Does inward foreign direct investment boost the productivity of domestic firms?

Are there productivity spillovers from FDI to domestic firms, and, if so, how much should host countries be willing to pay to attract FDI? To examine these questions, we use a plant-level panel covering U.K. manufacturing from 1973 through 1992. Consistent with spillovers, we estimate a robust and significantly positive correlation between a domestic plant's TFP and the foreign-affiliate share of activity in that plant's industry. Typical estimates suggest that a 10-percentage-point increase in foreign presence in a U.K. industry raises the TFP of that industry's domestic plants by about 0.5%. We also use these estimates to calculate the per-job value of these spillovers at about £2,400 in 2000 prices ($4,300). These calculated values appear to be less than per-job incentives governments have granted in recent high-profile cases, in some cases several times less

Parasitismo associado às diferentes gerações da Traça-da-oliveira Prays oleae (Bernard), em Trás-os-Montes.

A traça-da-oliveira, Prays oleae (Bernard), pela importância dos prejuízos que causa e pela constância dos seus ataques, e considerada a principal praga do olival em Trás-os-Montes. Trabalhos desenvolvidos na região mostraram que as factores de limitação natural desempenham um papel de relevo na regulação das populações desta praga. Com o presente estudo pretendeu-se alargar a informação disponível sobre o papel desempenhado, neste contexto, pelos parasitóides

New advances in vehicular technology and automotive engineering

An automobile was seen as a simple accessory of luxury in the early years of the past century. Therefore, it was an expensive asset which none of the common citizen could afford. It was necessary to pass a long period and waiting for Henry Ford to establish the first plants with the series fabrication. This new industrial paradigm makes easy to the common American to acquire an automobile, either for running away or for working purposes. Since that date, the automotive research grown exponentially to the levels observed in the actuality. Now, the automobiles are indispensable goods; saying with other words, the automobile is a first necessity article in a wide number of aspects of living: for workers to allow them to move from their homes into their workplaces, for transportation of students, for allowing the domestic women in their home tasks, for ambulances to carry people with decease to the hospitals, for transportation of materials, and so on, the list don’t ends. The new goal pursued by the automotive industry is to provide electric vehicles at low cost and with high reliability. This commitment is justified by the oil’s peak extraction on 50s of this century and also by the necessity to reduce the emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere, as well as to reduce the needs of this even more valuable natural resource. In order to achieve this task and to improve the regular cars based on oil, the automotive industry is even more concerned on doing applied research on technology and on fundamental research of new materials. The most important idea to retain from the previous introduction is to clarify the minds of the potential readers for the direct and indirect penetration of the vehicles and the vehicular industry in the today’s life. In this sequence of ideas, this book tries not only to fill a gap by presenting fresh subjects related to the vehicular technology and to the automotive engineering but to provide guidelines for future research. This book account with valuable contributions from worldwide experts of automotive’s field. The amount and type of contributions were judiciously selected to cover a broad range of research. The reader can found the most recent and cutting-edge sources of information divided in four major groups: electronics (power, communications, optics, batteries, alternators and sensors), mechanics (suspension control, torque converters, deformation analysis, structural monitoring), materials (nanotechnology, nanocomposites, lubrificants, biodegradable, composites, structural monitoring) and manufacturing (supply chains). We are sure that you will enjoy this book and will profit with the technical and scientific contents. To finish, we are thankful to all of those who contributed to this book and who made it possible.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Thermal evaluation of MAG/TIG welding using numerical extension tool

The manufacturing processes involving thermal transitions have been more used in industries nowadays, being the welding one of the most widely used. The requirement to design and predict adverse conditions are fundamental to the development of any mechanical project. As a result, the market needs have motivated the companies to find faster and more effective solutions, being one of a recent tools an ACT (Ansys Customization Toolkit) called “Moving Heat Source”, in which is executed the Gaussian heat source to model welding and laser processes. Based on this, the present work proposes to evaluate the accuracy of that extension implementing a finite element model for the MAG/TIG welding processes in DINCK20 steel and Al6082-T6 aluminium alloy, comparing with one of the first mathematical model proposed by the literature (Rosenthal) and with a recent analytical method of high precision already validated experimentally. The results showed a smaller global error for MAG process (3~10%) when compared to TIG (15~18%) and, the temperatures measured on the surface of the plate presented errors lower than the bottom in both alloys.This research would like to thank the support of the double degree program by the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança and the Federal Center Celso Suckow da Fonseca (CEFET/RJ) as part of the master’s project entitled “Estudo Numérico do Shot-Peening no Alívio de Tensões Residuais em Soldaduras de topo MAG e TIG”. This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Abundance and diversity of soil arthropods in olive grove ecosystem (Portugal): effect of pitfall trap type

Soil arthropod biodiversity is an indicator of soil quality and can be studied using pitfall trapping. In this research, olive grove edaphic fauna was assessed at different sampling dates by comparing two different diameters (7 and 9 cm) and three different contents (empty, water and preservative) of pitfall traps in order to determine which type of pitfall trap is more efficient. Considering all pitfall trap types and sampling times, a total of 12,937 individual edaphic arthropods belonging to 11 taxa were recovered. Smaller traps with preservative collected significantly more individuals than the other pitfalls tested. Larger and empty traps collected significantly more spiders and traps with preservative collected more beetles. Smaller and empty traps collected fewer individuals than the other trap types. Both Shannon’s diversity and Pielou’s evenness indexes were higher in the larger and empty traps and richness was higher in the smaller traps filled with water. The study of myrmecocenosis was emphasised because olive grove soil fauna was numerically dominated by Formicidae (56.6% of all organisms captured) belonging to 12 genera and 24 species; Tapinoma nigerrimum, Messor barbarus, Cataglyphis hispanicus, Tetramorium semilaeve, Cataglyphis ibericus, Messor bouvieri and Camponotus cruentatus were the most abundant ant species. Traps with preservative reached the highest accumulation of species for a small number of pitfalls when compared with the other pitfalls studied and a sampling effort of 20 samples is apparently sufficient to sample the greater part of the ant species of the olive grove. From this study, it seems that traps with preservative are the best choice to use in further studies concerning the epiedaphic fauna of the olive grove