Trends in tariff reforms and trends in wage inequality

The authors provide new evidence on the impacts of trade reforms on wages and wage inequality in developing countries. While most of the current literature on the topic achieves identification by comparing outcomes before and after one episode of trade liberalization across industries, they propose a stronger identifying strategy. The authors explore the recent historical record of policy changes adopted by Argentina: from significant protection in the early 1970s, to the first episode of liberalization during the late 1970s, back to a slowdown of reforms during the 1980s, to the second episode of liberalization in the 1990s. These swings in trade policy comprise broken trends in trade reforms that they can compare with observed trends in wages and wage inequality. After setting up unusual historical data sets of trends in tariffs, trends in wages, and trends in wage inequality, the evidence supports two well-known hypotheses: trade liberalization, other things being equal, (1) has reduced wages, and (2) has increased wage inequality.Free Trade,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Policy,Export Competitiveness,Labor Markets

Housing, health, and happiness

Despite the importance of housing for people's well-being, there has been little work done to assess the causal impact of housing and housing improvement programs on health and welfare. In this paper the authors help fill this gap by investigating the impact of a large-scale effort by the Mexican government to replace dirt floors with cement floors on child health and adult happiness. They find that replacing dirt floors with cement floors significantly reduces parasitic infestations in young children, reduces diarrhea, reduces anemia, and improves cognitive development. Finally, they also find that this program leave adults substantially better off, as measured by satisfaction with their housing and quality of life and by their significantly lower rates of depression and perceived stress.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Disease Control&Prevention,Housing&Human Habitats,Access to Finance,Construction Industry

Directed Functional Coordination Analysis of Swallowing Muscles in Healthy and Dysphagic Subjects by Surface Electromyography

[EN] Swallowing is a complex sequence of highly regulated and coordinated skeletal and smooth muscle activity. Previous studies have attempted to determine the temporal relationship between the muscles to establish the activation sequence pattern, assessing functional muscle coordination with cross-correlation or coherence, which is seriously impaired by volume conduction. In the present work, we used conditional Granger causality from surface electromyography signals to analyse the directed functional coordination between different swallowing muscles in both healthy and dysphagic subjects ingesting saliva, water, and yoghurt boluses. In healthy individuals, both bilateral and ipsilateral muscles showed higher coupling strength than contralateral muscles. We also found a dominant downward direction in ipsilateral supra and infrahyoid muscles. In dysphagic subjects, we found a significantly higher right-to-left infrahyoid, right ipsilateral infra-to-suprahyoid, and left ipsilateral supra-to-infrahyoid interactions, in addition to significant differences in the left ipsilateral muscles between bolus types. Our results suggest that the functional coordination analysis of swallowing muscles contains relevant information on the swallowing process and possible dysfunctions associated with dysphagia, indicating that it could potentially be used to assess the progress of the disease or the effectiveness of rehabilitation therapies.This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the European Regional Development Fund (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE RTI2018-094449-A-I00-AR), and the Regional Joint Call for R+D+i projects (G8+1, Medellin, Colombia; Research Project PE2020-9 (G8 2020-39651)).Ye-Lin, Y.; Prats-Boluda, G.; Galiano-Botella, M.; Roldan-Vasco, S.; Orozco-Duque, A.; Garcia-Casado, J. (2022). Directed Functional Coordination Analysis of Swallowing Muscles in Healthy and Dysphagic Subjects by Surface Electromyography. Sensors. 22(12):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22124513116221

Leaf Project - A book streaming platform : Infrastructure

During the 21st century, humans have begun to have digital books and use in digital form most of their information, be this: image, sound, or printed materials. Some of these efforts have had great success. For images, the new digital cameras brought lots of new features, such as reduced physical size, higher quality, and error correction. For sound, digital music enables digital distribution, ease of sharing, and large amounts of storage. But, despite the recent efforts by Internet companies and publishers, the book industry has resisted success in the digital era. Today, new technologies enable us to distribute digital books. However, these digitised books are still represented in a traditional: as text and static images. However, our project is based on the believe that ones reading experience can evolve and benefit from current technology. The "Leaf" project's main objective is to create an electronic publication distribution platform that can equally satisfy publishers, writers, and readers. The project will create an environment to distribute digital publications that support more advanced technologies, providing in the future something beyond text and static images to the reader. This document describes the different aspects of design of an information technology infrastructure designed to stream electronic publications. This part of the "Leaf" projects aims to describe the necessary information technology infrastructure needed as an electronic publication distribution platform. The main purpose of this infrastructure is to serve electronic publications on-line to readers; however, that is not the only objective for this infrastructure. It has to deliver a service that should be highly scalable. This architecture should include database and directory servers to support the main services. All the auxiliary services should support the aim of the project , i.e., to serve amounts of traffic in a scalable and highly manageable way, while utilising open standards. The first chapter reviews the state of the art in electronic publication. The document continues in chapter 3 with an analysis of each of the different servers involved in the architecture. The Apache web server is used as streaming book service, the OpenLDAP is used to implement the authentication server. The last section nishes with a discussion of the database server. Chapter 4 describes the performance tests to verify that the propose solution meets the requires set of the system. The "Leaf" project infrastructure has been designed and all the involved services implemented successfully delivering a future possible infrastructure for the book "streaming" services. Moreover, the obtained knowledge will help to create the rst steps in the project infrastructure. The performance test unveil that the Varnish web accelerator is a cheap and powerful solution to improve the web server performance.Under 21 århundradet, har människor börjat få digitala böcker och användning i digital form mesta av sin information, den har: bild, ljud eller tryckt material. Några av dessa insatser har haft stor framgång. För bilder, har väckt nya digitalkameror massor av nya funktioner, så som minskad fysisk storlek, högre kvalitet och felkorrigering. För ljud, möjliggör digital musik digital distribution, enkel delning och stort lagringsutrymme. Men trots den senaste tidens ansträngningar från Internet-företag och förläggare, har bokbranschen motstånd framgång i den digitala tidsåldern. Idag, ny teknik gör det möjligt att distribuera digitala böcker. Men dessa digitaliserade böckersom fortfarande representerade i en traditionell: som text och statiska bilder. Dock är vårt projekt bygger på tro att de läsupplevelse kan utvecklas och dra nytta av dagens teknik. Den "Leaf" projektets viktigaste mål är att skapa en elektronisk plattform publikation distribution som även kan tillfredsställa förläggare, författare, och läsare. Projektet kommer att skapa en miljö för att distribuera digitala publikationer som har stöd för mer avancerad teknik, att i framtiden något bortom text och statiska bilder for läsaren. Detta dokument beskriver olika aspekter av design av en IT-infrastruktur för att strömma elektroniska publikationer. Denna del av "Leaf" projekt syftar till att beskriva den infrastruktur som behovs IT behövs som en elektronisk publikation distributionsplattform. Det huvudsakligasyftet med denna infrastruktur är att tjäna elektroniska publikationer på nätet till läsarna, men det är inte den enda målet för denna infrastruktur. Det har att leverera en tjänst som ska vara skalbar. Denna arkitektur bor omfatta databas och servrar för att stödja de viktigaste tjänsterna. Alla stödtjänster bör stödja målet med projektet, dvs att tjäna mängder trafik i en skalbar och mycket hanterbart sätt, samtidigt utnyttjar öppna standarder. Det första kapitlet granskar den senaste i elektronisk publicering. Dokumentet fortsätter i kapitel 3 med en analys av varje av de olika servrar som deltar i arkitekturen. Webbservern Apache används som streaming bok tjänsten är OpenLDAP anvands for att genomfora autentiseringsservern. Det sista avsnittet avslutas med en diskussion om databasservern. Kapitel 4 beskriver prestandatester för att verifiera att föreslå lösningen uppfyller de kräver uppsättning av systemet. Den "Leaf" projektet infrastruktur har designats och alla inblandade genomförs tjänster kunna ge en framtida möjlig infrastruktur för boken "strmmande" tjänster. Dessutom kommer de erhållna kunskapen bidrar till att skapa de första stegen i projektet infrastrukturen. Föreställningen testet avslöjar att Varnish Web Accelerator är en billig och kraftfull lösning för att förbättra prestandan webbservern

Leaf Project - A book streaming platform : Infrastructure

During the 21st century, humans have begun to have digital books and use in digital form most of their information, be this: image, sound, or printed materials. Some of these efforts have had great success. For images, the new digital cameras brought lots of new features, such as reduced physical size, higher quality, and error correction. For sound, digital music enables digital distribution, ease of sharing, and large amounts of storage. But, despite the recent efforts by Internet companies and publishers, the book industry has resisted success in the digital era. Today, new technologies enable us to distribute digital books. However, these digitised books are still represented in a traditional: as text and static images. However, our project is based on the believe that ones reading experience can evolve and benefit from current technology. The "Leaf" project's main objective is to create an electronic publication distribution platform that can equally satisfy publishers, writers, and readers. The project will create an environment to distribute digital publications that support more advanced technologies, providing in the future something beyond text and static images to the reader. This document describes the different aspects of design of an information technology infrastructure designed to stream electronic publications. This part of the "Leaf" projects aims to describe the necessary information technology infrastructure needed as an electronic publication distribution platform. The main purpose of this infrastructure is to serve electronic publications on-line to readers; however, that is not the only objective for this infrastructure. It has to deliver a service that should be highly scalable. This architecture should include database and directory servers to support the main services. All the auxiliary services should support the aim of the project , i.e., to serve amounts of traffic in a scalable and highly manageable way, while utilising open standards. The first chapter reviews the state of the art in electronic publication. The document continues in chapter 3 with an analysis of each of the different servers involved in the architecture. The Apache web server is used as streaming book service, the OpenLDAP is used to implement the authentication server. The last section nishes with a discussion of the database server. Chapter 4 describes the performance tests to verify that the propose solution meets the requires set of the system. The "Leaf" project infrastructure has been designed and all the involved services implemented successfully delivering a future possible infrastructure for the book "streaming" services. Moreover, the obtained knowledge will help to create the rst steps in the project infrastructure. The performance test unveil that the Varnish web accelerator is a cheap and powerful solution to improve the web server performance.Under 21 århundradet, har människor börjat få digitala böcker och användning i digital form mesta av sin information, den har: bild, ljud eller tryckt material. Några av dessa insatser har haft stor framgång. För bilder, har väckt nya digitalkameror massor av nya funktioner, så som minskad fysisk storlek, högre kvalitet och felkorrigering. För ljud, möjliggör digital musik digital distribution, enkel delning och stort lagringsutrymme. Men trots den senaste tidens ansträngningar från Internet-företag och förläggare, har bokbranschen motstånd framgång i den digitala tidsåldern. Idag, ny teknik gör det möjligt att distribuera digitala böcker. Men dessa digitaliserade böckersom fortfarande representerade i en traditionell: som text och statiska bilder. Dock är vårt projekt bygger på tro att de läsupplevelse kan utvecklas och dra nytta av dagens teknik. Den "Leaf" projektets viktigaste mål är att skapa en elektronisk plattform publikation distribution som även kan tillfredsställa förläggare, författare, och läsare. Projektet kommer att skapa en miljö för att distribuera digitala publikationer som har stöd för mer avancerad teknik, att i framtiden något bortom text och statiska bilder for läsaren. Detta dokument beskriver olika aspekter av design av en IT-infrastruktur för att strömma elektroniska publikationer. Denna del av "Leaf" projekt syftar till att beskriva den infrastruktur som behovs IT behövs som en elektronisk publikation distributionsplattform. Det huvudsakligasyftet med denna infrastruktur är att tjäna elektroniska publikationer på nätet till läsarna, men det är inte den enda målet för denna infrastruktur. Det har att leverera en tjänst som ska vara skalbar. Denna arkitektur bor omfatta databas och servrar för att stödja de viktigaste tjänsterna. Alla stödtjänster bör stödja målet med projektet, dvs att tjäna mängder trafik i en skalbar och mycket hanterbart sätt, samtidigt utnyttjar öppna standarder. Det första kapitlet granskar den senaste i elektronisk publicering. Dokumentet fortsätter i kapitel 3 med en analys av varje av de olika servrar som deltar i arkitekturen. Webbservern Apache används som streaming bok tjänsten är OpenLDAP anvands for att genomfora autentiseringsservern. Det sista avsnittet avslutas med en diskussion om databasservern. Kapitel 4 beskriver prestandatester för att verifiera att föreslå lösningen uppfyller de kräver uppsättning av systemet. Den "Leaf" projektet infrastruktur har designats och alla inblandade genomförs tjänster kunna ge en framtida möjlig infrastruktur för boken "strmmande" tjänster. Dessutom kommer de erhållna kunskapen bidrar till att skapa de första stegen i projektet infrastrukturen. Föreställningen testet avslöjar att Varnish Web Accelerator är en billig och kraftfull lösning för att förbättra prestandan webbservern

Limitations in Activities of Daily Living Among Spanish Women Diagnosed With Endometriosis

Importance: Understanding the impact of endometriosis symptoms on patients' activities of daily living (ADLs) is a priority to establish effective and personalized intervention programs. Objective: To explore limitations in ADLs and instrumental ADLs (IADLs) and their association with pelvic pain (PP), chronic fatigue, and pain-catastrophizing thoughts among women with endometriosis. Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Spain. Participants: Two hundred thirty women with endometriosis. Outcomes and Measures: Information regarding performance of ADLs (Barthel Index) and IADLs (Lawton-Brody questionnaire), PP intensity (Numeric Rating Scale), chronic fatigue (Piper Fatigue Scale), and pain-catastrophizing thoughts (Pain Catastrophizing Scale) was gathered. Multivariate regression analyses were created, and mediating effects of fatigue and pain-catastrophizing thoughts on the association between PP and ADL and IADL limitations were assessed. Results: The prevalence of limitations in at least one ADL and one IADL was 22.6% (95% confidence interval [CI] [17.2, 28.1]) and 39.1% (95% CI [32.8, 45.5]), respectively. Limitations in bowel continence, housework, shopping, and meal preparation were reported most frequently. Women reporting severe PP showed higher risk for ADL (odds ratio [OR] = 3.33, 95% CI [1.10, 10.10]) and IADL (OR = 7.99, 95% CI [2.86, 22.34]) limitations. Chronic fatigue and pain-catastrophizing thoughts were also positively related to ADL-IADL limitations, showing a mediating effect on the association between PP and ADL-IADL limitations. Conclusions and relevance: This study reveals the widespread presence of difficulties in ADL-IADL performance among women with endometriosis, with some symptoms underlying these difficulties in occupational performance. This study points to the need for cost-effective occupational therapy interventions for affected women. What This Article Adds: This research shows that the occupational performance of women with endometriosis is frequently impaired; therefore, the effectiveness of occupational therapy interventions should be addressed in the near future.This study was partially supported by Carlos III Health Institute Grant FIS PI17/01743, donations from women with endometriosis, and Paidi Group CTS-206 funds. This project is cofunded by the University of Granada, Plan Propio de Investigacion 2016, Actions of Excellence, and by the Junta de Andalucıa, Consejerıa de Conocimiento, Investigacion y Universidades, and the European Regional Development Fund (Ref. SOMM17/6107/UGR). This article was part of the doctoral thesis developed by A. Mundo-Lopez for the Of ficial Doctoral Programme in Clinical Medicine and Public Health at the University of Granada