Nature conservation and urban development control in the portuguese planning system: a new impetus against old praxis?

Natura 2000 areas bring a new incentive to assess the performance of land-use planning in protecting environmental values from the impacts of development pressures. In the last decades, urban growth and consequent environmental impacts on natural areas have been a major concern for the Portuguese land-use planning system. Sprawl around sensitive areas has been revealed to be a persistent phenomenon in spite of the increasing challenges underlying land-use plans. This article critically analyses the content of three main documents recently adopted by the Portuguese government – the ‘National Strategy for Sustainable Development’, the ‘National Policy Programme for Spatial Planning’ and the ‘Sector Plan for Natura 2000’ – seeking prospects to innovate future plans at lower levels in order to prevent additional pressures on natural areas. First, the article reviews the recent theoretical debate on planning for the protection of natural areas. Results evidenced by recent EU evaluation reports are used to propose a set of guidelines to evaluate planning guidance at national level. Second, it critically analyses the three planning documents, bearing in mind the main features of the planning system and the proposed guidelines. The article is concluded with a discussion of their potential, exploring whether they bring a new impetus to the role of land-use planning against an outdated and persistent praxis, or whether, on the contrary, further efforts to strengthen planning guidance remain to be formulated. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Employers Steal Billions from Workers' Paychecks Each Year

This paper finds that employers steal billions of dollars from American workers' paychecks each year, causing harm for working families, taxpayers, and the U.S. economy.While wage theft is difficult to measure and can occur in many forms, this report assesses one straightforward, identifiable type of wage theft: workers being paid less than the minimum wage. Using Current Population Survey data, the authors analyze minimum wage violations in the 10 largest U.S. states, finding that nearly one fifth of low-wage workers in these states are being cheated by their employers

Price volatility in ethanol markets

Our paper looks at how price volatility in the Brazilian ethanol industry changes over time and across markets by using a new methodological approach suggested by Seo (2007). The main advantage of Seo’s proposal over previously existing methods is that it allows to jointly estimate the cointegration relationship between the price series investigated and the multivariate GARCH process. Our results suggest that crude oil prices not only influence ethanol price levels, but also their volatility. Increased volatility in crude oil markets results in increased volatility in ethanol markets. Ethanol prices, on the other hand, influence sugar price levels and an increase in their volatility levels also impacts, though less strongly, on sugar markets.volatility, ethanol, GARCH, cointegration, Demand and Price Analysis, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Risk and Uncertainty, Q11, C32,

Group actions on labeled graphs and their C*-algebras

We introduce the notion of the action of a group on a labeled graph and the quotient object, also a labeled graph. We define a skew product labeled graph and use it to prove a version of the Gross-Tucker theorem for labeled graphs. We then apply these results to the $C^*$-algebra associated to a labeled graph and provide some applications in nonabelian duality.Comment: 18 pages, updated versio

A continuum of solutions for the SU(3) Toda System exhibiting partial blow-up

In this paper we consider the so-called Toda System in planar domains under Dirichlet boundary condition. We show the existence of continua of solutions for which one component is blowing up at a certain number of points. The proofs use singular perturbation methods