Countries frequently use health technology assessment (HTA) to set priorities for introducing new interventions or evaluating existing interventions; however, applying the tool effectively is heavily dependent on a country’s resources and capacity. Infrastructure and data, technical expertise, broad stakeholder involvement, and financial support are required to improve HTA processes. In the Asia-Pacific, HTAsiaLink was established to facilitate this practice, but strengthening and legitimizing this organization are needed to maximize its potential to support HTA institutionalization in the region. To realize this objective, HTAsiaLink can serve as a center of excellence while providing experiential learning and sharing information. As a learning hub, HTAsiaLink can share resources—particularly data—that can contribute to joint HTAs as done in the European Union and strengthen capacity in countries needing to develop their HTA expertise.

We investigated the environmental impacts of alternative cultural practices within a watershed under different water quality standards. We used experimental data on nutrient runoff to determine the optimal amount of broiler litter application in hay production in Louisiana. To compensate for the lack of experimental data, we used biophysical simulation models to find the optimal combination of agricultural best-management practices in a watershed in Mississippi. The results indicated that stricter environmental standards lower total profit potential and litter utilization.

This paper examines the effect of the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The results suggest that U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico have been responsive to tariff rate reductions applied to Mexican products. A one percentage point decrease in tariff rates is associated with an increase in U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico by 5.31% in the first 6 years of NAFTA and by 2.62% in the last 6 years of NAFTA. U.S. imports from Mexico have also been attributable to the pre-NAFTA tariff rates. Overall, the results indicate that the U.S-Mexico trade agreement under NAFTA has been trade creating rather than trade diverting.

This study analyzes the potential impacts of expanded ethanol production on southern agriculture. Results of regression analysis suggest that acreage planted for field crops (corn, cotton, soybeans, and wheat) is inelastic with respect to relative prices. The results provide statistical evidence of potential significant acreage shifts favoring corn over cotton, soybeans, and wheat. Simulations indicate that higher corn prices will increase corn acreage, but the South continues to be a deficit corn region. U.S. corn production is capable of supplying domestic demand for ethanol, feed for livestock and poultry, and other uses, while maintaining exports at more than 2 billion bushels annually.

The transport properties, i.e. microstructural behavior and mechanisms related to water and ionic transport within the pore network of cement-based materials can be considered as an indicator for durability and to predict service life of concrete structures. Hence, the investigation of ionic transport is very important to asses ionic diffusion and ionic migration that potentially affect microstructural development of the bulk cement-based matrix. External electric fields are commonly accelerating ion (and water) migration. Numerical works on simulation of these phenomena have been reported, however, most of them consider only a constant ionic diffusion coefficient. This paper deals with the application of the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations to simulate ionic transport in cement-based systems exposed to external electric potential by considering time dependent diffusion coefficient. The simulation involves solving the equation of mass conservation of individual ionic species coupled with electrostatic potential. Profiles of ionic concentrations and ionic distribution in cement-based systems are presented and discussed.

We consider a Josephson junction system installed with a finite length inhomogeneity, either of micro-resistor or micro-resonator type. The system can be modelled by a sine-Gordon equation with a piecewise-constant function to represent the varying Josephson tunneling critical current. The existence of pinned fluxons depends on the length of the inhomogeneity, the variation in the Josephson tunneling critical current and the applied bias current. We establish that a system may either not be able to sustain a pinned fluxon, or – for instance by varying the length of the inhomogeneity – may exhibit various different types of pinned fluxons. Our stability analysis shows that changes of stability can only occur at critical points of the length of the inhomogeneity as a function of the (Hamiltonian) energy density inside the inhomogeneity – a relation we determine explicitly. In combination with continuation arguments and Sturm–Liouville theory, we determine the stability of all constructed pinned fluxons. It follows that if a given system is able to sustain at least one pinned fluxon, a microresistor has exactly one pinned fluxon, i.e. the system selects one unique pinned stable pinned configuration, and a microresonator has at least one stable pinned configuration. Moreover, it is shown that both for micro-resistors and micro-resonators this stable pinned configuration may be non-monotonic – something which is not possible in the homogeneous case. Finally, it is shown that results in the literature on localised inhomogeneities can be recovered as limits of our results on micro-resonators.

We report the intermixing enhancement using the Ge-doped sol-gel derived silica encapsulant layer in InGaAs/InGaAsP quantum-well laser structure. A bandgap shift of ∼64 nm has been observed from 16% Ge-doped silica capped sample at an annealing temperature of 630°C while the intermixing at the similar temperature can be effectively suppressed with the e-beam evaporated SiO2 encapsulant layer. Using our theoretical model, nearly identical activation energy of 1.7±0.5 eV was obtained from the intermixed sample with Ge-doped silica. Similar intermixing enhancement holds for high Ge-content cap in the intermixed GaAs/AlGaAs quantum-wells related to Ga vacancy injection. We postulate that the dissimilarity in interdiffusion behavior between 0% and 16% Ge-doped silica capped sample is only attributed to the difference in the number of beneficial vacancies that involve in the intermixing process.