Models of public-private partnerships in megaprojects: the Spanish case

This article provides a literature review of PPP Models, where the clarification of this current confusion and ambiguity constitute the fundamental issue addressed by our research. The systematization of the PPP models is performed by applying six classification criteria based on organizational and financial aspects and focused on the Spanish experience. Additionally, a comparative study of the various schemes applied in European countries is carried out, whereby the concession model implemented successfully in Spain is studied in greater detail. To this end, a megaproject, the first metro line of Seville (Spain) forms the basis of a case-study. When the megaproject is viable through user fees, the public sector can use PPPs to defer payments and as a way to control their deficits and debt without cutting investments in infrastructures and public services. Nevertheless, certain drawbacks should be borne in mind, such as the expenditure commitments of future budgets, the higher cost of private funding, and the necessity for transparency and accountability of PPP contractual arrangements to be improved. Therefore, the aim of this article is to analyze the various forms of PPPs in megaprojects in order to determine the potential efficiency gains that can be achieved in the implementation of these models

Study on the Information Level of Pupils and Parents Regarding the Effects of Unhealthy Food Consumption

During the past centuries, consumption has become both one of the most discussed and analyzed subjects in the literature and a mass phenomenon in society. In order to satisfy their needs and to improve the quality of their life consumers need information and education. Consumers’ information and education are promoted by a globally-developed consumer movement. The aims of our paper are to present the role of the consumer information and education in society, and to analyze and highlight the results of a national project regarding the information and education of Romanian young consumers, run by the Association for Consumers Protection (APC) Romania. By using primary data obtained from a survey based on a questionnaire, a set of three hypotheses was tested during our research. The results of our research shows that a relatively small number of Romanian pupils from the 5th grade to 8th grade were aware of the negative effects of unhealthy food consumption and of the fact that the unhealthy food consumption may give rise to obesity and ADHD (agitation with attention deficit).consumer information, consumption, consumer, consumerism, pupils

Indirect evidentiality and related domains: some observations from the current evolution of the Romanian presumptive.

One distinguishing feature of the Romanian tense-aspect-mood (hence- forth, TAM) domain is the presence of a morpho-syntactic paradigm tradi- tionally labelled the presumptive mood. As noticed several times (Slave 1957, Goudet 1977, Dimitriu 1979, Irimia 1983, Friedman 1986, 2004, Av- ram and Hill 2007, Squartini 2001, 2005, Irimia 2010) this class poses par- ticular theoretical challenges regarding its composition and morphology. Its highly idiosyncratic character is manifested by the presence of unique mor- phological patterns which nevertheless make use of morphological pieces (auxiliaries, participials) which can also be mapped to slightly distinct se- mantics when combined with distinct building blocks. Nevertheless, in the perfect forms, the indirect evidential semantics of the presumptive illus- trates formal syncretism with interpretations corresponding to other modals, like the conditional, or the future, which are normally considered to create individual paradigms (as they are morphologically individuated in the non-perfect uses). And yet another important observation is that in modern Romanian some non-perfect (present) sub-paradigms of the pre- sumptive are morphologically decaying, while their semantics is transferred to the non-perfect forms of the related TAM paradigms. The Romanian presumptive constitutes therefore an excellent testing ground for at least two directions in languages: i) the structure and the development of indirect evidentiality; ii) the morphological distribution of TAM notions, and their interactions. This paper proposes a morpho-semantic analysis of the struc- ture of indirect evidentiality in Romanian,..