Suchergebnisse

One of the most serious problems related to the current neoliberal hegemony is the reconstruction of economics, states and the rule of law alike. Deflected from any kind of democratic commitment, state sovereignty is repeatedly endangered by the neoliberal rationality and its economization code. This narrowing of state´s regulatory and democratic expectations relies more on soft power than on hard power (Brown, 2006; 2015) namely on specific languages, symbols and repertories. Neoliberal rationality and its market-mimicking languages have often been associated with violence exercised on the behalf of (or sponsered by) states. Such acts include the elimination of "dependency cultures" through fiscal reforms and changes in social policies that are oriented toward the protection of the most vulnerable; the intensification of social inequality; cyclical financial meltdowns; tremendous environmental impacts; the commodification of every human need; and the financing of everyday life (Chossudovsky, 2003; Brown, 2015; Howard and King, 2008; Klein, 2015). Our argument in this paper proposal is that neoliberal rationality has become increasingly powerful, ethereal, and hegemonic because it has displaced and instrumentalized state powers, while at the same time it has relocated and translated human dignity and social justice into a market-mimicking framework. As Clarke (2008) posits, neoliberalism´s most remarkable achievement lies within a double dynamic of translation: different repertories are decoded in the light of neoliberal rationality, reassembled for audiences and subjects, and then legitimatized when everyday languages translate the neoliberal paradigm, its goals, and contradictions. State oppression, violence and social injustices are then uncritically established and made vulgar, routine. Key to this appropriation are the ideological keystones and the languages used to justify social injustice and market-mimicking models of social organization (cf. Jost, Blout, Pfeffer and Hunyady, 2003). We seek to shed light on the micro-discourses that echo and reflect the neoliberal rationality and that justifies different social injustices allocated to states such as the continuously dismantlement of the welfare-state in different countries of the global north. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Today, after the International Year of Soils in 2015 and the proclamation by the International Union of Soil Sciences of the International Decade of Soils 2015-2020, much attention is paid to soil quality. Often used interchangeably, both terms, soil quality and soil health, refer to dynamic soil properties such as soil organic matter or pH, while soil quality also includes inherent soil properties such as texture or mineral composition. However, it is the dynamic or manageable properties that adequate soil management can influence and thus contribute to a well-functioning soil environment capable to deliver the soil-mediated provisioning, regulating and supporting ecosystem services and soil functions. This contribution intends to highlight the key principles of sustainable soil management and provide evidence that they are compliant with a productive, resource efficient and ecologically friendly agriculture. Paradoxically, and despite benefitting from good soil quality, agriculture itself when based on conventional, especially intensive tillage-based soil management practices contributes decisively to soil degradation and to several of the soil threats as identified by the Soil Thematic Strategy, being soil erosion and soil organic matter decline the most notorious ones. To mitigate soil degradation, the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy has introduced conservation measures, mainly through cross-compliance measures supposed to guarantee minimum soil cover, to limit soil erosion and to maintain the levels of soil organic matter. However, it remains unclear to what extent EU member states apply these 'Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition' (GAEC) measures to their utilized agricultural areas. Effective and cost-efficient soil management systems able to conserve or to restore favourable soil conditions, to minimize soil erosion and to invert soil organic matter and soil biodiversity decline and improve soil structure are those capable to mimic as close as possible natural soil conditions while producing food, feed, fibre and fuel. This means to establish and manage crops while disturbing the soil as least as possible, to maintain the soil permanently covered with plants or their residues and to allow for a diversity of plants either in rotation or in association. These principles also known as Conservation Agriculture have shown to be the most promising approach for a sustainable production intensification and proven to work in a wide range of agro-ecological conditions. Although adopted already on more than 150 Mha worldwide, in Europe it still can be considered a novel soil management practice as it is applied on only around 2% of the annual cropland. A paradigm shift and innovative approaches are needed both to recognise the principles of Conservation Agriculture as the only cost-effective, and thus overall sustainable soil management practices capable to deliver the soil-mediated ecosystem services and to make Conservation Agriculture systems work and accepted as the best compromise to attain better soil quality.

We use wavelet analysis to study business cycle synchronization across the EU-15 and the Euro-12 countries. Based on the wavelet transform, we propose a metric to measure and test for business cycles synchronization. Several conclusions emerge. France and Germany form the core of the Euro land, being the most synchronized countries with the rest of Europe. Portugal, Greece, Ireland and Finland do not show statistically relevant degrees of synchronization with Europe. We also show that some countries (like Spain) have a French accent, while others have a German accent (e.g., Austria). Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the French business cycle has been leading the German business cycle as well as the rest of Europe. Among the countries that may, in the future, join the Euro, the Czech Republic seems the most promising candidate. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia ...

The use of wavelet analysis is very common in a large variety of disciplines, such as signal and image processing, quantum mechanics, geophysics, medicine, biology, etc. In economics, however, wavelets are still a mysterious, but colorful, tool for time-series analysis. The pioneering work of Ramsey and Lampart [26] is unknown to the majority of economists. Among the exceptions to this rule, one can point to [4], [14], and [12]. See [6], for a recent survey of wavelet applications to economic data. Probably, wavelets are not more popular among economists, because wavelet multivariate analysis is still incipient. Recently, however, Gallegati [11] — using the maximum overlap discrete wavelet transform — and Crowley and Mayes [5] and Aguiar-Conraria and Soares [1] — using the continuous wavelet transform — showed how the cross-wavelet analysis could be fruitfully used to uncover time-frequency interactions between two economic timeseries. Still, most surely, wavelets will not become very fashionable in economics until a concept analogous to the spectral partial-coherence is developed. On this regard, the proficient reader may be interested in our most recent working-paper [2]. We present a brief and self-contained introduction to the wavelet tools used, namely the continuous wavelet transform, the wavelet coherency and the wavelet phasedifference. Then we apply these tools to a real world economic problem — the study of the synchronization of the Portuguese and Spanish economic cycles, in the last 5 decades. Decades that include the democratic transition in both countries (mid-1970s), the European Union membership of both countries (1986), and the adoption of a single currency, the Euro (1999). ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) ; COMPETE ; QREN ...

We use wavelet analysis to study cycle synchronization across the EU-15 and the Euro-12 countries. Based on the wavelet transform, we propose a metric to measure and test for business cycles synchronization. Several conclusions emerge. France and Germany form the core of the Euro land, being the most synchronized countries with the rest of Europe. Portugal, Greece, Ireland and Finland do not show statistically relevant degrees of synchronization with Europe. We also show that some countries (like Spain) have a French accent, while others have a German accent (e.g. Austria). Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the French business cycle has been leading the German business cycle as well as the rest of Europe. Among the countries that may, in the future, join the Euro, the Czech Republic seems the most promising candidate. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - ...

This deliverable reports back with findings based on work carried out in PROSEU Work Package 2- Baseline analysis and Characterisation of Renewable Energy Prosumer Initiatives. Specifically, it integrates the results of Tasks 2.1 (baseline review and stakeholder identification) and 2.2 (survey of RES prosumer initiatives across Europe) to provide a snapshot and characterisation of RES prosumer initiatives across Europe. ; H2020 project PROSEU - Prosumers for the Energy Union: Mainstreaming active participation of citizens in the energy transition. Work package 2 (WP2) - Baseline analysis and Characterization of RE Prosumer Initiatives

Central banks have different objectives in the short and long run. Governments operate simultaneously at different timescales. Many economic processes are the result of the actions of several agents, who have different term objectives. Therefore, a macroeconomic time series is a combination of components operating on different frequencies. Several questions about economic time series are connected to the understanding of the behavior of key variables at different frequencies over time, but this type of information is difficult to uncover using pure time-domain or pure frequency-domain methods. To our knowledge, for the first time in an economic setup, we use cross-wavelet tools to show that the relation between monetary policy variables and macroeconomic variables has changed and evolved with time. These changes are not homogeneous across the different frequencies. ; We thank Francisco Veiga, Nuno Palma and four anonymous referees for very useful comments. The usual disclaimer applies. Luís Aguiar-Conraria acknowledges financial support from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, project "Oil shocks and the macroeconomy: Econometric estimation, economic modeling and policy implications", ...

Spectral analysis and ARMA models have been the most common weapons of choice for the detection of cycles in political time-series. Controversies about cycles, however, tend to revolve about an issue that both techniques are badly equipped to address: the possibility of irregular cycles without fixed periodicity throughout the entire time-series. This has led to two main consequences. On the one hand, proponents of cyclical theories have often dismissed established statistical techniques. On the other hand, proponents of established techniques have dismissed the possibility of cycles without fixed periodicity. Wavelets allow the detection of transient and coexisting cycles and structural breaks in periodicity. In this paper, we present the tools of wavelet analysis and apply them to the study to two lingering puzzles in the political science literature: the existence to cycles in election returns in the United States and in the severity of major power wars. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia ...

Spectral analysis and ARMA models have been the most established weapons of choice for the detection of cycles in time series data. However, such techniques are only appropriate when periodic components are time invariant. This has led some scholars to disregard the possibility of irregular cycles. We aim to contribute to further reconsideration of the possibility of cycles in political phenomena by introducing wavelet analysis. Its main contribution comes from the ability to estimate the spectral characteristics of a time series as a function of time, thus revealing how its different periodic components change over time, while preserving rigorous standards of statistical inference. We demonstrate the usefulness of wavelet analysis with two applications. The first concerns the possibility of long-cycles in wars, one of the central puzzles in the international relations sub-field. The second concerns election returns in presidential and congressional elections in the United States, where the existence of cyclical patterns has been equally controversial. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, wavelet analysis allows the detection of transient and coexisting cycles, shedding some light over phenomena that have remained unaddressed so far. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Programa Operacional Ciência e Inovação 2010 (POCI 2010) ; Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional ...

The role of national, sectional, state, and local forces in driving electoral outcomes in the United States has remained a matter of considerable indeterminacy in the American politics literature. In what concerns House elections, different approaches and methods have yielded widely divergent results. In what concerns presidential elections, considerable doubts remain about the timing and the plausible causes of a long-term trend towards homogeneity. In this paper, we take a new look at the nationalization of politics in the United States. We are particularly interested in the dynamic nationalization in presidential elections, i.e., the extent to which swings and shifts from one election to the next have been similar across states and whether or not that similarity has increased through time. We treat this problem as one of similarity or dissimilarity — and convergence or divergence of — electoral cycles, and use wavelets analysis in order to ascertain the degree to which the national and state election cycles have been synchronized and the degree to which that synchronization has increased or decreased. We determine, first, the states where electoral change has been more in sync with the national cycle and clusters of states defined in terms of the mutual synchronization of their own electoral cycles. Second, we analyze how the degree of synchronization of electoral cycles in the states has changed through time, answering questions as to when, to what extent, and where has the tendency towards a "universality of political trends" in presidential elections been more strongly felt. We present evidence strongly in favor of an increase in the dynamic nationalization of presidential elections taking place in the 1950s, showing that alternative interpretations concerning the historical turning point in this respect are not supported by empirical evidence. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia ...

This article discusses a recently developed Mathematica tool -QPolynomial- a collection of functions for manipulating, evaluating and factoring quaternionic polynomials. QPolynomial relies on the package QuaternionAnalysis, which is available for download at w3.math.uminho.pt/QuaternionAnalysis. ; Research at the Centre of Mathematics at the University of Minho was financed by Portuguese Funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within the Project UID/MAT/00013/2013. Research at the Economics Politics Research Unit was carried out within the funding with COMPETE reference number POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006683 (UID/ECO/03182/2013), with the FCT/MEC's (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.) financial support through national funding and by the European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme on "Competitiveness and Internationalization - COMPETE 2020" under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement. ...

This article explores the numerical mathematics and visualization capabilities of Mathematica in the framework of quaternion algebra. In this context, we discuss computational aspects of the recently introduced Newton and Weierstrass methods for finding the roots of a quaternionic polynomial. ; Research at the Centre of Mathematics (CMAT) was financed by Portuguese Funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within the Project UID/MAT/00013/2013. Research at the Economics Politics Research Unit (NIPE) was carried out within the funding with COMPETE reference number POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006683 (UID/ECO/03182/2013), with the FCT/MEC's (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.) financial support through national funding and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Operational Programme on "Competitiveness and Internationalization - COMPETE 2020" under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement. ...