoint of distributional conflicts. A dynamic game of providing public goods (Alesina and Drazen, American Economic Review 81(5), 1170–1118 (1991)) is applied to the argument, modified by including abatement costs as well as the loss in the environment. In this framework, even if the immediate adoption of environmental policy is socially optimal, a disproportionate burden of pollution reduction leads to a delay in policy adoption. This is because the disproportionate burden increases the gain from waiting for each individual hoping that the other will agree to bear the heavier burden. The impact of income distribution on the timing is also examined. The level of averting behavior is assumed to depend on the level of income. If the distribution of income is more dispersed, the regional disparities in environmental degradation become larger because the poor tend to avert less and get more loss than the rich due to their tighter budget constraints. Under asymmetric information on damages, as the disparities in income become more dispersed, each individual expects that his/her opponent’s damage becomes severe; then, he/she gives in first. Thus, each individual holds out longer so that the timing of policy implementation is delayed further. Finally, the theoretical result is empirically tested by both probit and discriminant analyses to examine whether income distribution has an impact on the timing of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol in practice.     

Divine Witness

Journal of Indian Philosophy - When People were falsely accused, and yet there existed no human means to testify to the truth, to whom did they resort for the final judgment? In ancient India, it...     

16 Y chromosomal STR haplotypes in Japanese

A total of 1079 Japanese males were typed for the following 16 Y chromosomal short tandem repeat (Y-STR) markers: DYS456, DYS389I, DYS390, DYS389II, DYS458, DYS19, DYS385, DYS393, DYS391, DYS439, DYS635, DYS392, Y GATA H4, DYS437, DYS438 and DYS448 using an AmpFlSTR(R) Yfiler PCR Amplification kit (Applied Biosystems). A total of 950 haplotypes for the 16 Y-STR markers were detected and, of these, 886 haplotypes were unique. The most frequent haplotype was found in 22 Japanese males. The haplotype diversity was 0.9992, indicating a high potential for differentiating between male individuals. There were 10 haplotypes with no allele detected at the DYS448 marker. Thus, the presence of such atypical haplotypes should be noted, when DNA typing results obtained from degraded DNA samples and/or DNA mixture samples from more than one male individual are being interpreted.