The Economic Consequences of the Covid-19 First Wave and the New International Scenarios. An Historical Dimension

The Covid-19 crisis is urging scholars to ponder the perspectives of the globalization process which started at the end of the XXth Century. The pandemic is creating a sense of insecurity and uncertainty which has few precedents in the current age, pervading wider and wider sectors of the population. Moving from the analysis of the first wave of the pandemic (March 2020), this essay proposes a model of analysis of the effects of the pandemic by framing the economic emergency produced by it from a historical and theoretical perspective. The paper will also try to indicate the traits and the model of a new economic paradigm: the birth of a new globalization that would surely feature competitions between its biggest geoeconomics areas, but that would also offer the opportunity to promote novel perspectives for development and to achieve a brand-new convergence between the private and public interest

The Economic Consequences of the Covid-19 First Wave and the New International Scenarios. An Historical Dimension

The Covid-19 crisis is urging scholars to ponder the perspectives of the globalization process which started at the end of the XXth Century. The pandemic is creating a sense of insecurity and uncertainty which has few precedents in the current age, pervading wider and wider sectors of the population. Moving from the analysis of the first wave of the pandemic (March 2020), this essay proposes a model of analysis of the effects of the pandemic by framing the economic emergency produced by it from a historical and theoretical perspective. The paper will also try to indicate the traits and the model of a new economic paradigm: the birth of a new globalization that would surely feature competitions between its biggest geoeconomics areas, but that would also offer the opportunity to promote novel perspectives for development and to achieve a brand-new convergence between the private and public interest

The Economic Consequences of the COVID-19 First Wave and the New International Scenarios: An Historical Dimension

The COVID-19 crisis is urging scholars to ponder the perspectives of the globalization process which started at the end of the XX Century, while the pandemic is increasing a sense of insecurity and uncertainty which has few precedents in the current age, pervading wider and wider sectors of the population. This paper focuses on analyzing the effects of the first wave of the pandemic (March 2020) using a historical-economic methodology based on a diachronic and comparative model. The effects of the crisis produced by the spread of Coronavirus are thus part of a wider analysis, in which the comparison of the behaviours of the different geoeconomic areas is carried out within the evolution of the long-term business cycles, considering both development and crisis phases. Finally, the article also proposes some hypotheses on the possible models of organization that the current globalization may encounter in the coming years

Changes in non-invasive wave intensity parameters with variations of Savitzky-Golay filter settings

Ultrasound-measured waveforms, such as vessel diameter and blood flow velocity, are used to perform analysis of waves in the cardiovascular system. Wave intensity analysis is one of the tools used for this purpose. The waveforms are commonly filtered to eliminate high-frequency noise, however the filter settings affect the features of these signals and especially of their time derivatives, upon which wave intensity analysis is based. This study aims to investigate the alterations of wave intensity parameters with varying Savitzky-Golay filter settings, one of the most common smoothing algorithms used in this context. A broad spectrum of variations was observed in all the wave intensity variables. It is therefore important to always specify the filter settings applied to the signals in a wave intensity study, so that appropriate comparisons can be mad

Non-invasive wave intensity analysis in common carotid artery of healthy humans

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe study of arterial wave propagation is essential to understand the physiopathology of the cardiovascular system, as waves carry clinically relevant information. Impedance analysis was used for such type of studies, where results were presented in the frequency domain, but it was difficult to relate specific events to time points within the cardiac cycle. Therefore, a mathematical tool called wave intensity analysis was developed, initially using measurements of pressure and velocity (PU approach). However, the need to acquire such measurements in a non-invasive, direct and simultaneous fashion led to the development of the DU approach, a type of wave intensity analysis carried out using vessel diameter and flow velocity waveforms, thus giving up the pressure measurement. It is the only available technique, at present, able to extract wave intensity information without relying on distally recorded pressure measurements and on non-simultaneous recordings. Due to its non-invasive nature for collecting the required measurements, this technique has a potential use in clinical and research settings to investigate physiological changes under rapid perturbations, such as the ones introduced by exercise. In this thesis, the DU approach is performed by only using an ultrasound device and to extract information about cardio-arterial interaction in the human common carotid artery. In the first experimental chapter of this thesis, a reproducibility study of common carotid DU-derived wave intensity parameters was conducted on a healthy young cohort, both at rest and during exercise (semi-recumbent cycling). Carotid diameter and blood flow velocity features, as well as wave intensity parameters such as forward compression, backward compression and forward expansion wave peaks and energies, were overall fairly reproducible. In particular, diameter variables exhibited higher reproducibility and lower dispersion than corresponding velocity variables, whereas wave intensity energy variables exhibited higher reproducibility and lower dispersion than corresponding peaks. Local wave speed, calculated via lnDU-loop, a technique based only on local measurements of diameter and velocity and often associated with the DU approach, was also reproducible. It is possible to conclude that the DU-derived wave intensity analysis is reliable both at rest and during exercise. In a subsequent study, DU-derived wave intensity analysis was performed on a young trained cohort to investigate the contribution of cardiac and peripheral vascular alterations to common carotid wave intensity parameters, under rapid physiological perturbations, such as semi-recumbent cycling at incremental workrates, and subsequent recovery. Judging by the increase in local wave speed, the common carotid artery stiffened substantially as workrate increased whilst peak and energy of the forward and backward compression waves also increased, due to enhanced ventricular contractility, which was associated with larger reflections from the cerebral microcirculation and other vascular beds in the head. However, the reflection indices remained unchanged during exercise, highlighting that the increased magnitude of reflections is mainly due to the enhanced contractility, rather than changes in vascular resistance, at least at the carotid artery in young healthy individuals. The forward expansion wave increased during exercise, as the left ventricle actively decelerated blood flow in late systole, potentially improving filling time during diastole. In the early recovery, the magnitude of all waves returned to baseline value. Finally, the X wave, attributed to the reflection of the backward compression wave, had a tendency to increase during exercise and to return to baseline value in early recovery. A further development of wave intensity analysis came with the reservoir-wave approach, able to separate, from the pressure and velocity waveforms, the component solely due to the reservoir volume, for the correct evaluation of backward- and forward-travelling waves. A number of issues, however, still remains, involving specifically the lack of consensus over the fitting technique and over the value of the asymptotic pressure value (P ∞),used for the determination of the reservoir waveform. Therefore, to give a contribution to the debate involving the more correct model for the pressure and velocity reservoir-wave approach, a study aimed to investigate various common carotid hemodynamic and wave intensity parameters, using different fitting techniques and values of P ∞ currently available in literature, was performed and described in the last chapter of this thesis. The study demonstrated that different fitting method and values of P ∞ could bring significant variations in values and trends of hemodynamic and wave intensity parameters. However, despite the changes in the shape of the reservoir pressure waveform, its peak and integral with respect to time tended to remain constant. This is an important feature, because both reservoir peak pressure and its integral have been used in clinical settings for the calculation of diagnostic indicators. The reservoir and excess velocity peaks, instead, changed more significantly. This outcome, together with the concomitant substantial change in excess pressure peak and integral, may greatly affect wave intensity parameters. Wave intensity parameters were, in fact, significantly more sensitive to fitting techniques and values of P ∞ than pressure parameters. Finally, the wave speed did not substantially change, leading to the conclusion that the calculation of local vessel distensibility and/or compliance, when calculated from the excess components of the waveforms, seemed insensitive to fitting techniques and values of P

2-D kinematic restoration of the western Tauern Window using thermochronological constraints

The Tauern Window (TW) in the European Alps has a high tectonic complexity. It is a key area to understand a number of important orogenic processes. During the Cretaceous, subduction and accretion of the Penninic realm beneath the northern margin of Adria (Austroalpine) began, which led to collision between Europe (Subpenninic) and the Adria margin, from Eocene to early Oligocene. This resulted in the Penninic and Subpenninic nappe stack in the southward-dipping orogenic wedge. After the “Tauernkristallisation”-event, indentation of the Dolomites Indenter (Eastern Southern Alps) is heralded in the last deformation stage, which bent the primarily W-E striking, dextral Periadriatic Fault System (PFS) separating the Eastern from the Southern Alps, and finally caused this fault system to be sinistrally offset by the NNE-SSW-striking Giudicarie fault system in the Miocene. This last deformation stage resulted in strong N-S shortening (ca. 70 km) of the western TW in front of the Dolomites indenter as well as W-E extension, which formed the Katschberg and Brenner Normal Faults (eastern and western border of the TW), and to lateral extrusion towards the east involving major strike-slip faults (e.g., Inntal Fault, PFS, SEMP). It is widely assumed that all these processes happened synkinematically exhuming the western TW up to ca. 20 km (derived from the throw of the Brenner Normal Fault and by the metamorphic conditions reached). However, the quantitative deformation history of the western TW, and in particular its Subpenninic core (Venediger Duplex, VD), has never been investigated in detail. Our goal is therefore to quantify the deformation and kinematics accommodated by the VD in a first step by restoring the Brenner Base Tunnel cross-section using the software MOVE (Ptx). Since standard balancing of this structure is not possible due to penetrative deformation, we integrate Zircon Fission Track data (partial annealing zone of 240 – 180°C and closure temperature ca. 210°C) as marker for the transition from brittle to viscous conditions in the felsic rocks of the VD: Any folding in the VD must be older than the ZFT age of the corresponding unit. For this reason, we first displaced the whole duplex structure down along the Sub-Tauern Ramp below the Zircon Fission Track annealing zone. We then unfolded the gneiss cores individually until a symmetrical duplex structure was modeled, which reached 20 km depth. Since the modeling of vertical exhumation, N-S shortening and displacement along the Sub-Tauern Ramp strongly depends on the geothermal gradient (GG), we tested different GG. Resulting exhumation rates related to a GG of 30°C/km and 50°/km fit well with former studies, which means that 30-50°C/km is a reasonable range for the GG during the last deformation stage