A key finding from this study was that, in patients with bipolar disorder, obesity is a stronger influence on insulin resistance than is bipolar disorder itself. In other words, insulin resistance in these patients does not appear to be more severe after accounting for their obesity. This conclusion, however, should be tempered by the observation that these obese women with bipolar disorder had significantly more abdominal fat and were slightly more hypertensive than BMI-matched controls, allowing for the possibility that bipolar disorder may indeed be associated with altered metabolic profile.
Using tools to assess both energy expenditure and energy intake, this project indicates that, once these euthymic patients with bipolar disorder become obese, their energy imbalance is likely similar to non-patient controls. However, similar levels of insulin resistance in patients compared to BMI matched controls in this cross sectional study do not discount the possibility that bipolar disorder does not somehow predispose these patients towards weight gain and obesity. Comparing normal weight subjects perhaps provides some important clues in this regard.
The intuition is simple and, at least at the level of popular debate and policy discussion, compelling: when corporations face few barriers to locating in the lowest tax jurisdiction, countries will be forced to compete for mobile capital with artificially low tax rates. In an era of “globalization” that is, international economic integration and an accompanying increase in capital mobility the implication is that governments may find themselves drawn into an internecine “race the bottom” in capital taxation, undermining the financing of the welfare state and the provision of public goods generally. Further, taxes must then come to fall unduly on immobile factors, specifically labor, exacerbating labor market rigidities and unemployment.
The popular appeal of this common sense fuels not only the fears of anti-capitalist activists and the hopes of some seeking lower taxes (e.g. Economist [1997], Lee and McKenzie [1989]), but also policy initiatives by governments struggling with persistent budget deficits. During the 1990s, both the OECD and EU took up the issue of “harmful tax competition,” concluding that international cooperation was needed to prevent the erosion of corporate tax revenues and the introduction of distortions to the international allocation of capital [OECD, 1998].
The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) was created on January 1, 2005 by the European Commission (EC) to foster early compliance with the greenhouse gases emissions reduction targets agreed in the Kyoto Protocol. Its successful implementation is currently being evaluated against its simplicity and the fairly transparency of the trading mechanisms instored. As such, the EU ETS covers up to 46% of CO2 emissions from European energy-intensive industries. Every year, each industrial plant is allocated EU allowances (EUA) corresponding to its cap and must restitute as many allowances as verified CO2emissions. 2.2 billion of allowances were allocated to 10,600 installations across 27 EU Member States in 2005-2007 which are tradable all around Europe on exchanges and by over-the-counter. The next two phases of the scheme are interconnected and will take place during 2008-2012 and 2013-2020.
Yet this scheme raises various design issues related to the efficiency and equity of such market-based instruments. An efficient system leads to the equalization of marginal abatement costs among participants, yielding a unique market price that acts as a medium-term signal for investors to make cost estimates of delivering different levels of energy efficiency and how much emissions abatement to undertake. An equitable system consists in allocating allowances based on a uniform criteria that is mostly perceived as fair and agreed upon by the various stakeholders.
