91 research outputs found
Global/Local: reporting on the first meeting of global health educators on the theme of “global/local” education and a preliminary list of global/local program elements
Measuring the Cross-cultural Adaptability of a Graduate Student Team from a Global Immersion Experience
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
The deindustrialisation/tertiarisation hypothesis reconsidered: a subsystem application to the OECD7
The diffusion of outsourcing, both national and international, and
vertical FDIs among manufacturing firms, along with the higher integra-
tion of business services in manufacturing, has recently led to question
the empirical evidence supporting the Deindustrialisation/Tertiarisation
(DT) hypothesis. Rather than a \real" phenomenon, it has been argued,
DT would be an \apparent" one, mainly due to the reorganization of
production across national and sectoral boundaries.
The empirical studies that have dealt with the topic so far have
not been able to effectively rule out such possibility, because of two
main limitations: the sectoral level of the analysis and/or the national
focus. In order to overcome them, the paper carries out an appreciative
investigation of the actual extent of the DT occurred in the OECD
area over the '80s and the '90s by moving from a sector to a subsystem
perspective, thus retaining both direct and indirect relations, and by
referring to a \pseudo-World" of 7 OECD countries, thus taking into
account the \global" dimension of the phenomenon.
The results strongly support the DT hypothesis: although the weight
of business sector services in the manufacturing subsystem increased,
acting as a counterbalancing tendency to the manufacturing decline,
subsystem shares significantly decreased, thus confirming DT as a more
fundamental trend of modern economies
Democracy in trade unions, democracy through trade unions?
Since the Webbs published Industrial Democracy at the end of the nineteenth century, the principle that workers have a legitimate voice in decision-making in the world of work – in some versions through trade unions, in others at least formally through separate representative structures – has become widely accepted in most west European countries. There is now a vast literature on the strengths and weaknesses of such mechanisms, and we review briefly some of the key interpretations of the rise (and fall) of policies and structures for workplace and board-level representation. We also discuss the mainly failed attempts to establish broader processes of economic democracy, which the eclipse of nationally specific mechanisms of class compromise makes again a salient demand. Economic globalization also highlights the need for transnational mechanisms to achieve worker voice (or more radically, control) in the dynamics of capital-labour relations. We therefore examine the role of trade unions in coordinating pressure for a countervailing force at European and global levels, and in the construction of (emergent?) supranational industrial relations. However, many would argue that unions cannot win legitimacy as democratizing force unless manifestly democratic internally. We therefore revisit debates on and dilemmas of democracy within trade unions, and examine recent initiatives to enhance democratization
The crisis sensitivity of European countries and regions: stylized facts and spatial heterogeneity
We investigate the impact of the recent global recession on European countries and regions. We first identify the heterogeneous impact of the global recession on individual European countries and regions. We then discuss three classes of explanations for spatial heterogeneity in the severity of the crisis: (i) the extent to which countries are integrated in the global economy via financial and trade linkages, (ii) differences in the institutional framework of countries and (iii) differences in their sectoral composition. We show that especially variation in the sectoral composition contributes to the variation in the effects of the current crisis, both at the country level and at the detailed regional level across Europe. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved
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