Steel: A new round of protectionism in American trade

Traditionally the American steel industry is the most protected industrial sector in the USA and internationally it is the largest user of anti-dumping and anti-subsidy proceedings. At the end of 1994 a ruling from the GATT Panel settled the most recent trade dispute in the steel market. A number of the anti-dumping and anti-subsidy proceedings applied for by US integrated steel producers in 1992 remain in effect. The following paper outlines the latest trade dispute in the steel trade, beginning with an overview of the various rounds of protectionism to date, and seeks to analyse the background to and causes of the dispute.     

Maastricht II: Are real convergence criteria needed?

In the run-up to the Intergovernmental Conference of the Member States of the EU in 1996, criticism of the convergence criteria laid down in the Maastricht Treaty selection and the scope left for interpretation is becoming ever vociferous. Will the shortcomings be rectified if, as demanded by the British Government in particular, the monetary and fiscal convergence criteria are complemented by real economic criteria?     

The Assessment: Gender and the Life Cycle

This assessment is an introduction to the Oxford Review of EconomicPolicy's issue on gender and the life cycle. It sets the stageby providing background information on various dimensions ofgender differences, pointing out differences across countriesas well as over time, and relates this evidence to the papersthat follow. It further briefly reviews the articles in theissue and puts them into context. Footnotes ¹ E-mail address: c.dustmann{at}ucl.ac.uk     

Allocation of research grants to university research proposals

In this paper we examine the optimal allocation of research money to incoming research proposals in a university environment. Since a university has no obvious objective to maximize when allocating research money, but rather has several, possibly conflicting, goals it would like to achieve, the method of goal programming is proposed as a solution technique, and the meaning and estimation of the priority weights in the resulting objective function in the goal programming problem, with regard to tradeoffs between goals, are discussed thoroughly. Finally, calculations based upon hypothetical sample data re presented in order to test the sensitivity of the model to different sets of priority weights.