Regional Products, Regions' Reputation and Commercial Strategies: A Tale of Two Cheese Suppliers

Networks of firms producing and selling regional products to domestic and foreign markets are influencing the direction and options of local development. Regional products are embedded in historical tradition and geographic, cultural and social specificity. Most of the local activities are performed by clustered SME's in well defined geographical areas. To study the mechanisms and factors which favour spontaneous development in specific areas and make SME's competitive through cluster development we used case study methodology. An evolutionary perspective of "Casa Matias" and "Casa dos Queijos", two portuguese SME's, is expected to illustrate which key factors triggered the firm's cheese business and, simultaneously, examine organisational practices with particular emphasis on cluster formation and internationalisation process. From this analysis we expected to conceptualise a specific policy scheme to help developing spontaneous entrepreneurship, cooperation between clustered SME's and local collective development.

Location of foreign firms in Portugal: A network approach

The importance of the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and the foreign firm in the portuguese economy has been rising quite significantly for the last years. Nevertheless, we might say that there has been little work which brings into focus the factors that provide us with a consistent explanation about the location of the foreign manufacturing firm. The paper try to clear up the above mentioned issue, considering an analytical framework that integrates the network approach. In this framework the social, intra-entrepreneurial, inter-entrepreneurial (both national and local) and the local institutional networks are supposed to exert a relevant influence on the location decision making process of the foreign manufacturing firm.

EU regulation concerning genetically modified products: an issue of food security or a measure of disguised protectionism?

The biggest producers and exporters of agricultural products have been adopting the genetic engineering in order to improve the factors productivity and the firms profits In the last decade, the United States of America (US) and the European Union (EU) have established a high divergent regulation on production, distribution and consumption of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Apparently, the EU's complex legislative framework related to GMOs was intend to satisfy the European consumers which are concerned about food safety and whish to make more informed choice about the food they eat. The aim of this paper is to understand the potential motivations behind the different policies on GM products adopted by US and EU.Genetically Modified Organisms; Consumers preferences; Food security; Technical barriers to trade.

A Glimpse Inside the Coffers: Endowment Spending at Wealthy Colleges and Universities

Even as ongoing national conversations about income inequality intensify, wealth stratification is occurring not only among individuals but also among institutions of higher education, a study from theEducation Trust finds.The report, "A Glimpse Inside the Coffers", found that roughly 3.6 percent of the nation's colleges and universities held 75 percent of all postsecondary endowment wealth. Despite that wealth, however, few of the hundred and thirty-eight colleges and universities with at least $500 million in their endowments were found to be investing significantly in students from low-income families, with nearly half those institutions ranking in the bottom 5 percent nationally in terms of the enrollment of first-time, full-time Pell Grant recipients.The assets of these institutions totaled$149.5 billion at the beginning of 2010 and had grown to $202.3 billion just four years later. According to the report, if the thirty-five institutions that currently spend less than 5 percent of their endowments annually were to increase their spend-out rate to the 5 percent required of private foundations, an additional$418 million would become available for other things. And if those funds were allocated solely to financial aid, they could be used to enroll an additional 2,376 low-income students at the current net price for four years -- a nearly 67 percent increase from the enrollment numbers for first-time, full-time low-income students in 2012-13. Alternatively, the same $418 million also could be used to reduce the net price for low-income students at these institutions by an average of$8,000 per year for four years."It's common for institutional leaders to say that endowment spending is all about preserving the excellence of their institutions for years to come. But our data show that most could easily afford to do more to educate more low-income students now without compromising their futures," said Andrew Nichols, director of higher education research and data analytics and co-author of the report. "By choosing to serve more low-income students, these wealthy institutions could be leaders -- not just in riches, but in extending opportunity.

Comparing Exchange Market Pressure in West and Southern African Countries

We compare the performance of Cape Verde and Mozambique concerning financial credibility as measured by Exchange Market Pressure, an institutional feature that has often been overlooked in the literature as a relevant institution for economies. Drawing on previous research by Macedo et al. (2009), we expand their analysis and, using several definitions of “financial credibility”, all related to different angles on Exchange Market Pressure indices, we conclude that - against reasonable benchmarks in their respective regions - financial credibility has been very good for Cape Verde and fairly good for Mozambique. JEL codes: C22, E44, F31, F33Exchange Rate Regime, Exchange Market Pressure, EGARCH

Efficient Learning and Evaluation of Complex Concepts in Inductive Logic Programming

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a subfield of Machine Learning with foundations in logic programming. In ILP, logic programming, a subset of first-order logic, is used as a uniform representation language for the problem specification and induced theories. ILP has been successfully applied to many real-world problems, especially in the biological domain (e.g. drug design, protein structure prediction), where relational information is of particular importance. The expressiveness of logic programs grants flexibility in specifying the learning task and understandability to the induced theories. However, this flexibility comes at a high computational cost, constraining the applicability of ILP systems. Constructing and evaluating complex concepts remain two of the main issues that prevent ILP systems from tackling many learning problems. These learning problems are interesting both from a research perspective, as they raise the standards for ILP systems, and from an application perspective, where these target concepts naturally occur in many real-world applications. Such complex concepts cannot be constructed or evaluated by parallelizing existing top-down ILP systems or improving the underlying Prolog engine. Novel search strategies and cover algorithms are needed. The main focus of this thesis is on how to efficiently construct and evaluate complex hypotheses in an ILP setting. In order to construct such hypotheses we investigate two approaches. The first, the Top Directed Hypothesis Derivation framework, implemented in the ILP system TopLog, involves the use of a top theory to constrain the hypothesis space. In the second approach we revisit the bottom-up search strategy of Golem, lifting its restriction on determinate clauses which had rendered Golem inapplicable to many key areas. These developments led to the bottom-up ILP system ProGolem. A challenge that arises with a bottom-up approach is the coverage computation of long, non-determinate, clauses. Prolog’s SLD-resolution is no longer adequate. We developed a new, Prolog-based, theta-subsumption engine which is significantly more efficient than SLD-resolution in computing the coverage of such complex clauses. We provide evidence that ProGolem achieves the goal of learning complex concepts by presenting a protein-hexose binding prediction application. The theory ProGolem induced has a statistically significant better predictive accuracy than that of other learners. More importantly, the biological insights ProGolem’s theory provided were judged by domain experts to be relevant and, in some cases, novel

Intervención internacional a través de los medios de comunicación en sociedades posguerra: Perspectivas a partir de las epistemologías del sur

Over the past two decades, international intervention in post-war settings has strictly followed liberal assumptions and practices. Efforts to build and shape the media in the aftermath of armed conflict are no exception. In setting the foundations for the rule of law, liberal democracy and free market, external actors have (re)defined what constitutes the mediascape – that is, the various spheres of communication within public discourse – and how to (re)construct it. Imprinted with modernity’s tenets and western assumptions about the public space, this approach has understood the mediascape narrowly as limited to traditional, established, liberal media, serving to validate particular actors and processes whilst obscuring, neglecting and shutting off global diversity. Law and technology, this paper argues, are the two main axes through which legitimation and exclusion are effected. A myopic focus on legal and technological aspects of the media reduces a rich space of local discourses, norms and practices to western-like media legislation, training and outlets, narrowing in turn the sites for addressing violence and building peace.Durante las últimas dos décadas, la intervención internacional en contextos posguerra ha seguido estrictamente los supuestos y prácticas liberales. Los esfuerzos para construir y dar forma a los medios de comunicación después de los conflictos armados no son una excepción. Al sentar las bases del estado de derecho, de la democracia liberal y del libre mercado, los actores externos han definido lo que constituye el paisaje mediático, es decir, las diversas esferas de la comunicación en el discurso público y cómo reconstruirlo. Imbuido con los principios de la modernidad y los supuestos occidentales sobre el espacio público, este enfoque ha entendido el panorama mediático estrechamente como limitado a los medios tradicionales, establecidos y liberales, sirviendo para validar actores y procesos particulares mientras oscurece, descuida y cierra la diversidad global. El derecho y la tecnología, sostiene este documento, son los dos ejes principales a través de los cuales se efectúan la legitimación y la exclusión. Un enfoque miope en los aspectos legales y tecnológicos de los medios de comunicación que reduce un rico espacio de discursos, normas y prácticas locales a la legislación, la formación y los medios de comunicación de los medios occidentales, reduciendo a su vez los sitios para abordar la violencia y construir la paz