Posts tagged…Data

Climate ‘tipping’ points fall down

Thu, Feb 19 2009

If you're alarmed by claims—sometimes from official sources—about CO2 from thawing permafrost or cataclysms caused by a slowing or reversal of the "Meridional Overturning Circulation", then relax!

It looks like neither one nor the other of these exotic risks stands up to scientific scrutiny.

Transparency as stimulus

Thu, Feb 19 2009
Recovery.gov_tmb.jpg

This is a great idea that the Rudd government should adopt.

"…The ‘American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,’ better known as our national Hail Mary stimulus bill, … also contains a measure promoting a less-noted type of economic infrastructure: government data. In the name of transparency, all the Fed’s stimulus-spending data will be posted at a new government site, Recovery.gov"Extract from Naive forecasts outperform IPCC Tue, Feb 17 2009

Mean and maximum errors in a naive forecast of temperature 1850-2008 [Green et. al.]

In a straightforward but important paper, Green, Armstrong and Soon demonstrate that there is no reason to develop elaborate 'forecasts' of temperature. The forecasts of the CGM models, they predict, will be no better over policy-relevant periods of 20, 50 or even 100 years than a naive forecast that assumes future temperatures will be the same as today's.

"Global mean temperatures were found…

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Aus exports at current prices

Mon, Dec 08 2008

AusExpCurPriceJun2008_tmb.gif

Speaking of unsustainable trends …

Australian food trade barriers revealed

Wed, Aug 13 2008

The World Bank's World Trade Indicators (WTI) are a relatively new, but very powerful, way of describing global trade policies and regulations. Their simplified metrics help to reveal the 'big picture' that emerges from a blizzard of trade and tariff data collected by the UN and WTO. Their method is theoretically sound but—as always—has limits and perspectives that need some interpretive…

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IMF Data Mapper

Sat, Feb 02 2008

IMFDataMapperThumb.gifTrade data sets are large and often difficult to interpret. Simplifying the data and showing policy-relevant relationships is important. The new IMF Data Mapper is a brilliant new on-line tool for doing just that

Click the thumbnail image to see an example map.

WTO Tariff Profiles

Tue, Jun 26 2007

A gazette of global tariff levels by country, product group, applied and bound. Just in time for the regrets over the demise of Doha

Inquit Database of SPS notifications

Tue, May 29 2007

here to open the IQ SPS database in a new window”Access the Inquit database of SPS measures

I’ve built a new database of WTO notifications of Sanitary and Phytosanitary measures, covering all measures notified to WTO from September 1999 to April 2007 May 2007. [UPDATE] The database contains some 6,170 6265 records [UPDATE] of which about 150 corrections. On average, governments are notifying about 75 new measures every month. The rapid…

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Design of a multilateral regime for emissions trading

Sat, Mar 10 2007

The most difficult questions about the management of climate change are not about taxes or trading but about the weakness of multilateral regimes. Their recent history should worry anyone who wants a global answer to a problem of managing a global commons.

In my submission to the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Emissions Trading I draw some lessons from the history of multilateral trade and…

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Access to the Inquit Standards Database

Mon, Feb 19 2007

The Inquit database of SPS and TBT standards is still available has been retired and replaced with new database of SPS measures (see this story). The data on SPS measures and TBT measures had a number of errors due, mostly, to the inconsistent way that Members filled out their notifications in the first few years of the WTO system. The new datbase is much more accurate, and links directly to the…

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Climate change concern

Tue, Feb 13 2007

The daily number of blog posts in last 12 months has quadrupled
Technorati Chart

WTO and Developing Countries

Sat, Feb 10 2007

here to open WTODC in a new window”WTO and Developing Countries Cover page

The World Trade Organization has commissioned Inquit to write a number of publications. One of the first—in 1999—was “WTO and Developing Countries”, which described the impact on Developing Country members of the Uruguay Round Agreements and the provisions that the agreements made specifically for development.

The hard-cover version of the book is now out of…

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