Implicações Estratégicas do Crescimento Chinês na Região Ásia-Pacífico

A República Popular da China (RPC), herdeira e actual sucessora da China Imperial, é, desde há muitos séculos, uma potência regional, cuja presença geopolítica tem oscilado entre a tentativa de ascensão perante a periferia e a retracção diplomática para consolidação das fronteiras, com um ritmo de crescimento económico potenciador das características geoestratégicas, que influencia a sua atitude perante a configuração internacional, bem delineada pela sua actual estratégia de afirmação como actor de relevância na cena regional e com impacte mundial. Localizada no arco que circunda o centro do poder mundial, consolidadas que sejam as potencialidades geoestratégicas e associadas à determinação do poder político, a RPC provoca expectativa face à influência que as suas acções futuras podem ter nas relações regionais pela possibilidade de concretizar o poder potencial, para manter a integridade territorial, sendo uma obrigação histórica e contributo para o domínio dos recursos necessários à continuação do desenvolvimento, que crê ser um direito. A sua concepção de Poder Nacional Abrangente, assente no conceito de Ascensão Pacífica que privilegia as acções não ofensivas, deverá materializar a conduta de obtenção de recursos a que a sua economia obriga e que não pode comprometer com relações conflituais na ordem regional. Estas podem provocar a intervenção dos vários actores regionais, em especial dos Estados Unidos da América, poder com o qual a RPC não pode entrar em conflito. A RPC é uma potência regional renascida e em ascensão, na direcção de afirmação mundial, influenciadora das relações de poder na região Ásia-Pacífico, na medida em que o seu crescimento não seja diminuído, fruto de eventuais tentativas de hegemonia que, mercê das suas vulnerabilidades, poderão, eventualmente, reavivar o ciclo de declínio experimentado pela época dinástica. Abstract: Peoples Republic of China (PRC), heir to Imperial China, has been, for many centuries, a regional power, with a geopolitical orientation balancing between the attempt to ascend towards a territorial periphery and the diplomatic retraction in order to consolidate its geographic borders, with an economic growth that emphasizes its geostrategic characteristics, and that influences its attitude before the international scenery, well delineated by its current strategy of strengthening its relevance as a major player in the regional scene and with global impact. Located in the arc surrounding the theoretic centre of world power, once its geostrategic potentialities associated with its determined politics are consolidated, PRC causes expectation due to the influence that its future actions may have in regional relations with the possibility to materialize its potential power, to maintain territorial integrity, being this a historical duty and a contribution to dominate needed resources to keep up with its development, which it believes to be a natural right. Its conception of Enlarged National Power, based on the conscience of Peaceful Ascension which privileges non-offensive actions, should materialize the approach to obtain resources demanded by the economy, which cannot be compromised by any conflicts in the regional order. These may eventually lead to the intervention of other regional players, mainly the United States of America, power who the PRC cannot compete with. The PRC is a resurgent regional power, on the way to affirm itself worldwide, influencing the relations of power in the Asia-Pacific region, provided that its growth does not shrink with hegemonic attempts that, affected by its vulnerabilities, may bring back to life the declining cycle experienced in the dynastic age

Growth and Firm Dynamics with Horizontal and Vertical R&D

This paper develops a tournament model of horizontal and vertical R&D under a lab-equipment specification. A key feature is that the overall growth rate is endogenous, as the splitting of the growth rate between the intensive and the extensive margin is itself endogenous. This setup gives rise to strong inter-R&D composition effects, while making economic growth and firm dynamics closely related, both along the balanced-growth path and transition. The model hence offers a (qualitative) explanation for the negative or insignificant empirical correlation between aggregate R&D intensity and both firm size and economic growth, a well-known puzzle in the growth literature.endogenous growth, vertical and horizontal R&D, firm dynamics, transitional dynamics

A Model of Quality Ladders with Horizontal Entry

We develop a multi-sector model of R&D-driven endogenous growth that merges the expanding-variety with the quality-ladders mechanism. The mechanism of expanding variety provides the flow of new firms (new product lines), whilst the mechanism of quality ladders provides the accumulation of non-physical capital (technological knowledge). The aim is to explore the view that, from the perspective of the households, wealth can be accumulated either by creating new firms or by accumulating capital, in a setting with no population growth. Differently from the standard expanding-variety literature, we allow for entry as well as exit of product lines from the market, view the creation of new product lines as a product development activity without positive spillovers, and postulate an horizontal entry mechanism that takes explicitly into account dynamic second-order effects. We perform a detailed comparative steady-state analysis and characterise qualitatively the local dynamics properties in a neighbourhood of the interior balanced-growth equilibrium. The model produces specific results with respect to the impact of changes in the entry-cost parameters and the fiscal-policy variables both in the aggregate growth rate and in the market structure and industry dynamics in steady state. We also conclude that the transitional dynamics is characterised by a catching-up effect, with an empirically reasonable speed of convergence under standard calibration.endogenous growth, firm dynamics, transitional dynamics

Efeitos da atividade física não formal na capacidade funcional e no índice de massa corporal, da população idosa

Esta investigação tem como objetivo determinar qual a capacidade funcional e a composição corporal (IMC) de idosos sedentários e com prática de atividade física formal e não formal. Amostra composta por 90 idosos voluntários de ambos sexos, aparentemente saudáveis, com idades compreendidas entre 65 e 93 anos, com uma idade média de 75 ± 8 anos. O estudo baseou-se na aplicação da bateria de Rikli & Jones (1999) para avaliar a capacidade funcional dos idosos e o IMC foi avaliado através das medidas antropométricas. Os dados obtidos foram tratados através da análise de variância (SCHEFFÉ). Nos indivíduos que praticam atividade física formal, os resultados obtidos foram significativamente (p ≤ 0,05) melhores em todas as provas, em comparação com os indivíduos sedentários. Nos Indivíduos que praticam atividade física não formal, os resultados obtidos foram significativamente (p≤ 0,05) melhores em quatro provas da bateria. Os resultados indicam que a prática de sessões de exercício supervisionado e com objetivos quanto à intensidade e tipo de exercício, contribui para a melhoria da capacidade funcional e do IMC, da população idosa

Literature review on specific types of risk faced by firms

UIDB/00667/2020This contribution presents a literature review focused on four types of risk that firms may face during their operation, namely, operational risk, supply chain risk, strategic risk, and enterprise risk. The applied methodology consisted of an online search of databases regarding scientific documents in English, published in different journals; the search was based on several keywords/strings (themes) that had to be included just as in the article title. The number of surveyed papers by theme showed a variation from 40 to 600 and the number of citations of those papers showed a wider variation from 2 to 918. Selected articles from the four themes were analyzed and the first five with more citations were read in full to make a synopsis of each article. However, to reduce the length of the current paper, only two synopses of each theme were explicitly included here. Overall, the findings show that firm’s risks are an important subject for academic researchers, managers and stakeholders, for risky situations can occur and sometimes lead to very heavy losses. A few research gaps were identified, either the lack of quantitative models for the assessment and management of enterprises’ risks, or insufficient practical support/expertise, namely through case studies and/or well-designed surveys. The review ends with the limitations and contributions of the study.publishersversionpublishe

Equilibrium price dynamics in an overlapping-generations exchange economy

We present a continuous time overlapping generations model for an endowment Arrow-Debreu economy with an age-structured popu¬lation. For an economy with a balanced growth path, we prove that Arrow-Debreu equilibrium prices exist, and their dynamic properties are age-dependent. Our model allows for an explicit dependence of prices on critical age-specific endowment parameters. We show that, if endowments are distributed earlier than some critical age, then spec¬ulative bubbles for prices do exist

A workflow description language to orchestrate multi-lingual resources

Texts aligned alongside their translation, or Parallel Corpora, are a very widely used resource in Computational Linguistics. Processing these resources, however, is a very intensive, time consuming task, which makes it a suitable case study for High Performance Computing (HPC). HPC underwent several recent changes, with the evolution of Heterogeneous Platforms, where multiple devices with different architectures are able to share workload to increase performance. Several frameworks/toolkits have been under development, in various fields, to aid the programmer in extracting more performance from these platforms. Either by dynamically scheduling the workload across the available resources or by exploring the opportunities for parallelism. However, there is no toolkit targeted at Computational Linguistics, more specifically, Parallel Corpora processing. Parallel Corpora processing can be a very time consuming task, and the field could definitely use a toolkit which aids the programmer in achieving not only better performance, but also a convenient and expressive way of specifying tasks and their dependencies.(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

CBmeter- a new medical device for early screening of metabolic diseases

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a highly prevalent disease worldwide which is asymptomatic in about 44% of patients being critical to search for new ways of early diagnosis. Recent studies have demonstrated that the etiology of this disease may be associated with alterations in the function of the carotid body (CB), a chemosensor organ located within the bifurcation of the carotid artery. In animal models of metabolic syndrome it was observed that the CBs are overactivated, underlying diseases such as obesity, hypertension and T2DM. This discovery provided a new paradigm in the neuroendocrinology field, suggesting that diagnostic function of the CBs has predictive value for the development of metabolic diseases. Despite this fact, it is not common in clinical practice to look at the CBs as organs associated with endocrine dysfunction and we believe this is probably due to the nonexistence of a user-friendly, portable medical device that diagnosis the function of the CBs.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An open-source UFBGA µ-board for wearable devices

This paper presents the development of an open-source, low-sized, BGA microcontroller breakout board, that can be used for the development of wearable and cyber-physical prototypes. The board is based on the low power, 8-bit, ATtiny20-CCU Microchip AVR microcontroller. The ATtiny20-CCU can be programmed without bootloader, using the Atmel Tiny Programming Interface (TPI), instead of In-System Programming (ISP). The C code used to program the microcontroller can be written and compiled using the Microchip Studio freeware platform. The ATtiny20-CCU Ultra Fine-pitch Ball Grid Array (UFBGA) packaging technology allows the shrinkage of the conceived Electroless Nickel-Immersion Gold (ENIG) Printed Circuit Board (PCB) to a size of only 15.5 × 13 mm. Its low cost also makes it a viable option for developing many educational electronic projects, especially for Instrumentation and Assistive Technology. The contribution of this paper is mainly the hardware prototype design, the PCB manufacturing, building and test of a very low-sized open source µ-breakout PCB board, for wearable Instrumentation applications, towards the emergent Society/Industry 5.0.publishersversionpublishe

Efeitos da atividade física não formal na capacidade funcional o no índice de massa corporal da população idosa

The aim of the study was to verify the functional capacity and the physical composition (BMI) of old sedentary population and with formal and non-formal physical practice. Sample composed by 90 volunteers of both sexes, apparently healthy, aged between 65 and 93 years, with an average of 75 ± 8 years.The study was based on the application of the Rikli and Jones battery (1999) to value the functional capacity of the old population, and the BMI was valued through anthropometric measurements. The obtained data were treated through the analysis of variance (SCHEFFÉ). The individuals practicing formal physical activity obtained results significantly (p = 0,05) better in all the tests, comparatively to sedentary individuals. The practitioners of non-formal physical activity obtained results significantly (p=0,05) better in four tests of battery, comparatively to the sedentary.The results indicate that the practice of sessions of supervised exercise and with objectives as for the intensity and type of exercise, contributes to the improvement of the functional capacity and BMI of the old population.Esta investigação tem como objetivo determinar qual a capacidade funcional e a composição corporal (IMC) de idosos sedentários e com prática de atividade física formal e não formal. Amostra composta por 90 idosos voluntários de ambos sexos, aparentemente saudáveis, com idades compreendidas entre 65 e 93 anos, com uma idade média de 75 ± 8 anos.O estudo baseou-se na aplicação da bateria de Rikli & Jones (1999) para avaliar a capacidade funcional dos idosos e o IMC foi avaliado através das medidas antropométricas. Os dados obtidos foram tratados através da análise de variância (SCHEFFÉ). Nos indivíduos que praticam atividade física formal, os resultados obtidos foram significativamente (p = 0,05) melhores em todas as provas, em comparação com os indivíduos sedentários. Nos Indivíduos que praticam atividade física não formal, os resultados obtidos foram significativamente (p= 0,05) melhores em quatro provas da bateria. Os resultados indicam que a prática de sessões de exercício supervisionado e com objetivos quanto à intensidade e tipo de exercício, contribui para a melhoria da capacidade funcional e do IMC, da população idosa.Esta investigación tiene como objetivo determinar que la capacidad funcional y la composición corporal (IMC) de los ancianos sedentarios y con práctica de actividad física formal y no formal. Muestra de 90 voluntarios de ambos sexos, aparentemente sanos, de edades comprendidas entre 65 y 93 años, con una edad media de 75 ± 8 años.El estudio se basó en la aplicación de la batería de Rikli y Jones (1999) para evaluar la capacidad funcional de los ancianos, y el IMC se evaluó mediante mediciones antropométricas. Los datos obtenidos fueron tratados mediante análisis de varianza (SCHEFFÉ). Individuos que practican actividad física formal los resultados obtenidos fueron significativamente (p = 0,05) mejores en todas las pruebas, en comparación con los individuos sedentarios. Los Individuos que practican actividad física no formal los resultados obtenidos fueron significativamente (p = 0,05) mejores en cuatro pruebas de la batería. Los resultados indican que la práctica de las sesiones de ejercicio supervisado y objetivos en relación con la intensidad y el tipo de ejercicio ayuda a mejorar la capacidad funcional y el IMC en la población anciana