Poverty Alleviation and Job Creation: Integrating Social Investment Funds with Corporate Social Responsibility as Possible Solutions

“In West Michigan today, more families are struggling to put food on their tables and lacking basic necessities than any time in the past 15 years.” So wrote Sharon Parks in The Grand Rapids Press (September 13, 2008: Growing poverty in Michigan needs emergency response). The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the rate of poverty jumped 14%, one in five live in poverty, and the unemployment rate jumped to 8.5%. Apparently Michigan joined the rest of the world where two billion people live on one dollar a day, except we are in a relatively better position. Incidence and magnitude of poverty have spread over the past fifteen years. High unemployment rates increased to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Inflation is soaring and the number of foreclosures has multiplied. The U.S. is not alone in suffering from these ailments. We are sharing what many developing countries have been suffering for decades. There are some policies these countries adopted that Michigan and the rest of the U.S. can apply at state, county, or city levels. We can draw some parallels with the intention of showing how to implement a selective set of measures that proved to be effective in meeting the challenges

Structural Changes and Global Trends in European Union Trade

The article aims at researching and presenting structural changes and global trends in distributive trade of European Union, resulted from liberalization of economic activities within the EU. During the last decades, EU trade went through deep transformation and structural changes. Traditional distributive trade has been replaced by organized and concentrated distribution. Even though, there are many developing trends which unify the EU trade, still there are some differences specific for particular countries. Level of development, structure of trade network, as well as structure of retail forms, differ from one country to another. Developing patterns of retail forms differ from one country to another. For instance, hypermarkets have reached mature stage in France, Germany and Belgium, just have started developing in Italy and are in developing stage in Spain. “Hard” discount shops are already one mature concept in Germany and Netherlands, while in France, they have just started developing. Regardless of differences between particular national and regional markets within EU, almost all countries participate in increased trend of internationalization, concentration and dislocation of traditional retail towards modern sale forms, which have more subsidiaries. However, degree of concentration in some countries is still quite different. While just a few companies control the markets in Scandinavia, France, Great Britain and Germany; in Italy there is not a company with similar comparable size or market strength. Trend of business globalization have emphasized the area of international retail as an important topic. With process of retail internationalization – retail has turned into a global industry quite fast.trade, retail, globalization, internationalization, concentration

Testing gravity theories using tensor perturbations

Primordial gravitational waves constitute a promising probe of the very early Universe and the laws of gravity. We study in this work changes to tensor-mode perturbations (TMPs) that can arise in various proposed modified gravity (MG) theories. These include additional friction effects, nonstandard dispersion relations involving a massive graviton, a modified speed, and a small-scale modification. We introduce a physically motivated parameterization of these effects and use current available data to obtain exclusion regions in the parameter spaces. Taking into account the foreground subtraction, we then perform a forecast analysis focusing on tensor-mode MG parameters as constrained by future experiments COrE, Stage-IV and PIXIE. For a fiducial value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r=0.01$, we find that an additional friction of $3.5\sim4.5\%$ compared to GR will be detected at $3$-$\sigma$ by these experiments, while a decrease in friction will be more difficult to detect. The speed of gravitational waves needs to be by $5\sim15\%$ different from the speed of light for detection. We find that the minimum detectable graviton mass is about $7.8\sim9.7\times 10^{-33}$ eV, which is of the same order of magnitude as the graviton mass that allows massive gravity theories to produce cosmic acceleration. Finally, we study TMPs in MG during inflation using our parameterization. We find that the tensor spectral index is related to $r$ and the friction parameter $\nu_0$ by $n_T=-3\nu_0-r/8$. Assuming that the friction parameter is unchanged throughout the history of the Universe and is much larger than $r$, future experiments will be able to distinguish this MG consistency relation from the standard inflation one, and thus can be used as a further test of MG. In summary, TMPs and cosmic-microwave-background B-mode polarization provide a complementary avenue to test gravity theories. (Abridged)Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures; matches version published in PR

LabView Based AC Magnetization Characteristics and Measurement for Soft Magnetic Materials

This paper presents LabView based method combined with a simple analog circuitry to characterize the ac magnetization profile of soft magnetic materials. First, soft magnetic materials prepared as ring cores are wound with equal number of turns for the primary and secondary windings. The primary winding is excited with sinusoidal supply of varying voltage amplitude. The secondary winding is interfaced with the LabView for data acquisition and calculation. Graphical plotting and viewing of the hysteresis loop exhibited by the soft magnetic materials under test can be achieved using National Instrument NI6009 data acquisition card and LabView software. This research discusses the methods of measurement for flux density, magnetic field intensity and core permeability at different points of the ac magnetization. The measured results are then compared with those given by the manufacturer datasheets. Good agreement has been achieved to validate the proposed LabView based method