Causes and Consequences of the Spanish Economic Crisis: Why the Recovery is Taken so Long?

Spain is currently facing its worst crisis in the last fifty years. The crisis began as an extension of the international financial crisis, but the internal imbalances accumulated in the pre-crisis period aggravated the situation. At present their incomplete adjustment is making difficult the economic recovery. This paper describes the evolution of the economic crisis in Spain. The real estate sector and the banking sector are analysed in detail, as they played a key role in the detonation and the deepening of the crisis. The results of the main reforms carried out so far are also carefully examined. It also discusses the main factors that have delayed the economic recovery up to now (unemployment and indebtedness), and present some alternatives to define an exit strategy.Crisis, Real estate, Banking, Debt problems, Unemployment, Public debt

Exploring Male and Female Voices through Epistemic Modality and Evidentiality in Some Modern English Travel Texts on the Canaries

This article describes authorial voice through evidential and epistemic sentential devices in a corpus of 19th and early 20th century travel texts. The corpus contains four works written by female travellers and the other four by men. Therefore, apart from providing a catalogue of the strategies deployed by the authors in order to mark modality and evidentiality, we also report on expected differences in their frequencies of use in relation to the writer’s gender. In addition, the interest of this study lies in the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, no research on writer stance has previously been carried out in texts belonging to the genre of travel writing

A variational approach to necklaces formation in polyelectrolytes

By means of a variational approach we study the conditions under which a polyelectrolyte in a bad solvent will undergo a transition from a rod-like structure to a ``necklace'' structure in which the chain collapses into a series of globules joined by stretched chain segments.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures (unfortunately big). Requires revtex, eps

Collapse of Flexible Polyelectrolytes in Multivalent Salt Solutions

The collapse of flexible polyelectrolytes in a solution of multivalent counterions is studied by means of a two state model. The states correspond to rod-like and spherically collapsed conformations respectively. We focus on the very dilute monomer concentration regime where the collapse transition is found to occur when the charge of the multivalent salt is comparable (but smaller) to that of the monomers. The main contribution to the free energy of the collapsed conformation is linear in the number of monomers $N$, since the internal state of the collapsed polymer approaches that of an amorphous ionic solid. The free energy of the rod-like state grows as $N\ln N$, due to the electrostatic energy associated with that shape. We show that practically all multivalent counterions added to the system are condensed into the polymer chain, even before the collapse.Comment: LaTeX-revtex, psfig file, 4 figure