An evolutive approach for the delineation of local labour markets

This paper presents a new approach to the delineation of local labour markets based on evolutionary computation. The main objective is the regionalisation of a given territory into functional regions based on commuting flows. According to the relevant literature, such regions are defined so that (a) their boundaries are rarely crossed in daily journeys to work, and (b) a high degree of intra-area movement exists. This proposal merges municipalities into functional regions by maximizing a fitness function that measures aggregate intra-region interaction under constraints of inter-region separation and minimum size. Real results are presented based on the latest database from the Census of Population in the Region of Valencia. Comparison between the results obtained through the official method which currently is most widely used (that of British Travel-to-Work Areas) and those from our approach is also presented, showing important improvements in terms of both the number of different market areas identified that meet the statistical criteria and the degree of aggregate intra-market interaction.José M. Casado-Díaz has received financial support from the Spanish Department of Education and Science (ref. BEC2003-02391) through a program partly funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Lucas Martínez-Bernabeu acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Dept. of Education and Science, the European Social Fund (ESF) and the University of Alicante

Industry 4.0 at work: economic implications and evidence from the Italian market

Technological advances have always been seen in two ways: great opportunities on the one hand, great threats on the other. This contrasting feeling is due to the intrinsic nature of innovations: created as tools to improve productivity and realise economic gains, under certain conditions they can cause a reduction in employment and wages. After a literature review concerning the relationship between general automation and the key labour market variables (productivity, employment, and wages), an overall decline in the labour income share of the main OECD countries was highlighted. This result, together with the identification of technological advance as the most determining factor, raised questions about the role that has been and will be played by the most recent technological wave, namely Industry 4.0. Therefore, after outlining its driving forces and barriers, the final section studied its impact on the Italian market. Specifically, based on the Bank of Italy’s “Survey of Industrial and Service Firms”, interesting results emerged, among all a lack of significance on Industry 4.0 actually reducing the Italian share of labour income.Technological advances have always been seen in two ways: great opportunities on the one hand, great threats on the other. This contrasting feeling is due to the intrinsic nature of innovations: created as tools to improve productivity and realise economic gains, under certain conditions they can cause a reduction in employment and wages. After a literature review concerning the relationship between general automation and the key labour market variables (productivity, employment, and wages), an overall decline in the labour income share of the main OECD countries was highlighted. This result, together with the identification of technological advance as the most determining factor, raised questions about the role that has been and will be played by the most recent technological wave, namely Industry 4.0. Therefore, after outlining its driving forces and barriers, the final section studied its impact on the Italian market. Specifically, based on the Bank of Italy’s “Survey of Industrial and Service Firms”, interesting results emerged, among all a lack of significance on Industry 4.0 actually reducing the Italian share of labour income

The new territorial paradigm of rural development: theoretical foundations from systems and institutional theories

In recent decades, a new paradigm for public policies in rural areas has made headway. This new approach aims to support economic and institutional transformation processes designed and implemented by local rural actors themselves. It argues for the building of local partnerships as atoolfor the governance of rural change. This paper reflects about the governance of development and change in rural areas. It builds a conceptual framework from two complementary theoretical sources: (a) complexity theory views on the governance of resilience and (b) institutional theories. Given the impossibility to predict and plan social change in a top-down fashion, it stresses that change requires that actors of a social system construct a sufficiently shared vision of a desired future state and manage to act together in order to ‘navigate’ the pathway towards that aim. Capacity for territorial governance is also critical in rural governance of resilience. System resilience refers to the capacity of actors to adjust the desired pathway whenever external shocks threaten its viability, or in certain cases, impose the need for a more fundamental change in the prevailing system and the desired pathways of change. We argue that these theoretical inspirations provide a useful substantiated underpinning for the territorial paradigm of rural development and allow us to show why and how the local partnership has the potential to improve the governance and the resilience of rural territories. We also develop a number of further reflections about the challenges of such partnerships, in particular the difficulties emerging from heterogeneous interest and power of local actors.

Conflict of norms in European Union law and the legal reasoning of the European Court of Justice

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis examines the topic of conflict of norms in European Union (EU) law and the legal reasoning of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), arguing that the framework of conflict of norms provides conceptual insight into justification and the role of value choices in legal reasoning. After examining the theory of conflict of norms, which seems to have been relatively under-studied generally and especially in EU law, it examines three particular aspects of norm conflict resolution in the legal reasoning of the ECJ and EU law: conflict of interpretative norms, especially the opposition between conserving and innovative interpretation; conflicts of human rights norms, looking in particular at the idea of a hierarchy of rights and of specificationism in the articulation of rights; and conflicts of competence norms. It concludes that the scope exists for a fuller justification of the choice of norms in the legal reasoning of the ECJ and generally in EU law and offers a perspective on how the values articulated by the EU suggest particular approaches to norm conflict resolution by the ECJ in its decision-making in these fields, in particular, a greater resort to lex specialis and originalist or historical interpretation, in contrast to its current method.Department of Education and Learning of Northern Ireland (2005-2008); Scholarship from the Modern Law Review (2006-2008); Waiver of fees by Brunel Universit

Characterising and modeling the co-evolution of transportation networks and territories

The identification of structuring effects of transportation infrastructure on territorial dynamics remains an open research problem. This issue is one of the aspects of approaches on complexity of territorial dynamics, within which territories and networks would be co-evolving. The aim of this thesis is to challenge this view on interactions between networks and territories, both at the conceptual and empirical level, by integrating them in simulation models of territorial systems.Comment: Doctoral dissertation (2017), Universit\'e Paris 7 Denis Diderot. Translated from French. Several papers compose this PhD thesis; overlap with: arXiv:{1605.08888, 1608.00840, 1608.05266, 1612.08504, 1706.07467, 1706.09244, 1708.06743, 1709.08684, 1712.00805, 1803.11457, 1804.09416, 1804.09430, 1805.05195, 1808.07282, 1809.00861, 1811.04270, 1812.01473, 1812.06008, 1908.02034, 2012.13367, 2102.13501, 2106.11996

Scaling and governance conference 2010 : "Towards a New Knowledge for Scale Sensitive Governance of Complex Systems" : conference program and book of abstracts, Wageningen, the Netherlands November 11-12, 2010

Both the ecological and the socio-economic domain are organized across a multitude of scales and levels. Governance encompasses all those structures and activities of social, political and administrative actors that can be seen as purposeful efforts to guide, steer, control, or manage sustainable development or other moral principles like good governance, accountability or environmental justice

Exploitation of mineral potentials of Cameroon

Imperial Users onl

Markets and mediators: politics and primary art markets in Montréal

Markets and mediators: Politics and primary art markets in Montréal is an ethnographic study of Montrealʼs primary art market and explains how history, government policy and calculative agency operate together to frame the practice of cultural mediators in the visual arts field. Actors operate within a complex financial and symbolic economy that must respond to changing modes of governance and international trends that increasingly concern metropolitan rather than national development. These forms of agency are situated within overlapping discourses concerning cultural policy at a provincial and municipal level that organize the artistic field in the city, the ʻrule and rolesʼ and ʻweak tiesʼ that format legitimate action in the primary market and the processes that are used to incorporate new trends and innovation in the field. The thesis argues that mediators in the primary art market play a generative role in the creation of a multicultural and cosmopolitan cultural capital while addressing the conflicting demands of Quebecʼs nationalist politics. The thesis uses Bourdieuʼs field and cultural theory, Callonʼs theory of markets and contemporary work on cities and multicultures to understand this competition over scarce resources by actors in an art world dominated by state support and institutions. The function of art worlds and their mediation by urban elites reiterates the political importance of aesthetic canonization and labor market practice in a city held to bear a specific responsibility for maintaining a sense of culture and identity