Regional Products, Regions' Reputation and Commercial Strategies: A Tale of Two Cheese Suppliers

Networks of firms producing and selling regional products to domestic and foreign markets are influencing the direction and options of local development. Regional products are embedded in historical tradition and geographic, cultural and social specificity. Most of the local activities are performed by clustered SME's in well defined geographical areas. To study the mechanisms and factors which favour spontaneous development in specific areas and make SME's competitive through cluster development we used case study methodology. An evolutionary perspective of "Casa Matias" and "Casa dos Queijos", two portuguese SME's, is expected to illustrate which key factors triggered the firm's cheese business and, simultaneously, examine organisational practices with particular emphasis on cluster formation and internationalisation process. From this analysis we expected to conceptualise a specific policy scheme to help developing spontaneous entrepreneurship, cooperation between clustered SME's and local collective development.

Location of foreign firms in Portugal: A network approach

The importance of the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and the foreign firm in the portuguese economy has been rising quite significantly for the last years. Nevertheless, we might say that there has been little work which brings into focus the factors that provide us with a consistent explanation about the location of the foreign manufacturing firm. The paper try to clear up the above mentioned issue, considering an analytical framework that integrates the network approach. In this framework the social, intra-entrepreneurial, inter-entrepreneurial (both national and local) and the local institutional networks are supposed to exert a relevant influence on the location decision making process of the foreign manufacturing firm.

EU regulation concerning genetically modified products: an issue of food security or a measure of disguised protectionism?

The biggest producers and exporters of agricultural products have been adopting the genetic engineering in order to improve the factors productivity and the firms profits In the last decade, the United States of America (US) and the European Union (EU) have established a high divergent regulation on production, distribution and consumption of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Apparently, the EU's complex legislative framework related to GMOs was intend to satisfy the European consumers which are concerned about food safety and whish to make more informed choice about the food they eat. The aim of this paper is to understand the potential motivations behind the different policies on GM products adopted by US and EU.Genetically Modified Organisms; Consumers preferences; Food security; Technical barriers to trade.

A Glimpse Inside the Coffers: Endowment Spending at Wealthy Colleges and Universities

Even as ongoing national conversations about income inequality intensify, wealth stratification is occurring not only among individuals but also among institutions of higher education, a study from theEducation Trust finds.The report, "A Glimpse Inside the Coffers", found that roughly 3.6 percent of the nation's colleges and universities held 75 percent of all postsecondary endowment wealth. Despite that wealth, however, few of the hundred and thirty-eight colleges and universities with at least $500 million in their endowments were found to be investing significantly in students from low-income families, with nearly half those institutions ranking in the bottom 5 percent nationally in terms of the enrollment of first-time, full-time Pell Grant recipients.The assets of these institutions totaled$149.5 billion at the beginning of 2010 and had grown to $202.3 billion just four years later. According to the report, if the thirty-five institutions that currently spend less than 5 percent of their endowments annually were to increase their spend-out rate to the 5 percent required of private foundations, an additional$418 million would become available for other things. And if those funds were allocated solely to financial aid, they could be used to enroll an additional 2,376 low-income students at the current net price for four years -- a nearly 67 percent increase from the enrollment numbers for first-time, full-time low-income students in 2012-13. Alternatively, the same $418 million also could be used to reduce the net price for low-income students at these institutions by an average of$8,000 per year for four years."It's common for institutional leaders to say that endowment spending is all about preserving the excellence of their institutions for years to come. But our data show that most could easily afford to do more to educate more low-income students now without compromising their futures," said Andrew Nichols, director of higher education research and data analytics and co-author of the report. "By choosing to serve more low-income students, these wealthy institutions could be leaders -- not just in riches, but in extending opportunity.

Efficient Learning and Evaluation of Complex Concepts in Inductive Logic Programming

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a subfield of Machine Learning with foundations in logic programming. In ILP, logic programming, a subset of first-order logic, is used as a uniform representation language for the problem specification and induced theories. ILP has been successfully applied to many real-world problems, especially in the biological domain (e.g. drug design, protein structure prediction), where relational information is of particular importance. The expressiveness of logic programs grants flexibility in specifying the learning task and understandability to the induced theories. However, this flexibility comes at a high computational cost, constraining the applicability of ILP systems. Constructing and evaluating complex concepts remain two of the main issues that prevent ILP systems from tackling many learning problems. These learning problems are interesting both from a research perspective, as they raise the standards for ILP systems, and from an application perspective, where these target concepts naturally occur in many real-world applications. Such complex concepts cannot be constructed or evaluated by parallelizing existing top-down ILP systems or improving the underlying Prolog engine. Novel search strategies and cover algorithms are needed. The main focus of this thesis is on how to efficiently construct and evaluate complex hypotheses in an ILP setting. In order to construct such hypotheses we investigate two approaches. The first, the Top Directed Hypothesis Derivation framework, implemented in the ILP system TopLog, involves the use of a top theory to constrain the hypothesis space. In the second approach we revisit the bottom-up search strategy of Golem, lifting its restriction on determinate clauses which had rendered Golem inapplicable to many key areas. These developments led to the bottom-up ILP system ProGolem. A challenge that arises with a bottom-up approach is the coverage computation of long, non-determinate, clauses. Prolog’s SLD-resolution is no longer adequate. We developed a new, Prolog-based, theta-subsumption engine which is significantly more efficient than SLD-resolution in computing the coverage of such complex clauses. We provide evidence that ProGolem achieves the goal of learning complex concepts by presenting a protein-hexose binding prediction application. The theory ProGolem induced has a statistically significant better predictive accuracy than that of other learners. More importantly, the biological insights ProGolem’s theory provided were judged by domain experts to be relevant and, in some cases, novel

Comparing Exchange Market Pressure in West and Southern African Countries

We compare the performance of Cape Verde and Mozambique concerning financial credibility as measured by Exchange Market Pressure, an institutional feature that has often been overlooked in the literature as a relevant institution for economies. Drawing on previous research by Macedo et al. (2009), we expand their analysis and, using several definitions of “financial credibility”, all related to different angles on Exchange Market Pressure indices, we conclude that - against reasonable benchmarks in their respective regions - financial credibility has been very good for Cape Verde and fairly good for Mozambique. JEL codes: C22, E44, F31, F33Exchange Rate Regime, Exchange Market Pressure, EGARCH

Cosmology with a Continuous Tower of Scalar Fields

We study the cosmological evolution for a universe in the presence of a continuous tower of massive scalar fields which can drive the current phase of accelerated expansion of the universe and, in addition, can contribute as a dark matter component. The tower consists of a continuous set of massive scalar fields with a gaussian mass distribution. We show that, in a certain region of the parameter space, the {\it heavy} modes of the tower (those with masses much larger than the Hubble expansion rate) dominate at early times and make the tower behave like the usual single scalar field whose coherent oscillations around the minimum of the potential give a matter-like contribution. On the other hand, at late times, the {\it light} modes (those with masses much smaller than the Hubble expansion rate) overcome the energy density of the tower and they behave like a perfect fluid with equation of state ranging from 0 to -1, depending on the spectral index of the initial spectrum. This is a distinctive feature of the tower with respect to the case of quintessence fields, since a massive scalar field can only give acceleration with equation of state close to -1. Such unique property is the result of a synergy effect between the different mass modes. Interestingly, we find that, for some choices of the spectral index, the tower tracks the matter component at high redshifts (or it can even play the role of the dark matter) and eventually becomes the dominant component of the universe and give rise to an accelerated expansion.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures. V2: minor changes to match published versio