The negative effects of monetary expansion on long-run economic growth : evidence from Southern and Northern-central European countries

This thesis investigates the effects of monetary expansionary policy on the economy following the Austrian Theory of Business Cycles. In accordance with this school of thought, the interventions of monetary authorities are believed to have adverse effects on the sustainable path of economic growth. Attempting to mitigate business cycles, liquidity injections intensify fluctuation in the long run. The origin of the Neo-Austrians’ approach and its differences with mainstream economic arguments, are described in the first part of the thesis. In the second part, I will study the cases of three Northern-central European countries and, for the first time, three Southern European countries: Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, as well as Italy, Spain and Portugal. The results obtained are consistent with the idea that the injection of ex-nihilo credit in the system creates internal disequilibria in the economy. The unbalances eventually lead to unproductive investment of the available resources and slow down the economic growth. In the short term monetary expansions brings about an economic boom since both the output and investment increase due to the higher level of capital in circulation. But the economy is operating on a fragile base since the resources invested are not backed up by real saving but created out of thin air. In the long run the inconsistency between produced consumable output and consumption preferences leads to an economic recession. Austrian economists advocate for a laisser-faire economy, free from any regulatory intervention. They believe that greater interferences in the markets, lead to more severe recessionary effects

Parking search in urban street networks: Taming down the complexity of the search-time problem via a coarse-graining approach

The parking issue is central in transport policies and drivers' concerns, but the determinants of the parking search time remain relatively poorly understood. The question is often handled in a fairly ad hoc way, or by resorting to crude approximations. Very recently, we proposed a more general agent-based approach, which notably takes due account of the role of the street network and the unequal attractiveness of parking spaces, and showed that it can be solved analytically by leveraging the machinery of Statistical Physics and Graph Theory, in the steady-state mean-field regime. Although the analytical formula is computationally more efficient than direct agent-based simulations, it involves cumbersome matrices, with linear size proportional to the number of parking spaces. Here, we extend the theoretical approach and demonstrate that it can be further simplified, by coarse-graining the parking spot occupancy at the street level. This results in even more efficient analytical formulae for the parking search time, which could be used efficiently by transport engineers

Enhancing Stakeholder Participation in Urban Mobility Planning: the NISTO Evaluation Framework

Public participation and stakeholder involvement have become core prerequisites of a comprehensive and fair transport planning process. In this paper, we show how the multi-actor multi-criteria analysis (MAMCA) methodology can enhance urban and regional mobility planning and decision-making by considering conflicting stakeholder objectives and helping to identify synergies and disagreement between different stakeholder groups. We suggest the application of MAMCA as part of the NISTO evaluation framework that offers tools to appraise small-scale mobility projects through a toolkit of multi-criteria analysis, MAMCA and target monitoring. MAMCA provides a tool to appraise the preferences of the stakeholders involved or affected by a project. It is based on assessing the evaluation criteria of the different stakeholder groups rather than appraising the project based on a set of common criteria agreed on with all stakeholders at the beginning of the process. Therefore the evaluation shows which implementation alternatives or scenarios each group would prefer and allows for a straightforward comparison of preferences across all stakeholder groups. The application of the MAMCA is demonstrated through the initial results of the evaluation of five demonstration projects in North-West Europe. We show that MAMCA is suitable for a range of mobility projects since it can handle the diversity of stakeholder groups and their objectives. In addition it offers the practitioner a well-structured way of carrying out the whole evaluation process. The application of MAMCA also has the added value of broadening the evaluation process to a wide range of stakeholders instead of limiting it to experts. As opposed to previous approaches, the MAMCA methodology aims to provide a balanced evaluation process where the stakeholders have equal weight, i.e. no priority is given to decision makers, users groups or experts. Our analysis of the process of the identification of stakeholders and their objectives also suggests that there is no generic recipe for the range of stakeholders to be involved in different projects, their objectives and the data that needs to be collected for the evaluation. The MAMCA methodology will be offered to practitioners as a simple-to-use web-based software tool that can collect stakeholder objectives and weights, as well as the input of experts and monitoring data for the evaluation of the alternatives and display the outcome on graphs. Therefore we hope that the tool will improve participation in urban decision-making and evaluation thorough the better integration of diverse stakeholder preferences

La tortue et l’éléphant

Composé de deux départements seulement, le Nord – Pas-de-Calais présente pourtant la particularité de réunir deux BDP exceptionnelles dans le réseau national : l’une est la plus ancienne, l’autre la plus importante. Produits croisés de l’histoire et de la géographie, leur cas méritait examen

Omgaan met de wederopbouwarchitectuur in de Frontstreek van 1914-1918: Ieper en Heuvelland

De wederopbouw na de Grote Oorlog bepaalt nog sterk de huidige aanblik van de Westhoek. Van Heuvelland tot Nieuwpoort is toen een samenhangend wederopbouwlandschap ontstaan door het gebruik van een set materialen, gebouwtypologieën, stijlen en stedenbouwkundige principes, nauw verbonden met de ideologie en de pragmatiek van het wederopbouwproject. Dit bijzonder gebouwenbestand staat vandaag onder toenemende druk van verbouwingen, nieuwbouw, sloop, … De lokale overheden willen nieuwe ontwikkelingen een kans geven, maar tegelijk het waardevol erfgoed vrijwaren. Labo S (een onderzoekscel van de Vakgroep Architectuur en Stedenbouw, UGent) maakte in opdracht van de provincie West-Vlaanderen hierover een studie voor de gemeentes Ieper en Heuvelland. Het opvatten van de wederopbouwarchitectuur als deel van een gestructureerd (stads/plattelands)landschap dat zich kan vernieuwen, in plaats van het patrimonium te zien als individuele stijlobjecten, is de invalshoek die Labo S aanreikt voor een ruimtelijk beleid. Centraal in de studie staat een theoretisch afwegingskader waarin concrete erfgoedconflicten worden gekaderd. Het stelt dat elk gebouw een bepaalde gebruikswaarde, een culturele waarde en een locuswaarde draagt. De locuswaarde drukt de mate uit waarin een gebouw de lokale stedenbouwkundige structuur ondersteunt. De drie waarden kunnen onafhankelijk van elkaar groter of kleiner zijn, zowel voor wederopbouwarchitectuur als voor nieuwe architectuur. Het afwegingskader laat zo tegelijk toe om bestaande situaties te evalueren en om randvoorwaarden of ambities voor nieuwe ontwikkelingen voorop te stellen. De studie koppelt steeds naar dit afwegingskader terug. Om de locuswaarde concreter te maken wordt de stedenbouwkundige wederopbouwstructuur in kaart gebracht. Acht casestudies analyseren aan de hand van het afwegingskader en de structuurkaarten een uitgangssituatie en ontwikkelingsvraag en reiken er enkele mogelijke oplossingen voor aan. Het wordt duidelijk dat hedendaagse architectuur en stedenbouw hun plaats vinden in een leesbaar en samenhangend wederopbouwlandschap dat zich verder kan ontwikkelen

An 18 S rDNA based molecular phylogeny of the Mysidacea (Crustacea)

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How regulating and cultural services of ecosystems have changed over time in Italy

In this experimental study, different components are computed for three different ecosystem services (ES). Specifically, supply, demand and use are estimated for pollination service, flood risk regulation service and nature-based tourism. These are analysed and assessed in 2012 and 2018 for the Italian context, in order to estimate the evolution over this period and to allow a significant comparison of results. The same methodology and models are applied for the selected accounting years and accounting tables and tend to reflect as closely as possible the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting-Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA), which is the international standard endorsed by the United Nations to compile Natural Capital Accounting in 2021. Both biophysical and monetary assessments are performed using the ARIES technology, an integrated modelling platform providing automatic and flexible integration of data and models, via its semantic modelling nature. Models have been run adjusting the components of the global modelling approach to the Italian context and, whenever available, prioritising the use of local data to carry out the study. This approach is particularly useful to analyse trends over time, as potentially biased components of models and data are substantially mitigated when the same biases is constant over time. This study finds an increase in benefits over the period analysed for the ES examined. The main contribution of this pioneering work is to support the idea that ES accounting or Natural Capital Accounting can provide a very useful tool to improve economic and environmental information at national and regional level. This can support processes to provide the necessary incentives to steer policy-making towards preventative rather than corrective actions, which are usually much less effective and more costly, both at environmental and economic levels. Nevertheless, particular attention must be paid to the meaning of the estimates and the drivers of these values to derive a direct or indirect relationship between the benefits observable and the actual Italian ecosystems condition. © Capriolo A et al

Sustainable consensus? the NISTO evaluation framework to appraise sustainability and stakeholder preferences for mobility projects

AbstractWhile sustainability of transport projects is of increasing importance, the concept of sustainability can be understood in many different ways by the stakeholders that are involved in or affected by mobility projects. In this paper, we compare the outcomes of the assessment of sustainability of projects through a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and the appraisal of stakeholder preferences through the multi-actor multi-criteria analysis (MAMCA). Evaluating projects with both tools and comparing the outcomes can provide insight into the stakeholder support of sustainable solutions and the sustainability of alternatives preferred by stakeholders. The sustainability of projects is assessed through 16 criteria grouped under the three pillars of sustainability. They were selected by in-depth review of 16 case studies of mobility projects, 18 transport evaluation schemes and the ranking of potential criteria by 214 stakeholders in North-West Europe. These criteria were weighted by 93 representatives of decision makers in the mobility domain. Stakeholder preferences were appraised through the criteria identified for each stakeholder group. We illustrate the framework by evaluating alternative solutions to improve cycling connections between the towns of Tilburg and Waalwijk in the Netherlands. The results of the comparison show that stakeholder preferences are biased towards one or two of the sustainability pillars (economy, environment, society) in three ways: through the selection of the criteria by the stakeholders, the weights of each criterion by each stakeholder group and differences in the final ranking of alternatives between the stakeholder groups and the MCA