Confronting Bolivia's "Lack of Demographic Capacity": Protonatalism in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia, 1950s-1970s

After coming to power in April 1952, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) looked to address Bolivia’s economic problems, in part, through initiatives encouraging population growth. A 1953 report highlighted underpopulation as a cause of Bolivia’s limited economic potential. The solution to Bolivia’s “lack of demographic capacity” was public health measures that would lower morbidity and mortality rates and encourage reproduction to boost the country’s human capital. This article analyzes prevalent pronatalist tendencies in the MNR government, including positive eugenics and criticism of birth control, to demonstrate the centrality of population growth to the MNR’s political and economic agenda. At a time when other Latin American countries began implementing population control measures as a pathway to economic growth and political stability, as recommended by the United States and international organizations, Bolivia diverged from global discourses about overpopulation and embraced pronatalism. While the MNR welcomed some global development ideologies associated with modernization, they rejected population control and reframed population debates towards population growth and demographic reorganization. They married pronatalism with a modernizing agenda and revolutionary nationalism, demonstrating that MNR policies were fundamentally conservative on matters of reproduction and gender roles.After coming to power in April 1952, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) looked to address Bolivia’s economic problems, in part, through initiatives encouraging population growth. A 1953 report highlighted underpopulation as a cause of Bolivia’s limited economic potential. The solution to Bolivia’s “lack of demographic capacity” was public health measures that would lower morbidity and mortality rates and encourage reproduction to boost the country’s human capital. This article analyzes prevalent pronatalist tendencies in the MNR government, including positive eugenics and criticism of birth control, to demonstrate the centrality of population growth to the MNR’s political and economic agenda. At a time when other Latin American countries began implementing population control measures as a pathway to economic growth and political stability, as recommended by the United States and international organizations, Bolivia diverged from global discourses about overpopulation and embraced pronatalism. While the MNR welcomed some global development ideologies associated with modernization, they rejected population control and reframed population debates towards population growth and demographic reorganization. They married pronatalism with a modernizing agenda and revolutionary nationalism, demonstrating that MNR policies were fundamentally conservative on matters of reproduction and gender roles.Después de llegar al poder en abril de 1952, el Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) buscó abordar los problemas económicos de Bolivia, en parte, a través de iniciativas que alentaban el crecimiento demográfico. Un informe de 1953 señaló que la subpoblación era una causa particular del limitado potencial económico de Bolivia. La solución a la “falta de capacidad demográfica” de Bolivia eran medidas de salud pública que reducirían las tasas de morbilidad y mortalidad y alentarían la reproducción para impulsar el capital humano del país. En este artículo se analizan las tendencias pronatalistas prevalentes en el gobierno del MNR, incluyendo eugenesia positiva y críticas al control de la natalidad, para demostrar la centralidad del crecimiento demográfico en la agenda política y económica del MNR. En un momento en que otros países latinoamericanos comenzaron a implementar medidas de control de la población como un camino hacia el crecimiento económico y la estabilidad política, como recomendaron los Estados Unidos y las organizaciones internacionales, Bolivia se desvió de los discursos mundiales sobre la sobrepoblación y abrazó el pronatalismo. Si bien el MNR adoptó algunas ideologías de desarrollo global asociadas con la modernización, rechazó el control de la población y refrenaba los debates hacia el crecimiento demográfico y la reorganización demográfica. Se casaron el pronatalismo con una agenda modernizadora y nacionalismo revolucionario, demostrando que las políticas del MNR eran fundamentalmente conservadoras en materia de reproducción y roles de género

Navigation system for the remote management of unmanned aircraft

In this work will be discussed the problematic of the UAV navigation for the remote management in vision of a BLOS capability showing the research experience developed in collaboration with Alenia Aermacchi, focusing on the solution adopted for increasing the navigation automations and the system interoperability. The first section presents an overview of such problems and the guideline followed to provide a relevant solution. The second section exhibits the effective implementation of the studied cases on the Alenia Aermacchi Sky-Y UAV focusing on the navigation issues. During the navigation functions development a large use of simulators occurred: one Matlab® model and one Simulink® simulator have been developed for this purpose, then the proper Alenia Aermacchi Sky-Y flight simulator has been used before the RIG tests. In the last part of this work some results of such simulations are presented by showing some significant cases of navigation test done with the different tools mentioned above

A decomposition method for finding optimal container stowage plans

In transportation of goods in large container ships, shipping industries need to minimize the time spent at ports to load/unload containers. An optimal stowage of containers on board minimizes unnecessary unloading/reloading movements, while satisfying many operational constraints. We address the basic container stowage planning problem (CSPP). Different heuristics and formulations have been proposed for the CSPP, but finding an optimal stowage plan remains an open problem even for small-sized instances. We introduce a novel formulation that decomposes CSPPs into two sets of decision variables: the first defining how single container stacks evolve over time and the second modeling port-dependent constraints. Its linear relaxation is solved through stabilized column generation and with different heuristic and exact pricing algorithms. The lower bound achieved is then used to find an optimal stowage plan by solving a mixed-integer programming model. The proposed solution method outperforms the methods from the literature and can solve to optimality instances with up to 10 ports and 5,000 containers in a few minutes of computing time

The impact of student and peer behaviour on EFL teachers' motivation and job satisfaction in a Saudi Arabian context

This article investigates the effect that students and peers, their behaviours, and the way classes are practically and physically taught affect teachers’ motivation and job satisfaction in a Saudi Arabian context. A lack of trained teachers, unawareness of the cultural differences between their home country and that of Saudi Arabia, and the lack of training and induction in their working life, means it may be difficult to integrate into the workplace and, indeed, society. This has a knock on effect on their personal and professional lives, and added to the somewhat perplexing attitudes of some students and peer teachers, who for reasons including non-compliance, unwillingness and demotivation among students, as well as peer teachers who were perceived as poor, untrained and uncooperative, can make time at work within the Kingdom difficult, unrewarding and lonely. This results in many teachers feeling unappreciated, demotivated and demoralised, and they have little satisfaction in the job they are doing

Integrated Berth Allocation and Quay Crane Assignment Problem: Set partitioning models and computational results

Most of the operational problems in container terminals are strongly interconnected. In this paper, we study the integrated Berth Allocation and Quay Crane Assignment Problem in seaport container terminals. We will extend the current state-of-the-art by proposing novel set partitioning models. To improve the performance of the set partitioning formulations, a number of variable reduction techniques are proposed. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of different discretization schemes and the impact of using a time-variant/invariant quay crane allocation policy. Computational experiments show that the proposed models significantly improve the benchmark solutions of the current state-of-art optimal approaches