Avaliação sistêmica do setor industrial brasileiro: 1995-2009

Resumo O presente artigo busca avaliar o setor industrial sob uma ótica distinta da que tem sido utilizada quando se trata de industrialização/desindustrialização. O objetivo é analisar o caráter sistêmico do setor industrial a partir do método de insumo-produto, por meio de indicadores de intensidade direta e intensidade direta mais indireta da indústria. Por esta medida, é possível deixar mais clara a contribuição do artigo, ou seja, fornecer uma medida de integração produtiva do setor industrial com os demais setores, de modo a verificar se a indústria tem ganhado importância relativa como setor articulador das atividades produtivas

Primordialists and Constructionists: a typology of theories of religion

This article adopts categories from nationalism theory to classify theories of religion. Primordialist explanations are grounded in evolutionary psychology and emphasize the innate human demand for religion. Primordialists predict that religion does not decline in the modern era but will endure in perpetuity. Constructionist theories argue that religious demand is a human construct. Modernity initially energizes religion, but subsequently undermines it. Unpacking these ideal types is necessary in order to describe actual theorists of religion. Three distinctions within primordialism and constructionism are relevant. Namely those distinguishing: a) materialist from symbolist forms of constructionism; b) theories of origins from those pertaining to the reproduction of religion; and c) within reproduction, between theories of religious persistence and secularization. This typology helps to make sense of theories of religion by classifying them on the basis of their causal mechanisms, chronology and effects. In so doing, it opens up new sightlines for theory and research

Epidemic centrality - is there an underestimated epidemic impact of network peripheral nodes?

In the study of disease spreading on empirical complex networks in SIR model, initially infected nodes can be ranked according to some measure of their epidemic impact. The highest ranked nodes, also referred to as "superspreaders", are associated to dominant epidemic risks and therefore deserve special attention. In simulations on studied empirical complex networks, it is shown that the ranking depends on the dynamical regime of the disease spreading. A possible mechanism leading to this dependence is illustrated in an analytically tractable example. In systems where the allocation of resources to counter disease spreading to individual nodes is based on their ranking, the dynamical regime of disease spreading is frequently not known before the outbreak of the disease. Therefore, we introduce a quantity called epidemic centrality as an average over all relevant regimes of disease spreading as a basis of the ranking. A recently introduced concept of phase diagram of epidemic spreading is used as a framework in which several types of averaging are studied. The epidemic centrality is compared to structural properties of nodes such as node degree, k-cores and betweenness. There is a growing trend of epidemic centrality with degree and k-cores values, but the variation of epidemic centrality is much smaller than the variation of degree or k-cores value. It is found that the epidemic centrality of the structurally peripheral nodes is of the same order of magnitude as the epidemic centrality of the structurally central nodes. The implications of these findings for the distributions of resources to counter disease spreading are discussed

Sustainable agriculture and plant diseases: an epidemiological perspective

The potential for modern biology to identify new sources for genetical, chemical and biological control of plant disease is remarkably high. Successful implementation of these methods within globally and locally changing agricultural environments demands new approaches to durable control. This, in turn, requires fusion of population genetics and epidemiology at a range of scales from the field to the landscape and even to continental deployment of control measures. It also requires an understanding of economic and social constraints that influence the deployment of control. Here I propose an epidemiological framework to model invasion, persistence and variability of epidemics that encompasses a wide range of scales and topologies through which disease spreads. By considering how to map control methods onto epidemiological parameters and variables, some new approaches towards optimizing the efficiency of control at the landscape scale are introduced. Epidemiological strategies to minimize the risks of failure of chemical and genetical control are presented and some consequences of heterogeneous selection pressures in time and space on the persistence and evolutionary changes of the pathogen population are discussed. Finally, some approaches towards embedding epidemiological models for the deployment of control in an economically plausible framework are presented

Foreign Direct Investment

Whether foreign direct investment will lead to deindustrialisation at home depends on the investing country's capability to restructure itself on the intra-firm, intra-industry, and intersectoral levels. This paper divides FDI into defensive and expansionary types and argues that defensive FDI is an indication of deteriorating comparative advantage at home. The industry in which defensive FDI prevails lacks the capacity for restructuring. Data from Taiwan show that domestic production declines in an industry when defensive FDI dominates expansionary FDI in that industry.

Conflict, growth, distribution, and employment: a long-run Kaleckian model

This paper presents a Kaleckian growth model in which (i) the rate of capacity utilization, the profit share, and the rate of employment are adjusted in the medium run, and (ii) the normal rate of capacity utilization and the expected rate of capital accumulation are adjusted in the long run. The long-run equilibrium is a continuum of equilibria and is characterized by hysteresis in that the long-run position of the economy depends on where it starts. An increase in the bargaining power of workers lowers the rate of unemployment in both the medium-run and the long-run equilibrium