Labour market policies and youth unemployment: a comparative evaluation between Italy and Austria

Europe’s attention to youth policies has become more and more marked over time and this has been precisely in order to respond to the needs created by the unemployment and NEET phenomenon, which have become major issues at European level. This represents a challenge for the EU labour market, made even more urgent by socio-economic changes, the current political crisis, and the health emergency linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, cross-regional differences are remarkably high. Available evidence highlights the gap in youth labour market integration between the welfare regimes of Central-Northern Europe and those of the Mediterranean area. In this perspective, this PhD thesis examines the main theoretical constructs of youth policies by performing an extensive literature review to better understand the differences in regional contexts and the factors that hinder or promote their effectiveness. The traditional Italian family-based and sub-protective welfare system, when it comes to these phenomena, represents a more extreme case of general transformations that are traversing Europe, as Italy is one of the European countries with the highest rates of NEET s and unemployed young people. On the other hand, the corporatist Austrian welfare state is based on a strong role of social partners and is characterized by a long tradition of incremental reforms and continuity in social policies, which tend to favour the entry of young people into the labour market through an integrated school-to-work transition. In this regard, Austria and Italy were selected as case studies, through a multi-level and multi-method comparative analysis that aims to evaluate different aspects of youth policies in their complexity. An exploratory study, analyzing the data collected through a survey to investigate the implementation of labour market policies in the territorial contexts considered, permitted the definition of the evaluative dimensions on which the subsequent qualitative research focused. In particular, in-depth interviews with key informants, such as policymakers and experts at national, regional, and local level in the Austrian and Italian contexts, have allowed to compare the different perceptions and meanings assigned by the stakeholders to the policies considered and to evaluate, through the investigation of governance mechanisms, how actors interact at various levels and whether they intervene in the negotiation of policy choices. The outcome of empirical research also provide insight into the specific ALMP s implemented by the EU, highlighting the limits inherent in the activation of standardized measures to combat complex and highly diversified phenomena such as youth unemployment and in particular NEET s. The different views that emerged underline the complexity both the implementation of youth policies and of the system’s multilevel governance

On the problem of the existence for connecting trajectories under the action of gravitational and electromagnetic fields

AbstractWe give sufficient conditions assuring the existence of timelike trajectories connecting two prescribed events in a Lorentzian manifold. They represent the trajectories of a free falling massive particle under the action of a gravitational and electromagnetic fiel

Electrodynamic friction of a charged particle passing a conducting plate

The classical electromagnetic friction of a charged particle moving with prescribed constant velocity parallel to a planar imperfectly conducting surface is reinvestigated. As a concrete example, the Drude model is used to describe the conductor. The transverse electric and transverse magnetic contributions have very different character both in the low velocity (nonrelativistic) and high velocity (ultrarelativistic) regimes. Both numerical and analytical results are given. Most remarkably, the transverse magnetic contribution to the friction has a maximum for $|\mathbf{v}|<c$, and persists in the limit of vanishing resistivity for sufficiently high velocities. We also show how Vavilov-\v{C}erenkov radiation can be treated in the same formalism.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures. This is the extensively revised version accepted by Physical Review Researc

Etoposide-Bevacizumab a new strategy against human melanoma cells expressing stem-like traits

Tumors contain a sub-population of self-renewing and expanding cells known as cancer stem cells (CSCs). Putative CSCs were isolated from human melanoma cells of a different aggressiveness, Hs294T and A375 cell lines, grown under hypoxia using “sphere-forming assay”, CD133 surface expression and migration ability. We found that a cell sub-population enriched for P1 sphere-initiating ability and CD133 expression also express larger amount of VEGF-R2. Etoposide does not influence phenotype of this sub-population of melanoma cells, while a combined treatment with Etoposide and Bevacizumab significantly abolished P1 sphere-forming ability, an effect associated with apoptosis of this subset of cells. Hypoxic melanoma cells sorted for VEGF-R2/CD133 positivity also undergo apoptosis when exposed to Etoposide and Bevacizumab. When Etoposide and Bevacizumab-treated hypoxic cells were injected intravenously into immunodeficient mice revealed a reduced capacity to induce lung colonies, which also appear with a longer latency period. Hence, our study indicates that a combined exposure to Etoposide and Bevacizumab targets melanoma cells endowed with stem-like properties and might be considered a novel approach to treat cancer-initiating cells

Mesenchymal to amoeboid transition is associated with stem-like features of melanoma cells

Background: Cellular plasticity confers cancer cells the ability to adapt to microenvironmental changes, a fundamental requirement for tumour progression and metastasis. The epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a transcriptional programme associated with increased cell motility and stemness. Besides EMT, the mesenchymal to amoeboid transition (MAT) has been described during tumour progression but to date, little is known about its transcriptional control and involvement in stemness. The aim of this manuscript is to investigate (i) the transcriptional profile associated with the MAT programme and (ii) to study whether MAT acquisition in melanoma cancer cells correlates with clonogenic potential to promote tumour growth. Results: By using a multidisciplinary approach, we identified four different treatments able to induce MAT in melanoma cells: EphA2 overexpression, Rac1 functional inhibition using its RacN17 dominant negative mutant, stimulation with Ilomastat or treatment with the RhoA activator Calpeptin. First, gene expression profiling identified the transcriptional pathways associated with MAT, independently of the stimulus that induces the MAT programme. Notably, gene sets associated with the repression of mesenchymal traits, decrease in the secretion of extracellular matrix components as well as increase of cellular stemness positively correlate with MAT. Second, the link between MAT and stemness has been investigated in vitro by analysing stemness markers and clonogenic potential of melanoma cells undergoing MAT. Finally, the link between MAT inducing treatments and tumour initiating capability has been validated in vivo. Conclusion: Taken together, our results demonstrate that MAT programme in melanoma is characterised by increased stemness and clonogenic features of cancer cells, thus sustaining tumour progression. Furthermore, these data suggest that stemness is not an exclusive feature of cells undergoing EMT, but more generally is associated with an increase in cellular plasticity of cancer cells