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Countries and regions around the world face a number of economic, environmental and social challenges. Increased demand for energy, primary resources (agricultural, forestry and fishing), industrial products and services (healthcare in particular) put significant pressure on the sustainability of the ecosystems that support our society. One option to provide a more sustainable base for the economy would be the transition towards bioeconomy in which the importance of biotechnology and biomassbased production to generate economic output is significantly greater than today. Bioeconomy is considered to encompass all economic activity connected with the utilization of renewable biological resources. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the importance of bioeconomy in the management of natural resources in the 21st century, providing many answers to resolve the previous challenges together with environmental preservation. The concept has gained scientific and political attention during the recent years, especially in Europe but also globally. From the review and analysis of the literature, this paper addresses the emerging bioeconomy, definitions and conceptual bases, and its great potential in different sectors of economic activity and development of new products. Special emphasis is placed on the case of the European Union. We present the concerns of European authorities at this level and best practices already in force in two Nordic countries that can be regarded as the beginning of a general transition to bioeconomy. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Corruption is a serious problem and social ethics has a significant impact on all societies. It is a phenomenon which is globally widespread and can be generally defined as the use of public power to benefit a private interest. It is a complex and multifaceted concept with several and heavy complications for the economy and environmental sustainability. Despite the existing theorizations and descriptions of the political economy concerning environment/society interactions and widespread evidence of bribery and illegal exchange in natural resources management, nowadays, fighting corruption goes on widely ineffective, with serious consequences for environmental quality. The main focus of this study is the different forms of corruption and its consequences and costs to the environment, especially in resource-rich developing countries. It explores a few practical examples taken from these countries due to the linkages between corruption and weak environmental governance. The institutional set-up of the country such as the characteristics of the political and judicial system determines the extent of corruption. In such a context, transparency has been described as a cure for corruption. Good governance including a broad commitment to the rule of law is crucial for environmental sustainability and is a way to put a stop to the devastating impact corruption has had on the environment. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Este estudo tem como objetivos examinar o impacto do programa NORTE 2020 no VAB e emprego da economia portuguesa e se a riqueza global gerada se concentra na região Norte.
Com base na análise input-output, estima-se que o investimento total aprovado no âmbito deste programa tenha um impacto no VAB nacional na ordem dos € 4 mil milhões e leve a criação de 112 mil postos de trabalho. O impacto na riqueza produzida concentra-se esmagadoramente na Região Norte.
A competitividade e internacionalização corresponde à maior fração de investimento total aprovado por prioridade temática, mas é onde o impacto no VAB por euro investido é menor, distanciando-se dos multiplicadores das restantes prioridades. O efeito multiplicador no VAB do investimento no domínio do capital humano é o mais significativo.

This paper investigates empirically the determinants of air quality in a large cross-section of countries. We assess air quality by sulfur emissions and, following the literature, we consider three different groups of determinants: economic, political and cultural. We confirm the existence of an EKC for sulfur (inverted-U shaped relation between wealth and pollution). Political determinants are proxied by ethnic or religious fractionalization indexes and the country's legal origin (we consider five possible legal origins: English common law, French civil law, German civil law, Scandinavian legal system and Socialist legal system). Cultural determinants are assessed by the percentage of a country's population that belongs to one of the three main religions (Catholic, Muslim or Protestant). Our goal is to establish the economic, political and cultural profile of a country that manages to be efficient in providing good air quality. We conclude that a country will provide higher air quality if it has one or more of the following characteristics: it is ethnic and/or religious homogeneous, it has a German or Scandinavian legal tradition; it is Protestant. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

We describe the neoclassical view of the business cycle by European Institutions in the Euro Area, and derive the stylized facts of business cycles and trends for Germany and Portugal in the period 1991–2018. The data are extracted from the European Commission's AMECO database. To separate cycle and trend, we use the decomposition available in the AMECO database for the output, and the Hodrick-Prescott filter for the other variables. The results show that the amplitude of the business cycle and persistence of shocks are greater in Portugal than in Germany. They also show that the stylized facts of the business cycles of the two economies are quite different. Moreover, common shocks have asymmetric consequences. In the long run, there has been a convergence of inflation, general government structural balances, and real unit labour costs, but general government consolidated gross debt, fixed investment, and per capita potential GDP have been increasingly diverging, despite the behaviour of real wages and net exports in the two countries. Additionally, temporary shocks have permanent effects on the Portuguese economy. The results raise questions about the place-neutral macroeconomic policy enforced by the European institutions in the Euro Area, particularly in what concerns cohesion Member States. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

The European Union developed a set of different policies to deal with different problems, such as macroeconomic stability, unemployment, inequality and the environment. However, these problems are interconnected and cannot be adequately addressed without an integrated approach that takes into account the different territories, which is possible within the existing EU institutional framework, as we shall argue while identifying the key European institutions necessary for doing so. But this integrated view has not been adopted so far. We argue that a normative circular conception of the economy provides a more adequate framework for advancing full employment within a place-based integrated approach while articulating the microeconomic, mesoeconomic and macroeconomic levels and/or all governance levels. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion