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The main criticisms of trade from a sustainability viewpoint are that it accelerates resource depletion and pollution, harms income distribution both locally and internationally, and undermines democratic institutions. After considering the relationship between trade and "sustainability," this paper discusses a number of feedback mechanisms which promote the kind of trade that is more sustainable - for the South as well as the North. The role of technological change, a model of the relationship between production and "sustaining services," data needs and research priorities are also discussed.

What happens when fiscal and/or monetary policy changes systematically? We construct a DSGE model in which agents have to estimate fiscal and monetary policy rules and assess how uncertainty surrounding the conduct of policymakers influences transition paths after policy changes. We find that policy changes of the magnitude often considered in the literature can lead private agents to hold substantially different views about the nature of equilibrium than would be predicted by a full information analysis. In particular, random walk-like behavior can be observed for a large number of periods in equilibrium, even though the models we use admit stationary dynamics under full-information rational expectations.

While thermal rates of state transitions in classical systems have been studied for almost a century, associated transition-path times have only recently received attention. Uphill and downhill transition paths between states at different free energies should be statistically indistinguishable. Here, we systematically investigate transition-path-time symmetry and report evidence of its breakdown on the molecular- and meso-scale out of equilibrium. In automated Brownian dynamics experiments, we establish first-passage-time symmetries of colloids driven by femtoNewton forces in holographically-created optical landscapes confined within microchannels. Conversely, we show that transitions which couple in a path-dependent manner to fluctuating forces exhibit asymmetry. We reproduce this asymmetry in folding transitions of DNA-hairpins driven out of equilibrium and suggest a topological mechanism of symmetry breakdown. Our results are relevant to measurements that capture a single coordinate in a multidimensional free energy landscape, as encountered in electrophysiology and single-molecule fluorescence experiments. ; (J.G.) European Training Network (ETN) Grant No. 674979-NANOTRANS (J.G.) Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability (M.R.C.) European Unions Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 749944 (U.F.K.) ERC Consolidator Grant (DesignerPores 647144) (F.R.) Spanish Research Council [FIS2016-80458-P] (F.R.) Catalan Government [Icrea Academia prize 2013] (F.R.) EU [Proseqo, FETOPEN, Proposal 687089]

This paper is an attempt to capture the relevance of the relative magnitude of the state and the private sectors in making the transition from central planning more likely to succeed. The basic idea that we introduce is that the growth of the new private sector, in an environment characterized by a severe form of credit constraint, depends on its relative magnitude in the economy. We also propose an extension of the model which examines the issue of full privatization versus restructuring in a credit‐constrained environment.