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Enzymatic terpene functionalization is an essential part of plant secondary metabolite diversity. Within this, multiple terpene-modifying enzymes are required to enable the chemical diversity of volatile compounds essential in plant communication and defense. This work sheds light on the differentially transcribed genes within Caryopteris × clandonensis that are capable of functionalizing cyclic terpene scaffolds, which are the product of terpene cyclase action. The available genomic reference was subjected to further improvements to provide a comprehensive basis, where the number of contigs was minimized. RNA-Seq data of six cultivars, Dark Knight, Grand Bleu, Good as Gold, Hint of Gold, Pink Perfection, and Sunny Blue, were mapped on the reference, and their distinct transcription profile investigated. Within this data resource, we detected interesting variations and additionally genes with high and low transcript abundancies in leaves of Caryopteris × clandonensis related to terpene functionalization. As previously described, different cultivars vary in their modification of monoterpenes, especially limonene, resulting in different limonene-derived molecules. This study focuses on predicting the cytochrome p450 enzymes underlying this varied transcription pattern between investigated samples. Thus, making them a reasonable explanation for terpenoid differences between these plants. Furthermore, these data provide the basis for functional assays and the verification of putative enzyme activities.

This paper aims at to investigate the ancient regional political history (600-180 BCE), which seems the foundation of Gandhara Civilization that emerged in the Northwest of the Indian subcontinent. The evolution of Gandhara Civilization and emergence of ancient regional political history deem consolidated. In this paper, it would be endeavoured to address the emergence of ancient regional political history that paved the way for a great civilization. The employed design to address the question is historical and qualitative. For the collection and analysis of the data, the qualitative historical approach is adopted. The edifice of present work is mainly erected on the archival sources, reputed journals, historical literature and version of prominent scholars associated to the field. Gandhara possessed a decent political exposition during its early phase. It remained an empire during Pakosati, a federating unit during Persian, independent kingdoms during the invasion of Alexander and remained central part of Mauryan Empire. The emergence of Gandhara is the exposition of politico-historical discourse of the region, which is the foundation of Gandhara Civilization.

Present power system and market reforms in India are being driven by large-scale integration of renewable energy into the grid. Indian Power system aims to achieve 175 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2022 and further, it has embarked on an ambitious target of 450 GW of renewable energy by 2030. The real-time availability of renewable energy being weather dependent and intermittent can increase the ramp in net load profile besides causing the significant difference between generation and load. Apart from the uncertainties in the generation side, the demand side is also changing with the growing adoption of distributed energy resources as well as the push to popularize electric vehicles, which is expected to increase demand uncertainty. Hence, to coordinate the demand and supply sides closer to real -time, Central Electricity Regulatory Commission implemented the Real Time Market in India, through the amendment in power market regulation in December 2019. This paper analyses the current market operations, real-time market design for India and the operational experience gained post implementation, and way forward of RTM through the case study.

Background Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) are becoming more important as carriers, because of their large specific surface area and easy separability. They are increasingly used in enzyme technology, diagnostics, and drug delivery. Major results For the directed and almost irreversible immobilization of proteins on MNPs, we have developed a new selective (His-Arg)4 peptide-tag, that binds fusion proteins directly from an E. coli cell lysate to non-functionalized, low-cost MNPs. Using the immobilization of an ene-reductase as an example, we could demonstrate that the fusion with this tag increases thermostability without reducing overall activity (ER w/o tag: t1/2 = 3.7 h, (HR)4 -ER: t1/2 = 9.9 h). Immobilization by adsorption in Tris buffer resulted in very high enzyme loads with approx. 380 mg g-1 and 67% residual activity. The immobilization on the MNPs allowed a fast concentration, buffer exchange, and reuse. While about 50% of the activity was lost after the first reuse, we were able to show that the activity did not decrease further and was stable for another nine cycles. Conclusion According to our studies, our tag highly works for any kind of immobilization on MNPs and holds the potential for enzyme immobilizations as well as for drug delivery and sensors.

International audience

The digital economy has created some new measurement challenges for macroeconomic statistics and may have exacerbated some older ones, raising some concerns about the scope and estimation of GDP. Against a backdrop of slowing rates of measured productivity growth, this has raised questions about the conceptual basis of GDP and output, and whether current compilation methods are adequate to capture them (known as the mismeasurement hypothesis). In response to these concerns the international statistics community has reinforced efforts to investigate these concerns, chiefly under the vehicle of OECD-IMF collaboration and a newly formed Advisory Expert Group working under the auspices of the OECD’s Committee for Statistics and Statistical Policy. This paper is intended to provide momentum to these on-going efforts and to address immediate concerns about the potential scale of GDP mismeasurement in key areas where mismeasurement is often suspected. Notwithstanding the need for further work in some areas, notably with regards to cross-border transactions as well as potential mismeasurement in other macro-economic statistics, such as the consumer prices index, this paper concludes that even if mismeasurement is occurring, its scale is not sufficient to explain the widespread slowdown in measured GDP growth or multi-factor productivity growth. Nevertheless it’s important to note that this is a backward looking exercise. Even though the distortionary impact of any potential mismeasurement is currently thought to be small the growing size of digitised transactions could point to larger impacts in the future.

Traditionally, the main source of data used to measure countries’ participation in international production networks or global value chains (GVCs) has been conventional international trade statistics. However, international fragmentation of production has weakened the analytic interpretability of these data as intermediate goods but also services cross borders many times on the way to their final destination. This is often referred to as the double (or multiple)-counting problem of international trade Statistics. This, in turn, has led to the development of a new branch of trade statistics, referred to as Trade in Value-Added (TiVA) providing new insights on GVCs, and corresponding databases, notably the OECD-WTO TiVA database, which provide a measure of international interdependencies through the construction of global input-output tables that show how producers in one country provide goods and/or services to producers and consumers in others. But with the field still relatively new, many users are struggling to fully understand how these new indicators should be used and indeed how they have been constructed. This document is designed to address those difficulties, providing, where appropriate guidance on “dos” and “don’ts”. It also reviews many other typical GVC indicators derived outside of input-output frameworks; recognising that gross measures of trade, and indicators derived from them, remain important and relevant for policy making.

Recent years have seen a rapid emergence of new disruptive technologies with new forms of intermediation, service provision and consumption, with digitalisation being a common characteristic. These include new platforms that facilitate Peer-to-Peer transactions, such as AirBnB and Uber, new activities such as crowd sourcing, a growing category of the ‘occasional self-employed’ and prevalence of ‘free’ media services, funded by advertising and ‘Big data’. Against a backdrop of slowing rates of measured productivity growth, this has raised questions about the conceptual basis of GDP and output, and whether current compilation methods are adequate to capture them. This paper frames the discussion under an umbrella of the Digitalised Economy, covering also statistical challenges where digitalisation is a complicating feature such as international transactions and knowledge based assets. It delineates between conceptual and compilation issues and highlights areas where further investigations are merited. The overall conclusion is that, on balance, the accounting framework for GDP looks to be up to the challenges posed by digitalisation. Many practical measurement issues remain, however, in particular concerning price changes and where digitalisation meets internationalisation.

Le systeme de comptabilite nationale le plus recent (SCN93) preconise que les achats de logiciels (ainsi que la production pour compte propre) soient assimiles a un investissement des lors que l’acquisition repond aux conditions requises pour les actifs conventionnels. Cette modification a entraine une hausse d’environ 1 pour cent du PIB dans la plupart des economies de l’OCDE au milieu des annees 90. Toutefois, l’ampleur de la revision a beaucoup varie d’un pays a l’autre, ce qui a conduit de nombreux observateurs a mettre en cause la comparabilite de ces statistiques. Un groupe d’etude special de l’OCDE a formule un ensemble de recommandations decrivant une methode harmonisee pour l’evaluation des logiciels ; ce document presente des estimations des variations des niveaux et de la croissance du PIB qui pourraient etre observees si les recommandations de l’OCDE etaient appliquees. Sont egalement presentees des estimations de variations avec une autre methode harmonisee. Quelle que soit la methode harmonisee qui sera retenue, l’effet sur les niveaux du PIB sera sans doute significatif, et dans quelques pays il atteindra environ 1 pour cent du PIB.

The latest system of national accounts (SNA93) recommended that purchases of software (and any ownaccount production) should be treated as investment as long as the acquisition satisfied conventional asset requirements. This change added about 1 per cent to GDP in most OECD economies in the mid-1990s. However, the range of the revision has been significantly different across countries, leading many observers to question the comparability of these statistics. An OECD task force has formulated a set of recommendations describing a harmonised method for estimating software and this paper provides estimates of changes to GDP levels and growth that might be expected if the OECD recommendations were applied. Estimates of changes are also presented using an alternative harmonised method. Whichever harmonised method is applied, the impact on GDP levels is likely to be significant, and in some countries about 1 per cent of GDP ...

Cet article analyse comment apprehender la diffusion des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC), en etudiant specialement l’investissement. Il approfondit les difficultes rencontrees pour obtenir des mesures fiables de l’investissement en TIC qui permettent les comparaisons internationales. L’etude accorde aussi une attention toute particuliere aux questions soulevees par la mesure et la comparaison des prix des TIC. L’article propose un panorama des travaux actuellement en cours, a l’OCDE et en general, pour ameliorer les possibilites de comparaisons internationales dans la mesure de l’investissement en TIC.Classification JEL : E22 ; L16 ; O47.

The increasing international fragmentation of production that has occurred in recent decades driven by technological progress, cost, access to resources and markets, trade policy reforms, and indeed emerging economies, has challenged our conventional wisdom on how we look at and interpret trade. Traditional measures of trade, record gross flows of goods and services each and every time they cross borders leading to what many describe as a ‘multiple’ counting of trade, which may lead to misguided policy measures. To respond to this challenge a number of initiatives have been launched in recent years that attempt to measure, or perhaps more accurately ‘estimate’, what has become known as ‘trade in value-added’. These have all helped to shed light on the importance of accounting for global value chains and have helped raise awareness of a growing need to mainstream the production of these estimates within the international statistics system. Responding to these challenges on 15 March 2012 the OECD and WTO undertook to collaborate on the development of estimates of trade in value-added (TiVA), resulting in a first release of a preliminary database on 16 January 2013 and a subsequent update in May 2013. This paper describes some of the key results of that work, and the methodology used. It also describes the detailed assumptions behind the methodology to necessarily deal with the treatment of data, and also the initiatives launched to improve the quality of those assumptions and the underlying data. The paper also describes extensions of the work to consider ‘trade in jobs’, and, proposes a framework to develop Extended national Supply Use tables that capture flows of primary/property income, so providing a mechanism to analyse the links between investment and global value chains. While TiVA estimates have been able to shed important light on our understanding of international trade and its relation to activity and competitiveness, in particular the importance of recognising the importance of imports to exports, and, so, the hitherto hidden costs of protectionism as well as the benefits of trade liberalisation, particularly in services, they do not reveal the full picture. With significant shares of exports being driven by foreign affiliates, TiVA estimates have also revealed the importance of going beyond just value-added towards income, in order to capture flows outside of conventional international trade statistics, such as the repatriation of profits related to the use of non-produced knowledge based assets (e.g. brands) and, indeed, the repatriation of profits related to the use of produced knowledge based assets (e.g. software) that are (often incorrectly) not recorded as receipts from exports of services.

This paper reports on work undertaken within the Statistics Directorate to measure the value of household production of non-market services, in order to better compare material well-being across countries. The work is being conducted under the aegis of the National Accounts Working Party and as input into the broader OECD activity on Measuring Progress. It responds to the growing recognition of the need to place a greater emphasis on the development of statistics that focus on the household perspective. The study shows that at a national level the estimates are acutely sensitive to the value placed on labour used in producing these services. However, it also demonstrates that relatively robust cross-country comparisons are obtainable using estimates converted on a purchasing power parity basis. For China, for example, GDP per capita relative to the United States improves by 50% when all household production of non-market services is included. Indeed the study demonstrates that including these services is particularly significant for comparisons of 'richer' and ' poorer' countries...

In recent years entrepreneurship has become a buzzword that?s entered the mainstream. Politicians continuously cite its importance and the need to create more entrepreneurial societies, and newspapers and television programmes frequently create themes around successful entrepreneurs. But, the pursuit and development of policies related to entrepreneurship are often hampered by the limited, albeit growing, empirical information relating to entrepreneurship (its size, factors and benefits). Therefore, in the absence of definitions that capture the essence of entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship indicators that are internationally comparable, policy makers are left somewhat rudderless when it comes to developing policies, particularly when they relate to learning from international best-practice. These shortcomings and the growing importance of entrepreneurship in the policy domain have magnified the need for a sounder basis for internationally comparable indicators of entrepreneurship. This paper provides a framework that is intended to provide that sounder basis. It does so by adopting a holistic approach, and, so, by focusing on the: factors that impede or motivate entrepreneurship (determinants); measures that provide indicators of the state of entrepreneurship (entrepreneurial performance); and, outcomes (impacts) of that performance on the economy as a whole. Each of these three themes provides the overarching structure to the framework, using a standardised OECD definition of entrepreneurship, and, within each, we develop a suite of indicators that provide the basis for quantifiable information to be collected in an internationally comparable way for each of these themes.

This paper sets out definitions of the entrepreneur, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activity for the purpose of supporting the development of related indicators. The paper recognises the long history in this area and the contention and differences that have existed, and that continue to exist, between academics who have confronted this issue over the last two centuries. It deliberately adopts a more pragmatic approach based on two principles – relevance and measurability - resulting in definitions that are developed from both a bottom-up and top-down approach. Importantly, the definitions emphasise the dynamic nature of entrepreneurial activity and focus attention on action rather than intentions or supply/demand conditions. The paper concludes with an overview of policy implications arising from the definitions.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Statistics Directorate launched the Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP), which is developing internationally comparable entrepreneurship indicators. The EIP seeks to engage the various bodies involved in producing entrepreneurship-related data in a cooperative effort to harmonize definitions and produce comparable data. Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Commission, has now formally joined the programme and is sharing in the work. Download the slides at: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper=1027938 Download the audio file at: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper=1028847

The development of the OECD?s input-output database started over a decade ago and is currently undergoing its second update. Over the years, the database has been used in a number of analytical applications both within and outside the OECD. Two major applications within the OECD concerned the analysis of the diffusion of embodied technology and, more recently, the measurement of carbon dioxide emissions embodied in the international trade of goods. The latest update is being conducted as part of an OECD project looking at global value chains. This paper describes how the database has developed over the last decade, both from a collection and a compilation...

The creation of new businesses and the decline of unproductive ones are often regarded key to business dynamism in OECD economies. Understanding business behaviour, creative destruction and identifying successful and failing businesses, as well as fostering entrepreneurship and innovation, have become increasingly important objectives for policy makers in many OECD economies in recent years. However, despite its growing importance, the study of business dynamics, and entrepreneurship more generally, is hampered by the lack of truly internationally comparable indicators. That is not for a lack of data however, as many statistical institutions and private agencies produce statistics in this domain, but because they lack comparability, are of questionable quality, or are not able to tackle all of the policy questions related to these issues, they can often generate confusion, giving mixed messages to policy makers. The framework of business demography indicators presented in this paper is an attempt to fill this gap by providing a mechanism by which more comparable indicators of business demography can be produced across OECD countries in particular, considering both what is practically achievable and desirable.

Le present document examine en quoi les problemes de mesure affectent les comparaisons internationales de la productivite de la main-d’œuvre. Il montre que ces problemes n’ont pas de repercussions notables sur l’evaluation du profil general d’evolution de la productivite dans la zone de l’OCDE. Par contre, ils ont une influence des lors qu’on veut pousser plus avant l’analyse de la croissance de la productivite, notamment determiner la part qui est imputable a un secteur particulier ou a telle ou telle composante de la demande. Les auteurs observent que la comparabilite entre pays de l’OCDE des donnees sur le PIB nominal souleve peu de problemes importants et que le principal de ces derniers est lie au traitement des investissements en logiciels. Dans la plupart des cas, des efforts sont deployes pour reduire l’ampleur de ces divergences. Les disparites au niveau de la mesure du PIB reel sont egalement importantes, meme si elles ne jouent pas toutes dans la meme direction. Qui plus ...

Efforts such as the Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions that may be linked to climate change focus on six greenhouse gases (GHG). Carbon dioxide is by far the largest of these by volume, representing about 80% of the total emissions of these six gases. Almost all carbon dioxide is emitted during the combustion of fossil fuels and OECD countries account for over half of the total carbon dioxide emission in the world while an additional four countries (Brazil, China, India and Russia) together account for a further quarter of the global total. Many policies designed to reduce these emissions set emission reduction goals based on some previous level (e.g. 1990 in the case of Kyoto for many countries) which is used as a benchmark for success and compliance to the protocol. But changes in emissions at the national level can occur for many reasons: including the relocation of production abroad, and/or by import substitution. This may have a negligible impact on global emissions but, if ...

The latest system of national accounts (SNA93) recommended that purchases of software (and any own-account production) should be capitalised as long as the acquisition satisfied conventional asset requirements. This change added about 1% to GDP in most OECD economies in the mid-1990s. However, the range of the revision has been significantly different across countries, leading many observers to question the comparability of these statistics. An OECD task force set up in October 2001 confirmed that differences in estimation procedures contributed significantly to the differences in software capitalisation rates, and a set of recommendations describing a harmonised method for estimating software were formulated. Most of these recommendations were approved at the OECD 2002 National Accounts Expert meeting. This paper reviews the recommendations in its annexes, giving more expansive explanations in some areas, and provides estimates of changes to GDP levels and growth that might be ...

This statistical working paper is the exact copy of the report of the joint OECD/Eurostat task force that was presented at the October 2002 OECD National Accounts Expert Meeting. The report confirms that current estimates of software investment differ significantly between countries for pure statistical reasons, thus affecting the comparability of GDP. The objective of this report is to propose concrete recommendations for a harmonised re-estimation of software investment in the national accounts. Recommendations cover definitional and conceptual issues (what is software?, what is software investment?), measurement issues in international trade and price, as well as general methods of estimation (sources and commodity-flow methods). The principle of the recommendations has been adopted by a large majority of OECD member countries during the October 2002 meeting. However, new estimates based on these recommendations should only be available in the forthcoming years, depending on the ...