Narrowing women's time and income gaps: An assessment of the synergies between working time reduction and universal income schemes

This paper departs from the hypothesis that policies targeting time poverty have the potential to reduce the gender income gap through the redistribution of time use between women and men. To this purpose, we compare two policy mixes and assess the synergies between working time reduction and two universal income schemes: a basic income and care income programme. While the former provides every individual with an equal monetary benefit, the latter ties monetary benefits to the amount of unpaid and care work performed by individuals. We assess the impact of these policy mixes by applying Eurogreen, a macrosimulation model tailored to Italy. Results suggest that while working time reduction directly drives a reduction of the aggregate amount of time spent by women in unpaid work, this does not imply a reduction in time poverty. The universal income schemes – and in particular the care income – promote a reduction of gender inequality in terms of income by sustaining women's total income, but leave the wage gap between women and men unchanged

Feasible alternatives to green growth

Climate change and increasing income inequality have emerged as twin threats to contemporary standards of living, peace and democracy. These two problems are usually tackled separately in the policy agenda. A new breed of radical proposals have been advanced to manage a fair low-carbon transition. In this spirit, we develop a dynamic macrosimulation model to investigate the long-term effects of three scenarios: green growth, policies for social equity, and degrowth. The green growth scenario, based on technological progress and environmental policies, achieves a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions at the cost of increasing income inequality and unemployment. The policies for social equity scenario adds direct labour market interventions that result in an environmental performance similar to green growth while improving social conditions at the cost of increasing public deficit. The degrowth scenario further adds a reduction in consumption and exports, and achieves a greater reduction in emissions and inequality with higher public deficit, despite the introduction of a wealth tax. We argue that new radical social policies can combine social prosperity and low-carbon emissions and are economically and politically feasible

Avaliação empírica do teorema da paridade coberta de juros entre o real brasileiro e o dólar americano (2008-2013)

Resumo: Em contraste com a vasta evidência internacional em favor da validade da Paridade Coberta de Juros (CIP), a escassa literatura nacional encontra dificuldades para confirmar tal condição na economia brasileira.Neste trabalho,a validade da CIP entre o Real brasileiro e o Dólar americano é testada para o período de 2008 a 2013, a partir de dados diários. Para tanto,são exploradas as peculiaridades dos dados brasileiros e das variáveis utilizadas na estimação. Argumenta-se que a taxa de juros externa relevante para o teste da CIP no Brasil é aquela acessível aos agentes internos, cuja proxy é a taxa libor acrescida do EMBI+ brasileiro (o spread entre os títulos da dívida externa soberana brasileira e a taxa livre de risco americana). Por fim, a comparação desta taxa com a do cupom cambial - que constitui um fechamento tautológico para a paridade coberta - estabelece um método alternativo para validar a CIP,o qual corrobora os resultados dos testes diretos

Temporal Web Image Retrieval

International audienceTemporal Web Image Retrieval can be defined as the process that retrieves sets ofWeb images with their temporal dimension from explicit or implicit temporal text queries. Supposing that (a) the temporal dimension is included in image indexing and (b) the query is explicitly expressed with a time tag (e.g. "Fukushima 2011"), the retrieval task can be straightforward as image retrieval has been studied for several years with success. However, text queries are usually implicit in time (e.g. "Second World War") and automatically capturing the time dimension included in Web images is a challenge that has not been studied so far to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we will discuss different research issues about Temporal Web Image Retrieval and the current progresses of our research in temporal ephemeral clustering and temporal image filtering

Coupling environmental transition and social prosperity: a scenario-analysis of the Italian case

Producción CientíficaThis paper investigates to what extent green growth is able to promote social equity and which social policies can complement environmental policies to achieve social prosperity and sustainability. We de- velop a dynamic macrosimulation model to explore the social and structural effects of the Italian national energy and climate plan. We show that green growth alone will not result in better societal conditions and needs to be compensated with social policies that directly tackle inequality. Consequently, we select two social policies that are expected to improve income distribution, namely a basic income programme and working time reduction. Our scenario analysis shows that working time reduction leads to an in- crease in employment and a parallel decrease in aggregate demand that causes a reduction in emissions and inequality. The basic income programme reduces inequality by sustaining aggregate demand which, in turn, partially offsets the positive environmental effects of the energy plan.We thank the participants of the conference “Capitalism, Con- flict, and Cooperation: A Celebration of the Work of Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis” held at Columbia University and Luigi Giorgio, Francesco Marghella and Bill Mebane for valuable com- ments and suggestions. The authors acknowledge funding from the Greens|EFA Group at the European Parliament and from the LO- COMOTION project, within the European Union’s Horizon 2020 re- search and innovation programme under grant agreement number 821105

Students’ Confidence and Interest in Palliative and Bereavement Care: A European Study

As part of a European Erasmus Plus project entitled Death Education for Palliative Psychology, this study assessed the ways in which Master’s Degree students in psychology and the creative arts therapies self-rated their confidence and interest in death education and palliative and bereavement care. In five countries (Austria, Israel, Italy, Poland, Romania), 344 students completed an online questionnaire, and 37 students were interviewed to better understand their views, interest, and confidence. The results revealed some significant differences between countries, and showed that older respondents with previous experience as formal caregivers for end-of-life clients showed greater interest in obtaining practical clinical competence in these fields. A mediation analysis indicated that students’ previous care experiences and past loss experiences were related to students’ current interest in death education and palliative and bereavement care through the mediation of their sense of confidence in this field. The qualitative findings identified five shared themes: life and death, learning about death, the psychological burden, personal experience and robust training, and four key training needs. Overall, students’ interest in studying and working with terminal illness and death are rooted in internal resources, a preliminary sense of confidence, but also external requirements

The lethal effect of soap on Schistosoma mansoni cercariae in water

Abstract Background Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease which is spread through skin contact with water containing Schistosoma cercariae. Drug treatment has been the main control method, but it does not prevent reinfection. The use of soap can be a complementary measure to reduce transmission. Therefore, this study investigates the quantitative effect of different soaps on the mortality of Schistosoma mansoni cercariae. Methodology Four soaps including two powder soaps (Kleesoft and Omo) and two bar soaps (B29 and Rungu) which are used in a schistosomiasis-endemic Tanzanian village were studied. S. mansoni cercariae were exposed to powder soaps of 0 (control), 10, 50, 75, 100 and 1000 mg/L and to bar soaps of 0 (control), 100, 500 and 1000 mg/L. The highest concentration of 1000 mg/L was selected based on the laboratory-estimated average soap concentration during handwashing. Cercariae were observed under a microscope after 0, 5, 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes of exposure to determine their survival. Conclusions All four soaps can kill S. mansoni cercariae and this lethal effect was related to soap concentration and exposure time. At the highest concentration of 1000 mg/L, all cercariae were dead at 5 minutes post-exposure with two powder soaps and Rungu, while 100% cercarial death was achieved between 5 minutes to 15 minutes for B29. Almost all cercariae survived after being exposed to 10 mg/L powder soaps and 100 mg/L bar soaps for 60 minutes. Powder soaps were more lethal than bar soaps. Considering the widely varying concentrations of soap during real-world hygiene activities and the necessity for a very high soap concentration to eliminate all cercariae in a short 5-minute exposure, providing the efficacy of soap in preventing schistosomiasis becomes challenging. Future studies should investigate whether soap can influence alternative mechanisms such as making cercariae unable to penetrate the skin, thereby providing protection