This paper examines the impact of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), an agreement under the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Jamaica. In its analysis, it considers both the island's existing and former foreign trade policy, as well as the progressive trade liberalization being undertaken within the Caribbean Single Market and Economy under CARICOM and its regionally devised policy initiatives. / Having followed a fairly liberal path in its trade relations since 1991, the provisions in domestic law which accommodate or hinder liberalization are referred to. Negotiation strategies for future rounds of the GATS are another important aspect of the thesis. This closely follows the schedule of commitments made under the GATS, taking into account recent instances of autonomous liberalization, including those taken in the telecommunications industry. Finally, a critical look is taken at the dispute resolution process of the WTO to determine the extent to which the trading interests of a developing microstate such as Jamaica are protected by this system.

<p>In this thesis, the study examines the factors that are believed to be instrumental in this trade imbalance between the European Union and the developing world in the agricultural sector. The study focuses on the main reason for the existance of this imbalance which is the continued use of export subsidies by the European Union. The discussion attempts to highlight the inadequacies which exist in the current trade relationship between the European Union and developing nations , in particular South Africa with regard to agricultural produce.</p>

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Any agreement, treaty or commercial transaction needs to be governed in order to work. The New Economics of Organisation literature glosses over the fact that different parts of the same transaction may be governed in different ways. In contrast, this thesis argues for the existence of "hybrid transacting" and presents two international bargaining cases to illustrate how interstate agreements are entered into legally, but enforced extra-legally. Given that the enforcement of international agreements is extra-legal, this thesis presents two lines of argument that are designed to answer the question, why do states enter into their agreements with other states in a legal way? It is suggested that treaty law offers states two important advantages. First, treaty law is a solution to an "information ordering" problem. Second, it is suggested that treaty law operates as a baseline against which reputation can be assessed.

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This thesis stresses the existence of a fundamental link between potential competition and multi-product activity. Potential competitors are identified as already-existing firms that possess "latent capacity", a principal source of scope economies, which enable firms to expand or alter their product portfolio in the short period. When latent capacity is accompanied by certain sunk costs, hit-and-run entry becomes profitable as the "latent competitor" is able to easily surmount the major barriers to entry, avoid the disadvantages in cost associated with small batch production, and exit cheaply from the various markets. This new theory of potential competition further demonstrates that when framed within a multi-product environment, the major criticisms that are levelled against the theory of contestability can be addressed. Additionally, it shows how the age-old conundrum of increasing returns and competitive behaviour may be reconciled. Empirical evidence confirms the existence of latent capacity. Such capacity is embodied in the Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) and flexible manpower resources that are increasingly being employed by firms.

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Nowadays, TV advertising is an important part of our daily life. However, it is usually hard for organizations that produce and pay for the advertisements to confirm whether their commercials are broadcasted as required in time and frequency. Consequently, a multimedia file search problem arises and it has drawn more and more attention in the past decade. In this thesis, we propose an automatic commercial search scheme using audio fingerprinting and implement it in a PC-based application. Our commercial search algorithm is composed of two parts: one for audio feature extraction and another for database search. For the first part, although the video stream of TV broadcast contains a great deal of intuitive information, we decide to ignore it because it takes much more storage and computations to process. For the audio stream, we have to extract proper audio features which can represent its characteristics and store them in a database for identification. We choose the Normalized Spectral Subband Centroids (NSSCs) as our audio fingerprints and preprocess the known commercials to build the database. For the second part, we apply a three-step process to search for any matches as the user requests, which comprises candidate search, decision-making and time verification. This process is performed for every N1 (N1=15 in our application) frames if the search result is negative. Once a match is confirmed, we skip the frames left in the commercial and use the frame after it to start a new process. Our experiment results are satisfactory based on the commercial and TV program data in our database. Moreover, it shows that our PC-based application is robust against degradation during real broadcast and recording.