PUBLIC INVESTMENT IN TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURES AND INDUSTRY PERFORMANCE IN PORTUGAL

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the effects at the industry level of public investment in transportation infrastructures in Portugal. The empirical results are based on VAR/ECM models for the Portuguese economy and for eighteen industries covering the whole spectrum of economic activity in the country. These models consider private-sector output, employment and investment as well as public investment. Empirical results at the aggregate level indicate that public investment has a positive effect on both private inputs as well as on private output and that it affects labor productivity positively. These aggregate results, however, hide a wide variety of industry-level effects. In absolute terms, the industries that benefit the most from public investment are Construction, Trade, Transportation, Finance, Real Estate, and Services. In turn, relative to their size, the industries that benefit the most are Mining, Non-Metal Products, Metal Products, Construction, Restaurants, Transportation, and Finance, and, therefore, public investment tends to shift the industry mix toward these industries. Accordingly, our empirical results suggest that although public investment has been a powerful instrument to enhance the long-term economic performance in Portugal it does so in a way that is rather unbalanced across industries.Infrastructures, Industry Performance, Portugal

Social security and economic performance in Portugal : after all that has been said and done how much has actually changed?

This paper provides an empirical estimate of the macroeconomic effects of the Portuguese pay-as-you-go social security system based on data for the period 1970–2007 and on VAR estimates using GDP, the unit cost of labor, the unemployment rate, the savings rate and social security spending. The major findings are twofold. First, growing social security spending has had detrimental effects on all of the private sector variables under consideration suggesting the existence of sizable inefficiencies. Second, these inefficiencies persist despite the successive reforms that took place over the last two decades. These results highlight the need for structural reforms of the pay-as-you-go system thereby addressing the sources of these inefficiencies, regardless of whether or not the system is financially sustainable. Furthermore, any reforms designed to address sustainability concerns cannot ignore these inefficiencies or risk making them even worse and thereby hindering the quest for sustain- ability itself.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Persistence change in tourism data

The authors apply recently proposed persistence change tests to inbound tourism series in order to evaluate whether their properties have changed over time. By using quarterly series of the number of overnight stays in hotel accommodation and similar establishments in the Algarve, from 1987:01 to 2008:03, they gathered evidence of persistence change in all series. In particular, a change from I(1) to I(0) was detected for some countries, while for others the direction change was not clear-cut. These results have implications from a policy perspective and shed light on the generally accepted conviction that policy decision processes should not ignore the fact that, in general, tourism inbound series display mean reverting behaviour, being only temporarily affected by external shocks

A new approach in the analysis of european countries convergence: Lessons for the economies of central and eastern europe

In this paper, we use the concept of convergence based on the stationarity of cross-country per capita output differences and propose new on the persistence and change of persistence of data, taking into consideration the occurrence of structural changes. We consider data on per capita output of the European Union member states, considering the Western European economies and the Eastern European economies in a total of 23 countries. Our objective is to analyze the convergence process of these economies and, in particular to conclude whether there has been a convergence and/or divergent process between the Western European economies and between those economies and the Eastern European economies over the sample period. By considering different sub-periods, the results suggest that in general the Western European countries have reduced their per capita output gaps, being Ireland the only country reporting divergence until the end of the 80s. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania have reported divergence to Western European countries over the period from the 50s to the 90s. Finally, per capita output gaps of other Eastern economies have been reduced since the 1990s, in particular the cases of Latvia and Lithuania

Inflation persistence in OECD and non-OECD economies

Inflation is an important macroeconomic variable that affects the options of economic agents as well as their future expectations and it is often regarded as a result of domestic policies combined with the effects of globalization and therefore, a sign of how governments have been well succeeded in their political options. This issue is reflected in the mandate of many monetary authorities to maintain price stability and, therefore, no wonder it plays a critical role in policies’ design as its effects spread out in the economy as a whole either in terms of economic efficiency and equity, two of the most important concerns of any government’s policy. This explains the attention political authorities and economic agents in general have given to the evolution of inflation and the fact that its control has been stated as a priority for governments all over the world. These issues have became increasing relevant as the international monetary context has experienced important changes such as the adoption of inflation targeting regimes by some countries, the arrival of monetary union in Europe, and a general deflationist process in industrial economies

A previsão com modelos de espaço de estado: Uma aplicação à economia portuguesa

A previsão com modelos de espaço de estado: modelo estrutural, modelo espaço estados (MEE), previsão com filtro de Kalman

Decentralised Hybridised Energy Management Systems (DHEMS) in power grids

The integration of electric batteries along the power supply chain is crucial for the transformation of the energy sector towards a new flexible grid that allows the penetration of renewable power generation while ensuring stability and supply security. Batteries penetration in the grid can be boosted through an efficient management of heterogeneous generation sources, controllable loads and batteries, according to different criteria of stability, efficiency, cost, maintenance and power flow requirements. The Distributed Hybrid Energy Management System (DHEMS) is a management software tool able to solve an optimization problem maximizing renewable energy sources exploitation. The DHEMS has been designed with two control layers. First, the Cloud DHEMS layer accepts external setpoints (from a VPP, DSO or TSO) and dispatchs the total active and reactive power to be exchanged with the grid by a set of distributed plants. Second, the Local DHEMSs are in charge of distributing received set points and commands among the local sets that form each power plant. Different real control and communication tests have been done, in La Plana facility (owned by Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy)

Bringing the margin to the focus: 10 challenges for riparian vegetation science and management

[EN] Riparian zones are the paragon of transitional ecosystems, providing critical habitat and ecosystem services that are especially threatened by global change. Following consultation with experts, 10 key challenges were identified to be addressed for riparian vegetation science and management improvement: (1) Create a distinct scientific community by establishing stronger bridges between disciplines; (2) Make riparian vegetation more visible and appreciated in society and policies; (3) Improve knowledge regarding biodiversity¿ ecosystem functioning links; (4) Manage spatial scale and context-based issues; (5) Improve knowledge on social dimensions of riparian vegetation; (6) Anticipate responses to emergent issues and future trajectories; (7) Enhance tools to quantify and prioritize ecosystem services; (8) Improve numerical modeling and simulation tools; (9) Calibrate methods and increase data availability for better indicators and monitoring practices and transferability; and (10) Undertake scientific validation of best management practices. These challenges are discussed and critiqued here, to guide future research into riparian vegetation.COST Action CONVERGES, Grant/Award Number: CA16208; Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union; Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, Grant/Award Number: 2020/03356/CEECIND;PTDC/ASP-SIL/28593/2017;UIDB/00239/2020; CSIC: PTIECOBIODIVRodríguez-González, PM.; Abraham, E.; Aguiar, F.; Andreoli, A.; Bale Entiene, L.; Berisha, N.; Bernez, I.... (2022). Bringing the margin to the focus: 10 challenges for riparian vegetation science and management. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Water. 9(5):1-14. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.16041149

What causes economic growth in Portugal: exports or inward FDI?

The purpose of this paper is to analyse possible casual relationships between exports, inward foreign investment and economic growth in Portugal and identify their direction. The paper uses the three stage procedure based on unit root, cointegration and causalty tests applied to annual data from 1977 to 2004

Monitoring tourism flows and destination management: Empirical evidence for Portugal

We propose the use of a tool recently introduced by Gayer (2010), known as the "economic climate tracer", to analyze and monitor the cyclical evolution of tourism source markets to Portugal. Considering the period 1987-2015, we evaluate how tourism to Portugal has been affected by economic cycles. This tool is useful as it clearly illustrates the evolutionary patterns of different markets, and allows us to identify close relationships with economic fluctuations. We found that German tourism plays a leading role, since its movements are followed with delays by tourism flows from other countries, and exhibits higher resilience to shocks. Also, domestic and Spanish tourism have both displayed less irregular behaviors than tourism from other source markets. On the contrary, tourism from the Netherlands and the UK, have displayed irregular patterns, which demonstrates the urgency to diversify tourism source markets to reduce the country's vulnerability to external shocks and economic cycles. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved