Tourist development impacts on the spatial transformation of the Greek islands. The case study of Kos insular area

The paper context is dealing with the changes in the spatial structure, within small island areas of Greece, caused by the rabbit tourist development of the last thirty years. In the early seventies, tourism was a new direction for the island rural communities and economies, having a complicated and multileveled spatial organization, knowing that it involves effectively: 'international', 'national', 'territorial' and 'local' level, over the island space, which was mostly believed as a 'closed' system ('closed' local society, local economy etc). In these terms tourism has become today the main factor of regional and local growth, affecting to: the evolution and agglomeration of the population, the function of the local labour market and the distribution of labour, land uses and the location of services and central activities, the role of small towns and settlements and their 'connectivity' level with 'autonomous' (how much?) tourist areas. We examine -as a case study- the above matters in a 'fully' tourist developed area of the greek islands space: Kos and Nisyros spatial unity, located in South Aegean (totally about 30,000 resident population and 32,000 hotel beds in 2000). Our research was based in empirical/ qualitative information but also in secondary/ quantitative data, comparatively presented. At the beginning we attempt to build a 'scenario' describing the process of the development. We detect the development phases by checking the spread sequence of the tourist units (and activities) compared with the existing spatial structure of the island/ rural case study area ('how'). At the same time we try to explain and connect this process with the changes within the local economy, the local community and the basic 'rules' of the land market ('why'). This 'scenario' is used as a framework for (the) following specific investigations referring to: -the differentiated evolution of the population in each island town/ settlement, due to a number of reasons related directly to the agglomeration of the tourist activities, -the changes in the location and the categories of labour and its increasing mobility, as a result of the special characteristics of tourism, -the role of the transportations and the spatial forms of the retail sector in a tourist environment, -the functional relations and the networking between a tourist area and a small town/ rural settlement, investigating whether the tourist areas are functionally embodied with the surrounding settlements. Finally the paper comes to some schematic types of spatial relations according to the size of each settlement and the spatial relations it develops in general. These spatial types contain the main conclusions of the above analysis and they describe how the area is transformed and reshaped under the changing developing procedures.

Elevating commodity storage with the SALSA host translation layer

To satisfy increasing storage demands in both capacity and performance, industry has turned to multiple storage technologies, including Flash SSDs and SMR disks. These devices employ a translation layer that conceals the idiosyncrasies of their mediums and enables random access. Device translation layers are, however, inherently constrained: resources on the drive are scarce, they cannot be adapted to application requirements, and lack visibility across multiple devices. As a result, performance and durability of many storage devices is severely degraded. In this paper, we present SALSA: a translation layer that executes on the host and allows unmodified applications to better utilize commodity storage. SALSA supports a wide range of single- and multi-device optimizations and, because is implemented in software, can adapt to specific workloads. We describe SALSA's design, and demonstrate its significant benefits using microbenchmarks and case studies based on three applications: MySQL, the Swift object store, and a video server.Comment: Presented at 2018 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS

The Consequences of Mandatory Corporate Sustainability Reporting

We examine the effect of mandatory corporate sustainability reporting (MCSR) on several measures of social responsibility using both country and firm-level data. Using data for 58 countries, we show that after the adoption of MCSR laws and regulations, the social responsibility of business leaders increases and both sustainable development and employee training become a higher priority for companies. Moreover, for companies in countries with MCSR, corporate governance improves and on average, companies implement more ethical practices, bribery and corruption decrease, and managerial credibility increases. These effects are larger for countries with stronger law enforcement and more widespread assurance of sustainability reports. We complement the country-level analysis using environmental, social and governance metrics at the firm-level in conjunction with a differences-in-differences research design and we find that for the treatment group, energy as well as waste and water consumption significantly decline, while investments in employee training significantly increase after the adoption of MCSR laws and regulations.sustainability reporting, mandatory reporting, corporate sustainability, corporate social responsibility

Have euro area and EU economic governance worked? Just the facts

We test whether two key elements of the EU and euro area economic governance framework, the Stability and Growth Pact and the Lisbon Strategy, have had any impact on macroeconomic outcomes. We test this proposition using a difference-in-difference approach on a panel of over 30 countries, some of which are non-EU (control group). Hence, the impact of the EU economic governance pillars is evaluated based on both the performance before and after their application as well as against the control group. We find strong and robust evidence that neither the Stability and Growth Pact nor the Lisbon Strategy have had a significant beneficial impact on fiscal and economic performance outcomes. We conclude that a profound reform of these pillars is needed to make them work in the next decade. JEL Classification: E62, E63, H63, O43euro area, European Union, governance, institutions, Lisbon Strategy, Stability and Growth Pact