The Tastes from Portugal: Food as Remembrance in Portuguese American Literature

Contemporary Portuguese American literature written by Thomas Braga (1943-), Frank Gaspar (1946-), and Katherine Vaz (1955-) share a profusion of topics - with ethnic food being, perhaps, the most representative one. What these writers have in common is that their roots can be traced to Portugal\u27s Atlantic islands - the Azores - and not to continental Portugal. They are native Americans and write in English, though their characters and themes are Portuguese American. Some of them lived close to the former New England whaling and fishing centers of New Bedford and Nantucket, which Herman Melville has immortalized in Moby-Dick and in his short story, The \u27Gees, in The Piazza Tales. These seaports were renowned worldwide and eventually attracted Azorean harpooners. The Azorean background of Thomas Braga and Frank Gaspar helps us to understand why fish and seafood feature so extensively in their writings instead of dishes containing meat as is the case in the fiction of Katherine Vaz

The center and the margins

Series : Portuguese literary & cultural studies (PLCS), vol. 26In this article, we propose a reflection about two recent histories of literature, the Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula (2010) and the Critical History of Portuguese Literature (1993-2010). In the first, which is spatially/topographically oriented and has a revisionist purpose, Portuguese literature emerges (geographically) decentered and (temporally) fragmented. The latter offers a summary of all the knowledge accumulated through the historiography of Portuguese literature, from a critical standpoint. Apropos of both, we put to question the possibilities of connection between space, history and literature

Estimation of Gender wage Discrimination in the Portuguese labour market

Gender wage discrimination is a reality in the Portuguese labour markets although no study has been until now carried on to measure its dimension. We think that economists should contribute to the knowledge of the dimension and significance of this phenomenon by giving orientation for the definition of political measures towards its reduction. In this paper we measure the size of gender wage discrimination in the Portuguese labour market. Furthermore, we evaluate this measure for the five Portuguese main regions. In recent literature about the measurement of gender wage discrimination the Oaxaca decomposition and its developments is a commonly used approach. We extend this approach using bootstrap techniques for statistical inference purposes.

The innovative behaviour of tourism firms

Tourism is a growing and an extremely competitive sector. To be competitive, tourism firms need do innovate, responding to the more and more demanding tourist. Nonetheless, research on this field is limited and insufficient. In Portugal, the tourism sector is a highly strategic sector for the Portuguese economy, but there is no evidence on how Portuguese tourism firms innovate. This paper presents a thesis proposal with the aim to provide empirical evidence of the innovative behaviour of Portuguese tourism firm. Trough a direct survey on all the Portuguese tourism firms we intent to investigate firms’ innovativeness and their determinants and then compare the results with data from Danish and Spanish tourism firms. The literature on innovation in services and in tourism, in particular Sunbdo et al. (2007) taxonomy of tourism firms, provides us a guide to our investigation. It is also our aim to contribute with additional findings on the process of innovation in the tourism industry.Innovation, Tourism Industries, Portugal

The expectations hypothesis of the term structure: some empirical evidence for Portugal

The purpose of this paper is to test the (rational) expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates using Portuguese data for the interbank money market. The results obtained support only a very weak, long-run or "asymptotic" version of the hypothesis, and broadly agree with previous evidence for other countries. The empirical evidence supports the cointegration of Portuguese rates and the "puzzle" well known in the literature: although its forecasts of future short-term rates are in the correct direction, the spread between longer and shorter rates fails to forecast future longer rates. In the single equation framework, the implications of the hypothesis in terms of the predictive ability of the spread are also clearly rejected

Oil price shocks and the Portuguese economy since the 1970s

This paper assesses empirically the effect of oil price shocks on Portuguese aggregate economic activity, industrial production and price level. We take the usual multivariate VAR methodology to investigate the magnitude and stability of this relationship. In doing so, we follow the approach presented in the recent literature and adopt different oil price specifications. We conclude that, as for most industrialized countries, the nature of this relationship changed in the mid-1980s. Furthermore, we show that the main Portuguese macroeconomic variables have become progressively less respon

UNH Faculty Abroad Series, Spring 2013: International Arts

Spring 2013 - International Arts Szu-Feng Chen UNH, Theatre & Dance Department February 26, 2013 Theater Design and Singaporean Storytelling View PowerPoint show Amy Boylan UNH, Languages, Literature, & Cultures Department March 26, 2013 Toxic Tables: Food and Eating in Italian Camorra Films View presentation (pdf) Jenni Cook UNH, Music Department April 18, 2013 Brazilian Portuguese Diction in Classical Singing View presentation (pdf

International Fragmentation of Production in the Portuguese Economy: What do Different Measures Tell Us?

This paper analyses the relevance and the characteristics of the international fragmentation of production in the Portuguese economy. The empirical trade literature suggests different measures of fragmentation, changing the scope of the concept and using alternative sets of information. The existing measures can be broadly divided in those that make use of Input-Output matrices together with international trade data and those that look at specific elements of international transactions, namely trade in parts and components and outward-inward processing trade. In this paper, we survey the different measures of international fragmentation of production and apply them to Portuguese data. Our results of Input-Output based measures point to a substantial increase of the vertical linkages in the Portuguese economy, in particular since the nineties. Nevertheless, it seems that the pace of vertical specialization has been somewhat modest in international terms. The share of exports of parts and components in total trade has almost doubled in the last two decades, while the import share of these goods has remained nearly stable. Processing trade represents a very low share of Portuguese international trade.