Suchergebnisse

Canada is a country whose history and urban areas have been critically shaped by immigration. Since the end of the Second World War, significant changes in both immigration policies and global migration patterns have contributed to the transformation of major urban areas in Canada. Immigrants in general seem to prefer settling in urban centres, and in this "new age of migration" Toronto – Canada's largest city and its primary "port of entry" for immigrants – has witnessed radical changes in its social, economic and political landscapes, becoming a "city of nations" and among the most multicultural spaces in North America and in the world.

With the recent global economic and financial crisis, the governments throughout Europe have been closing, concentrating, restructuring or privatizing some public services and, at the same time, the number of services available in electronic platforms (e.g., by Internet or telephone) has been increasing. Nowadays, the need for structural reform and territorial reorganization of many public services is well-known in European countries, as well as in Portugal. The nature and the scope of these reforms depend on several factors related not only to the forces of supply and demand, but also to the social and territorial context. Some countries have already made deeper changes. In September 2013, Netherlands proclaimed the end of the Welfare State (as we know it today in most European countries) and welcomed the beginning of a Participation Society. The public services in Portugal and European countries face many challenges, namely: the redefinition of the concept of public interest; the different roles of central and local government structures/new organizational paradigms; the orientation to the citizen's needs; the incorporation of technology and innovation; the financing systems and their sustainability; and the social and territorial (in)equalities. This communication is the result of PhD research in Geography and Regional Management, started at November 2012 and with a final report due in November 2015. To understand how the Portuguese public services will face the new challenges and trends, I'm doing a revision of state of the art about public services in Europe, their agents and dynamics. With this step, I'm summarizing the past practices and the actual problems, challenges and trends in the supply and demand of public services. I'm also analysing the Portuguese nineteen government programs (between 1974 and 2014), relating them with the administrative reforms and modernizations effectively performed in Portugal. In the final, as a result of the work, I will propose some public polices and strategies about the management and territorialisation of public services.

Project management in the construction sector is a complex and uncertain process and companies tend to look for the lowest value in the procurement of services and materials. However, contractors do not share the necessary information with the contracted parties and thus give rise to the asymmetric information (AI) phenomenon. The aim of this study is to perform an analysis of the determining factors in the adoption of relational contracting (RC) in combination with Building Information Modelling (BIM) to reduce AI. The results of a questionnaire survey, which was e-mailed to 14 specialists with solid experience (over twenty years) and knowledge in construction projects, revealed that the probability of the AI phenomenon occurring in Portugal is very high, and its impact on construction projects is equally high. The results also show that RC in combination with the BIM methodology contributes very positively to the mitigation of AI problems in construction projects in Portugal. Approximately 85% of respondents consider that the government should seek to reduce AI in the public works sector through the use of RC and its combination with the BIM methodology in the Portuguese Public Contracts Code.

Drawing on a post-Foucauldian conceptual framework we look at the rationalities that inform the organization of the Portuguese school meals and the implementation of these rationalities to transform and normalize children eating habits. The empirical material is drawn from a thematic documental analysis of the school meals regulatory framework from the 1970s up until nowadays. The objectives are threefold: 1) to describe the continuities and discontinuities of official discourses on school meals institutional practices; 2) to look at the ways children, health and food are placed and interpreted in those documents; 3) to describe and explain trajectories of school meals governmentalities and its plural arrangements. It was possible to identify five types of school meals governmental regimes: the Authoritarian ; the Democratic , the Modern , the Consumer and the Obesity and Risk . These regimes are intertwined and organize in multiple ways the contexts that govern children s eating practices in schools. ; Sobre la base de un marco conceptual post-foucaultiana nos fijamos en las racionalidades que informan a la organización de las comidas de los escolares portugueses y la aplicación de estas racionalidades para transformar y normalizan los hábitos alimenticios de los niños. El material empírico se extrae de un análisis documental del marco temático regulador de las comidas escolares desde la década de 1970 hasta la actualidad. Los objetivos son tres: 1) describir las continuidades y discontinuidades de los discursos oficiales sobre las comidas escolares; 2) ver de qué forma los niños, su salud y los alimentos aparecen y son interpretados en esos documentos; 3) describir y explicar las trayectorias de las gubernamentalidades y su pluralidad de acuerdos relativos a las comidas escolares. Fue posible identificar cinco tipos de regímenes gubernamentales de comidas escolares: la autoritaria ; la demócrata , la moderna , el consumidor y la de Obesidad y Riesgo . Estos regímenes se entrelazan y organizan en múltiples ...

To analyze the effects of government debt securities on the liquidity risk and profitability of banks in Cape Verde, this research employs an unbalanced panel dataset from 2000 to 2017 on the activity of all commercial banks operating at the end of 2017 (seven in total). The study employs models with lagged regressors, estimated by the ordinary least squares estimation method. The results show that government debt securities have no effect on bank liquidity risks, but they have an effect on bank profitability, with government debt securities having a positive impact on assets' profitability, in the long run. When government debt securities include Consolidated Securities of Financial Mobilization, the effects on profitability are negative both in the short and the long run. The study concludes that banks' strategy to hold the more conventional government debt securities as safe assets and risk-free alternative for the domestic application of liquidity surpluses is appropriate and a viable way to gain profitability in the long run. These results show the negative effect of government debt securities when the Consolidated Securities of Financial Mobilization are included, which helps to explain the low average profitability rates of Cape Verde's banks, when compared to other similar sub-Saharan African countries, like Mauritius or Seychelles.

During the XX century, a great intensity of new buildings construction was occurred, representing these buildings an enormous patrimonial valour, which require a permanent investment in management, maintenance, repair and rehabilitation. To provide adequate qualitative and quantitative levels of housing, great economic investments have been made in social housing, what implies the necessity of realise a study on the physical conditions of the built public housing park, with the aim of knowing about the necessity and viability of rehabilitation interventions in order to achieve quality and durability. Rehabilitation investment in the built environmental, beyond contributing for the preservation of the existing patrimony, contributes for the implementation of construction sustainable politics, through the reduction of the consumption of natural resources and energy, of the reduction of residues proceeding from the construction activity and for one better management of ground occupation. In opposition to this, has been registered a quality and durability decrease of the public and private built environmental through its precocious degradation. The aim of this paper is to identify the principal anomalies which appear in portuguese social housing buildings, based on a bibliographical research. This work aim to find design and construction solutions with a minor durability, to be eliminated in future ...

Project management in the construction sector is a complex and uncertain process and companies tend to look for the lowest value in the procurement of services and materials. However, contractors do not share the necessary information with the contracted parties and thus give rise to the asymmetric information (AI) phenomenon. The aim of this study is to perform an analysis of the determining factors in the adoption of relational contracting (RC) in combination with Building Information Modelling (BIM) to reduce AI. The results of a questionnaire survey, which was e-mailed to 14 specialists with solid experience (over twenty years) and knowledge in construction projects, revealed that the probability of the AI phenomenon occurring in Portugal is very high, and its impact on construction projects is equally high. The results also show that RC in combination with the BIM methodology contributes very positively to the mitigation of AI problems in construction projects in Portugal. Approximately 85% of respondents consider that the government should seek to reduce AI in the public works sector through the use of RC and its combination with the BIM methodology in the Portuguese Public Contracts ...

The labour risks control is an occupational health concern. Fitness participants have been increasing in the last years (Lindwall, 2004). Clients' demand and the increase in classes number take the fitness instructors (FI) to a higher injuries exposure due to high workload. It is possible to observe several variations in aerobic dance, cycling, pilates, strength training, flexibility and balance. The main differences are in the cardiovascular intensities and the low to high impact dance (Van Mechelen, Hlobil & Kemper, 1992). The FI are exposed to high volumes of classes and injuries risks due to the high number of students and classes (Couto et al., 2016). As far as our understanding goes, FI are 50% more prone to injuries incidence in comparison to students. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess by a bibliographic research the health and injuries risk in FI. This is a bibliographic review made in PUBMED, Google Scholar, SCIELO and Web of Science. The used keywords were "fitness instructors injuries", "fitness professor's injuries", and "fitness instructor's risks". From an analysis of 23 papers, ten were chosen considering title and abstract. After a full integral analysis, only five papers were selected for revision. The others did not aimed to analyse the injuries and the health risks for FI. The selected papers approached the injuries and health risk factors for FI. There is a positive and significant correlation between the formation levels and injuries incidence prevention in FI and students (Malek, Nalbone, Berger & Coburn, 2002). FI with higher classification prevent higher frequency of injuries events. The injuries prevalence was superior in FI than in students (72.4 – 75.9% and 22.8 – 43.3% respectively) (Mutoh, Sawai, Takanashi & Skurko, 1998; Francis, Francis & Welshons-Smith, 1985). The injuries were general inflammations, muscle strains or sprains and stress fractures by overuse (Rothenberger, Chang & Cable, 1988). The FI are more exposed to injuries than students are (0.17 injuries/100h vs 0.15/100h of practice, respectively) and about 77% of the injuries were in the lower limbs (Garrick, Gillien & Whiteside, 1986). There is a lack of research in FI injuries risk of factors. However, FI seem to have a higher exposure to injuries in comparison to students. The high workload seem to be determinant to the incidence of overuse injuries. ; This project was supported by the National Funds through FCT - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (UID/DTP/0445/2013) and the European Fund for regional development (FEDER? allocated by European Union through the COMPETE 2020 Programme (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006969) ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Petroleum exploration in Brazil is performed throughout a bidding process coordinated by the National Petroleum Agency (NPA), where the exploration and production (E&P) firms need to evaluate concessions performing financial and economic analyses routinely. Since oil is a public resource with economic and strategic value for the country, the governmental agency should have control over the financial and economic pricing techniques. The E&P firm holds the investment opportunity to develop a delineated oilfield. The oilfield development investment plan shall be presented to NPA until a specific date or the oilfield rights returns back to NPA. The oilfield can be developed up to a specific time through three mutually exclusive alternatives representing the oilfield production and exploration scale. The developed oilfield is proportional to the price of oil, which evolves according to a stochastic differential equation. The E&P firm considers three mutually exclusive alternatives of scale to exploit the oilfield, with different investment costs. The investment opportunity is analogous to an American call option with finite time to maturity and payoff equal to that of the developed oilfield (underlying asset) minus the development cost of the optimal alternative (exercise price). We obtain the investment opportunity value and the optimal development rule for the oilfield, i.e., the optimal development timing and the optimal production scale as function of the current oil price and the economic uncertainty of the market.