Elections and the public expenditure mix

The paper presents an intertemporal utility model that determines the effects of elections on the public expenditure composition. Conventional political budget cycle models describe incumbents as concerned only with the conditions that guarantee re-appointment. Aiming at achieving re-election, incumbents behave opportunistically in order to seduce voters about their political performance. The paper introduces another motivation for the manipulation of the public expenditure mix near elections: the incumbent’s concern with her future utility in the case of defeat. We provide data to suggest that both central and local governments in the European Union do manipulate the budget composition around election moments. In order to rationalise this observation, the paper proposes a model where voters and incumbent are rational, have complete information and no bias towards any category of public expenditure, namely consumption expenditure or investment expenditure. The paper shows that even under these extreme conditions, an electorally induced cycle on public expenditure mix is still expected, one where consumption expenditure raises relative to investment expenditure in pre-election periods. This opportunistic budget manipulation follows from two facts. First, any decision an incumbent makes on consumption expenditure pays back political dividends during the same period the expenditure is incurred, while any investment expenditure only becomes visible to voters with a one-period delay. Second, re-election is an uncertain event, which makes the second state of nature valuable. Outside politics, the incumbents’ pay back is a direct function of the voters’ assessment of the incumbents’ job while in office. The model is then extended to accommodate the scenario where voters and society at large do not share preferences. When voters or society evidence a preference prone to one of the public expenditure categories, a bias towards such category emerges in post-election periods. In pre-election periods two cases are found. Consumption expenditures exceed investment expenditures if either voters or society prefer the former category at the margin. The cycle’s nature is ambiguous if the marginal preferences of voters or society are biased towards investment expenditures. JEL classification: H50, E62. Keywords: Political Budget Cycles, Public Expenditure, Elections.

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Tese de mestrado. Engenharia Informática. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Cycles on public expenditure composition within the European Union

Casual observation of fiscal aggregates in developed economies detects current expenditure rising faster than capital expenditure in the run-up to elections with the reverse occurring soon after. We provide a rationale for these types of political budget cycles which is consistent with full information and self-interested politicians: current expenditure typically produces immediate political returns, while politicians are still in office and, investment expenditure needs a time span to generate political dividends. This paper provides an empirical application to test the existence of a political budget cycle on EU central governments’ expenditure data running from 1970 to 2001. We use the Pooled Mean Group Estimator technique to determine the empirical results

Eastern Europe immigration in Minho: a sociological study

Dissertação de mestrado em Sociologia (área de especialização em Desenvolvimento e Políticas Sociais)Nas últimas décadas, tem vindo a crescer o número de imigrantes em Portugal, contribuindo assim, para o crescimento de uma sociedade multicultural. Desses grupos, os imigrantes oriundos da Europa de Leste são o segundo mais numeroso a residir no nosso país. O fluxo da imigração do leste europeu em Portugal iniciou-se no final dos anos de 1990 do século passado e primeiros anos de 2000, período, aliás, onde a maior vaga de imigração deste grupo ocorreu. Foi, também, precisamente neste período em que foram implementadas reformas nas políticas de imigração portuguesas, no sentido de apoiar e facilitar a integração social de imigrantes. Com o decorrer dos anos, verifica-se que as oportunidades socio-laborais, que o mercado de trabalho português tinha prometido, no início da imigração, aos imigrantes de leste, modificou-se de forma generalizada. A situação de crise económica e financeira que Portugal enfrenta, teve, desde o início, grande impacto em vários estratos sociais e os grupos de imigrantes foram dos primeiros a sofrer os efeitos. Esta dissertação pretende compreender o percurso migratório, a realidade social atual deste grupo de imigrantes e saber como lidam eles com a mesma. Nesta investigação, realizada através de pesquisa bibliográfica e estatística, e da realização de entrevistas a uma amostra de imigrantes do leste europeu, foi possível realizar uma cuidada análise de conteúdo, através da qual foram tiradas conclusões, nas quais se destacam: o grupo comporta em si uma grande capacidade de adaptação cultural à sociedade portuguesa, embora não haja ruptura com os laços culturais dos países de origem; o percurso migratório do grupo foi realizado com dificuldades significativas; existe, ainda, pouca aproximação institucional, de apoio a imigrantes, a este grupo; as habilitações académicas que grande parte do grupo possui não correspondem à sua atual atividade profissional; segundo o grupo, verifica-se discriminação social face aos imigrantes, na sociedade portuguesa; a situação socioeconómica do grupo é precária e não correspondente à expectativa do grupo; está clara uma sensação de insegurança e pessimismo relativamente às ambições futuras dos imigrantes; a maioria dos entrevistados não possui nacionalidade portuguesa, embora a pretenda obter.In the last decades, the number of immigrants in Portugal has been rising, which have turn Portugal into growing multicultural society. Within these groups, the Eastern Europe immigrants are the second largest group living in our country. The flux of Eastern Europe immigration in Portugal begun in the late 1990’s of the past century and in the early 2000’s, which is the period when the higher rate of this group’s immigration occurred. It was also, precisely, in this period when there were put in place reforms in the Portuguese immigration policies, to support and facilitate the social integration of the immigrants. As the years passed, the social and labor opportunities that the labor market had promised, in the beginning of the immigration, to the eastern Europe immigrants had changed in a generalized way. The financial and economic crisis which Portugal is having, had, since its beginning, great impact in several social stratums and the immigrant groups were the first to suffer with the effects. This thesis aims to understand the migration journey, current social conditions of this group of immigrants and how they deal with it. In this thesis, based in literature review and empirical research conducted among Eastern Europe immigrants, it was possible to carry out a content analysis, through which some conclusions were possible: the group has a great capability to cultural adaptation to Portuguese society, although there is no rupture with the cultural ties of its origin countries; the migration journey was made with significant difficulties; there is, still, an insufficient approach of immigrant institutional support with this group; the academic qualifications of a great part of the group does not corresponds to their current working activities; according to the group, there is social discrimination towards immigrants, in the Portuguese society; the socioeconomic situation of the group is precarious and not corresponding the group’s expectation; there is a clear sense of insecurity and pessimism in what concerns to the immigrants ambitions towards the future; the majority of the respondents does not have Portuguese nationality, although they want to obtain it

Thermomechanical analysis of cold formed steel sections

This work presents an experimental study about cold formed steel elements submitted to compression loads. The sections analyzed are C and Z sections made of steel sheet with 1.5 and 2 [mm] thick and three different cross section heights. The compression tests were made at ambient and elevated temperatures. In both cases a pined support was developed and used. The member resistance at ambient temperature was determined by applying an increasing compression load until the member collapse was achieved. The fire tests were performed in a fire resistance furnace, using the same type of end supports, and a mechanical load given by a specific degree of utilization that is maintained constant during the fire test. These tests allow the determination of the fire resistance time and member critical temperature. The experimental results are compared with the ones obtained with the Eurocode simplified models.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Hepatitis C pretreatment profile and gender differences : cognition and disease severity effects

Copyright © 2019 Barreira, Marinho, Bicho, Flores, Fialho and Ouakinin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Background: The hepatitis C virus (HCV) is known to infect the brain, however, the findings based on associated neuropsychiatric syndrome are controversial and the association itself remains unclear. Gender research in HCV infection is limited, failing to integrate the role of gender differences in neurocognitive syndrome. The aim of this study was to characterize psychological and neurocognitive profiles in HCV-infected patients before treatment and to explore gender differences in those profiles, as well as the impact of disease severity. Methods: A total of 86 patients diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C were included. Depression and anxiety were assessed using Hamilton anxiety scale (HAM-A), Hamilton depression scale (HAM-D), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). For cognition, a neuropsychological battery to measure attention, concentration and memory was used, and executive function components validated for the Portuguese population was also used before starting treatment. To identify the disease severity, platelet ratio index, and FibroScan® were used. Results: A statistically significant gender effect was found on HAM-A (B = 0.64, CI: 0.17–1.11) and HAM-D (B = 0.62, CI: 0.14–1.09), with women scoring higher compared to men. Regarding neuropsychological scores, significant differences between gender were identified in executive functions measured by Trail Making Test (TMT B) (B = 0.48, CI: 0.02–0.97), TMT B-A (B = 0.26, CI: −39.2 to −3.7) and in digit span total (B = −0.52, CI: −1.0 to −0.04), with women performing worse than men. Controlling for years of substance dependence, TMT-B and TMT B-A showed significant gender differences. Regarding the presence or absence of substance dependence, only HAM-A and HAM-D remained significant. For categorical variables, Digit Span Total was also influenced by gender, with women being more likely to be impaired: odds ratio (OR) = 7.07, CI: 2.04–24.45), and a trend was observed for Digit Span Backward (OR = 3.57, CI: 1.31–9.75). No significant differences were found between disease severity and neurocognitive performance. Conclusion: Data suggest that gender has an influence on depression, anxiety and cognitive functions with women showing greater impairment compared with men. This effect seems to be influenced by substance dependence.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Differential Mortality and Inequalities in Health Services Access in Mainland Portugal

The guarantee of the right to health protection, with the priority of overcoming health inequalities, is a main goal of the Portuguese national Health service. in this context, health care access equity in mainland Portugal continues to be a challenge for public health policies, with a littoral territory where health services are concentrated and interior depopulated zones, stripped of health services and isolated in physical and social terms. Based on 2001 and 2011 data from POrData, the present article studies how mor-tality is related to the distribution of health services – namely hospital infrastructures, health centres and health professionals – and with population characteristics related to illiteracy and ageing. The results show a strong association between mortality and the distribution of health services, highlighting increasing mortality in the context of decreasing health servi-ces, worsening when related to population illiteracy and ageing. results reveal the impor-tance of designing public policies at the local level, focused on territorial socio-cultural spe-cificities, which are mainly materialized in a distribution of health services closer to isolated populations according to their needs.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cities challenges in the contemporary societies: Urban sustainability and environmental issues

Cities face several environmental problems related to traffic, industrialization or general intensified consumption. This article presents results from the application, at the local level, of the environmental indicator Env_WeGIx that combines several variables that translate the environment conditions of Portuguese municipalities. This composite indicator was developed based on methodological procedures used for the construction of other indicators. Preliminary results show that municipalities from Lisbon and Porto metropolitan areas are located at the bottom of the ranking due to waste production, pollutant emissions and fossil fuel consumption for transports. The municipalities located in the archipelagos, Alentejo, and Algarve regions are at the ranking top. This work’s main conclusions highlight that environmental issues have direct consequences on populations’ living conditions with more emphasis on urban territories, and that public policy design should take into account solutions for the environmental challenges of urban spaces.This study allowed for the development of an urban environmental sustainability indicator through a multi-scale analysis across the Portuguese territory. This indicator provides qualified knowledge for the choice and enhancement of public policies on environmental issues.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio