Self-defeating austerity in Portugal during the Troika’s economic and financial adjustment programme

In 2011, Portugal agreed with the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) to implement an economic and financial assistance programme during the period 2011-2014. One of the objectives of the programme was to guarantee the sustainability of public accounts, by setting targets for reducing the weight of the budget balance on GDP. Between 2010 and 2013, the weight of the budget deficit on GDP decreased by six percentage points. However, in that period, there was a colossal destruction of jobs and the unemployment rate grew by five percentage points. In an Input-Output framework, we show the existence of a negative relationship between the unemployment rate and the budget deficit and we revisit the concept of neutral budget balance proposed by Lopes and Amaral (2017), and also we consider the use of alternative fiscal policies and a mix of fiscal policies. In an empirical application to the Portuguese case, in 2013, we concluded that: (i) the balance of public accounts in that year would imply a very high unemployment rate; (ii) the larger the budget balance in that year, the greater the negative impact on the budget balance in 2014; and (iii) the budget balance actually verified in 2013 had a detrimental effect on the reduction of the budget deficit in 2014.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Intertemporal Choice of Fuzzy Soft Sets

This paper first merges two noteworthy aspects of choice. On the one hand, soft sets and fuzzy soft sets are popular models that have been largely applied to decision making problems, such as real estate valuation, medical diagnosis (glaucoma, prostate cancer, etc.), data mining, or international trade. They provide crisp or fuzzy parameterized descriptions of the universe of alternatives. On the other hand, in many decisions, costs and benefits occur at different points in time. This brings about intertemporal choices, which may involve an indefinitely large number of periods. However, the literature does not provide a model, let alone a solution, to the intertemporal problem when the alternatives are described by (fuzzy) parameterizations. In this paper, we propose a novel soft set inspired model that applies to the intertemporal framework, hence it fills an important gap in the development of fuzzy soft set theory. An algorithm allows the selection of the optimal option in intertemporal choice problems with an infinite time horizon. We illustrate its application with a numerical example involving alternative portfolios of projects that a public administration may undertake. This allows us to establish a pioneering intertemporal model of choice in the framework of extended fuzzy set theorie

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