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Substantial Potential (substantial + potential)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Life Sciences40%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting40%

Selected Abstracts

Agricultural and Economy-Wide Effects of European Enlargement: Modelling the Common Agricultural Policy

JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 2 2000
C. F. Bach
The economic impact of extending the Common Agricultural Policy to the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) has become a major issue in the European enlargement debate. This paper provides an assessment of the economy-wide effects of European enlargement using a global general equilibrium model where special attention is given to modelling the instruments of the Common Agricultural Policy, the Agenda 2000 proposal and the EU budget. The results indicate a substantial potential for increasing agricultural production in the CEEC. The EU budget will increase significantly and the transfers from EU taxpayers to farmers in the CEEC result in significant welfare gains in the new member countries. In spite of these important transfers the macroeconomic costs for the EU are found to be limited. [source]

Contribution of direct and maternal genetic effects to life-history evolution

NEW PHYTOLOGIST, Issue 3 2009
Laura F. Galloway
Summary ,,Maternal effects are ubiquitous in nature. In plants, most work has focused on the effects of maternal environments on offspring trait expression. Less is known about the prevalence of genetic maternal effects and how they influence adaptive evolution. Here, we used multivariate genetic models to estimate the contributions of maternal and direct genetic (co)variance, the cross-generation direct-maternal covariance, and M, the matrix of maternal effect coefficients, for life-history traits in Campanulastrum americanum, a monocarpic herb. ,,Following a three-generation breeding design, we grew paternal half-sib families with full-sib relatives of each parent and measured juvenile and adult traits. ,,Seed size was influenced exclusively by maternal environmental effects, whereas maternal genetic effects influenced traits throughout the life cycle, including strong direct and maternal additive genetic correlations within and between generations for phenological and size traits. Examination of M suggested that both juvenile and adult traits in maternal plants influenced the expression of offspring traits. ,,This study reveals substantial potential for genetic maternal effects to contribute to adaptive evolution including cross-generation direct-maternal correlations that may slow selection response, maternal effects on phenology that reinforce genetic correlations, and within- and between-generation genetic correlations that may influence life-history polymorphism. [source]

Doubled sugar content in sugarcane plants modified to produce a sucrose isomer

PLANT BIOTECHNOLOGY JOURNAL, Issue 1 2007
Luguang Wu
Summary Sucrose is the feedstock for more than half of the world's fuel ethanol production and a major human food. It is harvested primarily from sugarcane and beet. Despite attempts through conventional and molecular breeding, the stored sugar concentration in elite sugarcane cultivars has not been increased for several decades. Recently, genes have been cloned for bacterial isomerase enzymes that convert sucrose into sugars which are not metabolized by plants, but which are digested by humans, with health benefits over sucrose. We hypothesized that an appropriate sucrose isomerase (SI) expression pattern might simultaneously provide a valuable source of beneficial sugars and overcome the sugar yield ceiling in plants. The introduction of an SI gene tailored for vacuolar compartmentation resulted in sugarcane lines with remarkable increases in total stored sugar levels. The high-value sugar isomaltulose was accumulated in storage tissues without any decrease in stored sucrose concentration, resulting in up to doubled total sugar concentrations in harvested juice. The lines with enhanced sugar accumulation also showed increased photosynthesis, sucrose transport and sink strength. This remarkable step above the former ceiling in stored sugar concentration provides a new perspective into plant source,sink relationships, and has substantial potential for enhanced food and biofuel production. [source]

Assessment of the practicing physician: Challenges and opportunities

THE JOURNAL OF CONTINUING EDUCATION IN THE HEALTH PROFESSIONS, Issue S1 2008
Eric S. Holmboe MDArticle first published online: 4 DEC 200
Abstract Despite spending a substantial amount of time in structured educational settings during early medical training, most physicians will spend the majority of their career in clinical practice. In the clinical practice setting, physicians become responsible for determining and implementing their own educational program in order to maintain, at a minimum, competence. Pressure to change the nature of continuing medical education (CME) parallels pressure from patients, payers, and policymakers to hold individual physicians more accountable for the care they provide. How can these two forces be brought together more deliberately and effectively? Comprehensive physician assessment provides such an opportunity with the potential to benefit all parties involved in health care, especially patients and physicians. Many assessment methods and tools exist today that can facilitate the integration of CME and quality. Using a multifaceted physician-level performance assessment system has substantial potential to align the public's need and desire to ensure their physician is competent, at a minimum, with providing the physician with meaningful, actionable information and data to improve performance and engage in transformative learning. CME programs need to incorporate more robust assessment as part of the learning activity to facilitate improvements in health care more directly. [source]

Environmental Performance Assessment of China's Manufacturing

ASIAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 1 2010
Tao Zhang
O47; P28; R15 This paper applies the data envelopment analysis approach to contribute to the debate on the environmental performance of China's manufacturing sector. Regional and periodic differences in environmental efficiency, environmental quantity and environmental change indexes in China's manufacturing sector are examined for the period between 1998 and 2002. Within the framework of data envelopment analysis and distance functions, environmental quantity and environmental change indexes are measured as variants of the Malmquist quantity index. The overall environmental efficiency of China's manufacturing sector is very low, indicating substantial potential to reduce pollution emissions in China's manufacturing industries. The results and implications of this study can provide helpful information to improve the environmental performance of China's manufacturing sector. [source]