Eastern European migration to Portugal: from an unexpected migration to an uncertain future

In Portugal, Eastern European immigrants only become numerically significant at the end of the 1990s. Until that time, the Portuguese immigration landscape was mainly characterized by the presence of citizens from former Portuguese colonies in Africa and from Brazil. The study of this phenomenon is particularly interesting because it allows to analyse the constitution and development of a new immigration flow and of new immigrant communities in the country and, since the 2008 crisis, to investigate the strategies that immigrants use to face an economic situation that seems to hinder the fulfilment of their initial motivations for migration. Considering the importance of economic motives, it should be expected that, if the reason that justified migration can no longer be satisfied in Portugal,migrants would adopt strategies to attain their economic wellbeing elsewhere. By focusing on the possibilities that migrants consider when planning their future trajectories in a context marked by an economic downturn, this analysis intends to shed light on some of the factors that could impact on these possibilities. It will be shown that these are not limited by the dichotomy of staying or returning, but are spread over a continuum of mobility options in-between the two extreme options (staying or returning). The objective of this article is twofold. First, it presents the evolution of immigration in Portugal giving special attention to the inflow of Eastern European immigrants at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Second, it intends to analyse the effects of the 2008 economic crisis on this immigration flow and the various options that immigrants could follow in their response to a downturn in the economic situation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Conference News: Business, Social Policy and Corporate Political Influence in Developing Countries

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.UNRISD_Conference_BusSocPolCorpPoliInfluence.pdf: 1114 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Scale-dependent rigidity of polymer-ornamented membranes

We study the fluctuation spectrum of fluid membranes carrying grafted polymers. Contrary to usual descriptions, we find that the modifications induced by the polymers cannot be reduced to the renormalization of the membrane bending rigidity. Instead we show that the ornamented membrane exhibits a scale-dependent elastic modulus that we evaluate. In ornamented lamellar stacks, we further show that this leads to a modification of the Caille parameter characterizing the power-law singularities of the Bragg peaks.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Contribution to the study of PPP arrangements in airport development, management and operation

Following the liberalization wave in the airline sector, airports have been gradually taken out of the public sphere and open to the private initiative. This phenomenon is generally referred to as privatization, but not all the cases consist of, in fact, a full divestiture of assets. Although infrastructure construction, management and financing are undertaken by the private sector during a pre-defined period, usually 30 years or more, the property remains public or is transferred to the public domain after that period. This is a form of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) where two different models can be found: institutionalized PPP or a typical contractual regime, such as the concession arrangements. PPP options have been a “hot” topic over the last decade, being developed in several sectors, such as energy, water, road and seaports transportation infrastructures, etc, but few studies in the literature can be found on the PPP projects development in airport systems, for example, as far as risk-sharing is concerned. This paper looks at recent developments in airport “privatization” and “deregulation”, distinguishing privatizations from PPP arrangements, through a case study approach, and establishing a comparative analysis of different PPP models used for airport management. Some comments are made about the Portuguese model and the announcement of future privatization.Airport Concessions; Portugal; Public-Private Partnerships; Privatization.

The bank lending channel of monetary policy: identification and estimation using Portuguese micro bank data

This paper investigates the existence of the bank-lending channel in the transmission of monetary policy using Portuguese micro bank data. In contrast to the conventional approach, which addresses the identification issue by resorting to reduced form equations for bank credit with variables in differences, we directly estimate loan-supply schedules with variables in levels, thereby exploiting recent results on cointegration for panel data. We conclude that there is evidence of the existence of a bank-lending channel, and that the importance of the bank lending-channel is larger for less capitalised banks.Monetary policy transmission mechanism; bank lending channel; identification; nonstationary panel data; cointegration

Using Mean Reversion as a Measure of Persistence

This paper elaborates on the alternative measure of persistence recently suggested in Marques (2004), which is based on the idea of mean reversion. A formal distinction between the “unconditional probability of a given process not crossing its mean in period t” and its estimator, is made clear and the relationship between this new measure and the widely used “sum of the autoregressive coefficients”, as alternative measures of persistence, is investigated. Using the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem, properties for the estimator of the new measure of persistence are established, which allow tests of hypotheses to be performed, under very general conditions. Finally, some Monte Carlo experiments are conducted in order to compare the finite sample properties of the estimator for the “unconditional probability of a given process not crossing its mean in period t” and the OLS estimator for the “sum of the autoregressive coefficients”.