The Chinese Military Power: the Upswing Flight of the Dragon

China is a universal actor in the geopolitical landscape. Her geopolitical dimensions –physical, economic, human, socio-political, and military– are overwhelming. But perhaps, what impresses, and in some ways concerned more about is her impenetrability, which referred to the art of war it is called “deception”, one of the Sun Tzu principles, to become the basic form of the war, its main stratagem. It is not the military power struggle; it is the clash of intellectual performs. Thus, the Chinese military power, traditionally relegated, is not capable of withstanding the collide with the industrialized West that oppresses and humiliates her, in the so called “the infamous century of humiliations”. Only throughout two wars, the bloodiest in the history of mankind, and the communist revolution, the wounded dragon regains control of its own destiny, backed by his People’s Liberation Army, peasant and illiterate, as in the origins of this civilization-state. The military of the people and for the people act as the armed arm of the Communist Party just to look into the great wall, confident on the power of their other geopolitical dimensions; and only begins to look up and take flight based on the economic miracle of recent decades. A proud and capable military power that wants to lead, along with the people, this time, “the China’s dream, the dream of the people”, the “peaceful development”.China es un actor geopolítico de talla universal. Sus dimensiones geopolíticas –físicas, económicas, humanas, sociopolíticas y militares– son abrumadoras. Pero, quizás, lo que impresiona y en cierta manera preocupa más es su impenetrabilidad. Referido al arte de la guerra se manifiesta de forma clara en utilizar la “decepción” como su principal estratagema –uno de sus principios básicos enunciados por Sun Tzu–. No se busca, por lo tanto, el enfrentamiento de las capacidades militares, sino la pugna entre las maestrías intelectuales. Así, el poder militar chino, tradicionalmente postergado por el poder imperial, no fue capaz de resistir el encuentro con el industrializado occidente que lo sojuzga durante el llamado “siglo infame de humillación”. Y no ha sido sino a través de dos de las más cruentas guerras de la historia de la humanidad y de la revolución comunista como el dragón herido ha vuelto a recuperar el control de su propio destino. A lomos de su Ejército Popular de Liberación, campesino e iletrado, vuelve a sus orígenes para consolidar esa única e imperecedera Civilización-Estado. Un ejército del pueblo y para el pueblo que, como brazo armado del Partido Comunista Chino, sólo mira hacia el interior de su gran muralla; conocedor del poder del resto de dimensiones geopolíticas; y que sólo empieza a alzar la vista y emprender el vuelo de la mano del milagro económico de las últimas décadas. Un poder militar orgulloso y capaz, que quiere protagonizar, junto con su sociedad, esta vez sí, “el sueño de China, el sueño del pueblo”, del “desarrollo pacífico”

Social security and the search behaviour of workers approaching retirement

This paper explores the links between unemployment, retirement and their associated public insurance programs. It is a contribution to a growing body of literature focused on a better understanding of the labor behavior of advanced—age workers, which has gained importance as the pension crisis looms. The analysis combines the development of a new theoretical model and a detailed exploration of the empirical regularities using the Spanish Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales (MCVL) dataset. The model is a extension of the standard search model, designed to reproduce the non—stationary environment faced by workers approaching retirement and to explore the interaction of unemployment benefits and retirement pensions. Via calibrated simulations we show that the basic empirical reemployment and retirement patterns can be rationalized as the optimal responses to both the labor market conditions and the institutional incentives. Generous Unemployment Benefits (for durations of up to two years) together with very significant early retirement penalties, make optimal to stay unemployed without searching for large groups of unemployed workers. This moral hazard problem can he substantially alleviated through institutional reform. Setting the early retirement penalties according to the age when the individual withdraws from the labor force (rather than when he/she claims the pension for the first time) seems particularly beneficial. It increases the labor supply, reduces the financial cost for the social security system and generate enough extra resources to compensate for the welfare loss of those unemployed directly hit by the reform.Unemployment search, job benefit, retirement

Social Security and the search behaviour of workers approaching retirement

This paper explores the links between unemployment, retirement and their associated public insurance programs. It is a contribution to a growing body of literature focused on a better understanding of the labor behavior of advanced-age workers, which has gained importance as the pension crisis looms. It also contributes to the literature of optimal unemployment insurance by exploring the interaction of unemployment benefits and retirement pensions. The analysis combines the development of a new theoretical model and a detailed exploration of the empirical regularities using the Spanish Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales (MCVL) dataset. The model is an extension of the standard search model, designed to reproduce the non-stationary environment faced by workers of advanced ages (in the age range 50/65). Via calibrated simulations we show that the basic empirical re-employment and retirement patterns can be considered as rational responses to both the labor market conditions and the institutional incentives. Generous Unemployment Benefits (for durations of up to two years) together with very significant early retirement penalties, make optimal to stay unemployed without searching for large groups of unemployed workers. This moral hazard problem can be substantially alleviated through institutional reform. We explore several potential reforms and find that changing the details of early retirement pensions seems more promising than changing the Unemployment Benefit system.Unemployment, Retirement, Search models

Almost symmetric numerical semigroups with high type

We establish a one-to-one correspondence between numerical semigroups of genus g and almost symmetric numerical semigroups with Frobenius number F and type F − 2g , provided that F is greater than or equal to 4g − 1.The first author was partially supported by the Junta de Andalucía research group FQM-366, and by the project MTM2017-84890-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE). The second author was partially supported by the research groups FQM-024 (Junta de Extremadura/FEDER funds) and by the project MTM2015-65764-C3-1-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE) and by the project MTM2017-84890-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE)

Retirement incentives, individual heterogeneity and labour transitions of employed and unemployed workers

In this paper we analyze the sensitivity of the labour market decisions of workers close to retirement with respect to the incentives created by public regulations. We improve upon the extensive prior literature on the effect of pension incentives on retirement in two ways. First, by modeling the transitions between employment, unemployment and retirement in a simultaneous manner, paying special attention to the transition from unemployment to retirement (which is particularly important in Spain). Second, by considering the influence of unobserved heterogeneity in the estimation of the effect of our (carefully constructed) incentive variables. Using administrative data, we find that, when properly defined, economic incentives have a strong impact on labour market decisions in Spain. Unemployment regulations are shown to be particularly influential for retirement behaviour, along with the more traditional determinants linked to the pension system. Pension variables also have a major bearing on both workers’ reemployment decisions and on the strategic actions of employers. The quantitative impact of the incentives, however, is greatly affected by the existence of unobserved heterogeneity among workers. Its omission leads to sizable biases in the assessment of the sensitivity to economic incentives, a finding that has clear consequences for the credibility of any model-based policy analysis. We confirm the importance of this potential problem in one especially interesting instance: the reform of early retirement provisions undertaken in Spain in 2002. We use a difference-in-difference approach to measure the behavioural reaction to this change, finding a large overestimation when unobserved heterogeneity is not taken into account.Retirement, unemployment, incentives, Pension system, Unobserved, heterogeneity, Spain.

A bibliometric study of the research area of videogames using Dimensions.ai database

Videogames are a very interesting area of research for fields as diverse as computer science, health, psychology or even social sciences. Every year a growing number of articles are published in different topics inside this field, so it is very convenient to study the different bibliometric data in order to consolidate the research efforts. Thus, the aim of this work is to conduct a study on the distribution of articles related to videogames in the different fields of research, as well as to measure their interest over time, to identify the sources, countries and authors with the highest scientific production. In order to carry out this analysis, the information system Dimensions.ai has been considered, since it covers a large number of documents and allows for easy downloading and analysis of datasets. According to the study, three countries are the most prolific in this area: USA, Canada and UK. The obtained results also indicate that the fields with the highest number of publications are Information and Computer Sciences, Medical and Health Sciences, and Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, in this order. With regard to the impact of the publications, differences between the number of citations, and the number of Altmetric Attention Score, have been found

CRISPR-ERA for switching off (onco)genes

[EN]Genome editing nucleases like the popular CRISPR/Cas9 allow generate knock - out cell lines and nulls zygotes by inducing site - specific DSB within a genome. In most cases, when a DNA template is not present, the DSB is repaired by non - homologous end joining (NHEJ) resulting in small nucleotide insertions or deletions that can be used to construct knockout alleles. However, for se veral reasons, these mutations do not produce the desired null result in all cases, generating a similar protein with functional activity. That undesirable effect could limit the therapeutic efficiency of gene therapy strategies focused on abrogating oncog ene expression by CRISPR/Cas9 and should be taken in account. This chapter reviews the irruption of CRISPR technology for gene silencing and its application in gene therapy

Unexpected subspaces of tensor products

We describe complemented Copies Of l(2) both in C(K-1)circle times C-pi(K-2) when at least one of the compact spaces K-i is not scattered and in L-1(mu(1))circle times L-is an element of(1)(mu(2)) when at least one of the measures is not atomic. The corresponding local construction gives uniformly complemented copies of the l(2)(n) in c(0)circle times(pi)c(0.) We continue the study of c(0)(l(2)(n)) showing that it contains a complemented copy of Stegall's space c(0)(l(2)(n)) and proving that (c(0)circle times(pi)c(0))" is isomorphic to l infinity(l(infinity)(n)circle times(pi)l(infinity)(n)) together with other results. 2 In the last section we use Hardy spaces to find an isomorphic copy of L-p in the space of compact operators from L-q to L-r, where 1 < p, q, r < infinity and 1/r = 1/p + 1/q

Uniquely presented finitely generated commutative monoids

A finitely generated commutative monoid is uniquely presented if it has only a minimal presentation. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for finitely generated, combinatorially finite, cancellative, commutative monoids to be uniquely presented. We use the concept of gluing to construct commutative monoids with this property. Finally for some relevant families of numerical semigroups we describe the elements that are uniquely presented.Comment: 13 pages, typos corrected, references update

Technical efficiency of sea bass and sea bream farming in the Mediterranean Sea by European firms: A stochastic production frontier (SPF) approach

In recent years, European producers of cultured sea bass and sea bream have experienced a highly competitive market with low prices that have caused profitability challenges. An important factor of economic competitiveness for firms is to produce efficiently. In this paper, technical efficiency of European producers of cultured sea bass and sea bream is evaluated for the period 2008-2017 using the stochastic production frontier (SPF) approach. In addition, the effect of a set of specific-firm factors on firms' efficiency is investigated. The majority of firms in the sample were found to have a technical efficiency over 90% with Cypriot and Greek firms being, on average, the most efficient. We also found evidence that the technical efficiency of these firms is positively related to their size. Moreover, the high degree of average efficiency means that further production growth requires innovations that move up the production frontier