Varieties of capitalism, quality of government, and policy conditionality in Southern Europe: Greece and Portugal in comparative perspective

This paper, drawing primarily on the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) theoretical approach to political economy and the institutional theory of Europeanisation with emphasis on the Quality of Government (QoG) approach, examines possible variation between Greece and Portugal, in terms of their responses to pressures from Europeanisation before the crisis, as well as to MoU conditionality during the crisis. The empirical evidence seems to vindicate the fundamental assumptions of the VoC approach about the impact of variation among member states of the Eurozone, in terms of models of capitalism/political economy, on the crisis in Greece and Portugal. However, QoG is identified as key explanatory variable for variation in adaptation/adjustment capacity between the two countries, especially during the crisis. Additionally, there seems to be no evidence that cultural aspects, such as the level of social trust/ capital, can account for variation in adaptation performance between the two countries during the crisis

The future of the US Dollar and its competition with the Euro

Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods Global International System in 1971, the world economy has experienced significant currency volatility. The major economies of the world have addressed such volatility differently. The EU has chosen to follow a monetary union and introduced successfully a new currency. The U.S. has paid less attention to the fluctuations of the dollar and has pursued an independent monetary policy to promote national economic stability. Japan has seen its currency appreciate significantly. This paper argues that while trade and growth across the globe are doing well, financial developments are intensifying the competition between the U.S. dollar and the euro. Three possible future scenarios are developed and discussed.peer-reviewe

Asymmetrical economic and institutional changes in the Western Balkans : cooperation with the European Union

The Western Balkans have historically been a poor area of Europe. The total population of the Western Balkans is 24.7 million. Ethnic differences of long standing have led to conflicts and to political and economic instability. Poverty and instability have combined to produce a vicious circle of institutional backwardness. Recent conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo have aggravated an already adverse economic situation. GDP in 1999 was substantially lower than that in 1989. The EU plans to enter into contractual relationships with all the Western Balkans in the form of Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAAs). The pacts are aimed at helping to establish economic and political stability, to implement institutional reforms, to practice regional free trade and cooperation and to privatize the economies of Western Balkans. These are also the presumed goals of the Western Balkans. This study focuses on a review of the progress made by the Western Balkans toward meeting the above stated challenges. A main conclusion is that the attainment of these goals has been asymmetrical for economic, political and institutional reasons.peer-reviewe

Engineering Graph-Based Models for Dynamic Timetable Information Systems

Many efforts have been done in the last years to model public transport timetables in order to find optimal routes. The proposed models can be classified into two types: those representing the timetable as an array, and those representing it as a graph. The array-based models have been shown to be very effective in terms of query time, while the graph-based models usually answer queries by computing shortest paths, and hence they are suitable to be used in combination with speed-up techniques developed for road networks. In this paper, we focus on the dynamic behavior of graph-based models considering the case where transportation systems are subject to delays with respect to the given timetable. We make three contributions: (i) we give a simplified and optimized update routine for the well-known time-expanded model along with an engineered query algorithm; (ii) we propose a new graph-based model tailored for handling dynamic updates; (iii) we assess the effectiveness of the proposed models and algorithms by an experimental study, which shows that both models require negligible update time and a query time which is comparable to that required by some array-based models

An adaptive memory programming framework for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

The Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) is one of the most intractable combinatorial optimisation problems that combines a set of constraints and objectives met in a vast variety of applications and industries. Its solution raises major theoretical challenges due to its complexity, yet presenting numerous practical dimensions. Adaptive memory programming (AMP) is one of the most successful frameworks for solving hard combinatorial optimisation problems (e.g. vehicle routing and scheduling). Its success stems from the use of learning mechanisms that capture favourable solution elements found in high-quality solutions. This paper challenges the efficiency of AMP for solving the RCPSP, to our knowledge, for the first time in the literature. Computational experiments on well-known benchmark RCPSP instances show that the proposed AMP consistently produces high-quality solutions in reasonable computational times

Online Vehicle Routing with Pickups and Deliveries Under Time-Dependent Travel-Time Constraints

The Vehicle Routing Problem with pickups, deliveries and spatiotemporal service constraints (VRP_PDSTC) is a quite challenging algorithmic problem that can be dealt with in either an offline or an online fashion. In this work, we focus on a generalization, called VRP_PDSTCtd, in which the travel-time metric is time-dependent: the traversal-time per road segment (represented as a directed arc) is determined by some function of the departure-time from its tail towards its head. Time-dependence makes things much more complicated, even for the simpler problem of computing earliest-arrival-time paths which is a crucial subroutine to be solved (numerous times) by VRP_PDSTCtd schedulers. We propose two online schedulers of requests to workers, one which is a time-dependent variant of the classical Plain-Insertion heuristic, and an extension of it trying to digest some sort of forecasts for future demands for service. We enrich these two online schedulers with two additional heuristics, one targeting for distance-balanced assignments of work loads to the workers and another that makes local-search-improvements to the produced solutions. We conduct a careful experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithms on a real-world instance, with or without these heuristics, and compare their quality with human-curated assignments provided by professional experts (human operators at actual pickup-and-delivery control centers), and also with feasible solutions constructed from a relaxed MILP formulation of VRP_PDSTCtd, which is also introduced in this paper. Our findings are quite encouraging, demonstrating that the proposed algorithms produce solutions which (i) are significant improvements over the human-curated assignments, and (ii) have overall quality pretty close to that of the (extremely time-consuming) solutions provided by an exact solver for the MILP formulation