Buddhism and modernity: in the margin of Donald S. Lopez Jr.’S “Buddhism and Science”

The present article aims at setting the issue of the relationship between Buddhism and science in a historical and philosophical frame wider than that took into account by the international scholarship so far. The historical point of view allows us to conclude that the narrative that connects Buddhism with science is not based on features intrinsic to Buddhist thought. In fact, such narrative prospered thanks to the development of a dialectic between science and religion typical of the 18th and 19th centuries. The philosophical point of view allows us to conclude that such narrative is backed by a metaphysical-like thought that denies the specificity of both science and Buddhism

South-South Trade Agreements, Location of Production and Inequality in Latin America

This study aims at evaluating the relation between South-South trade agreements, location of production and inequality in Latin Amer- ican RTAs. Following Sanguinetti et al.(2004) and Midelfart-Knarvik et al.(2000), an empirical model will be estimated to check whether industry localization was affected by the agreement. An ending sec- tion will then evaluate the overall impact of trade agreements on ¾ -convergence, i.e. the standard deviation of income levels of countries belonging to the same agreement.

Empirical investigation on labour market interactions in an enlarged Europe

This paper proposes an empirical assessment of economic interactions between the labour markets of the integrating EU over the period of time 1995–2005. Drawing on recently made available industry statistics, we provide a sector level study (13 tradable sectors, including manufacturing and services), analysing the contemporary evolution of domestic and trade partners’ employment levels. Given the intensification of trade relations as a result of ongoing integration process, we build a sector-specific measure of economic interdependency, based on information on labour markets’ performance and weighted by the magnitude of intra-EU trade flows (imports). The estimates of a dynamic empirical model confirm the interactions between employment levels in different Member States. Domestic employment in NMS-5 is rather positively affected by the expansion of labour markets in other EU’s trade partners (domestic employment levels in NMS-5 countries improve in parallel to the increase in foreign tradable sectors’ employment). The opposite holds true for EU-15 domestic labour markets that are rather challenged by the expansion of tradable sectors in their EU trade partners.EU integration, labour markets, trade

Dalla geometria delle preesistenze alla conoscenza della costruzione: un'esperienza di recupero aggiornata dalla metodologia BIM

Il termine costruire (lessicalmente) equivale a riordinare le singole parti dell'operazione secondo il nesso logico e grammaticale; ed altresì disporle e collegarle secondo le regole e l'uso della lingua. Analogamente gli odierni strumenti BIM possiedono nelle loro corde sia una riconoscibile capacità di sviluppare progetti seguendo le regole del buon costruire, sia un puntuale controllo della geometria da cui derivano le molteplici rappresentazioni di tipo grafo-numerico. Ci si interrogherà inoltre sul rinnovato rapporto tra Rilievo e Progetto, in un ambiente particolarmente fertile ove la Geometria è indagata nelle sue poliedriche proprietà e al Disegno è affidato un ruolo di maggiore visibilità e di effettiva rilevanz

EU enlargement and labour demand in the New Member States

Research to date on labour market responses to EU integration has tended to concentrate on the labour markets of the old EU members. But what effect has the integration of trade had on wages in the new member states? The following article attempts to answer this question using an empirical model of conditional sectoral labour demand

Specialize rightly or decline

Is exporting potato chips really the same than exporting microchips for a country economic growth? Is the rate of economic growth independent on the production/export structure? Is moving toward dynamic sectors a key for economic growth? This paper exploits a panel dataset for 188 countries and almost 700 sectors over the 1960-2004 period. Our purpose is to determine if and how sectoral structure influences the rate of economic growth, both from a static and a dynamic perspective. Different theoretical lines of research give suggestion in this direction: both past keynesian contributions and the endogenous growth literature suggest that economic structure can play an effective role in influencing economic growth. Our empirical analysis, shows that there is some evidence of this kind. We test the robustness of our result, checking the sensitivity of our main result to several alternative

Individual Earnings, International Outsourcing and Technological Change.

The aim of this paper is to empirically evaluate the relative effects of international outsourcing of materials and services and of ICT capital deepening on wage inequality between blue and white collars in the Italian manufacturing industry during the period 1985-1999. We merge an administrative data set on workers\' wages and individual characteristics with data on imported inputs from Italian input-output tables and other sector-level variables. Our results confirm that both material and service outsourcing widen the skilled/unskilled wage gap while ICT capital deepening positively affects real wages regardless of the worker\'s status. However, important differences emerge when the overall sample is split between traditional and innovative sectors.International Outsourcing, ICT, Wage Inequality

BIM e beni architettonici. Verso una metodologia operativa per la conoscenza e la gestione del patrimonio culturale

Lo studio intende rispondere alla crescente ne- cessità di organizzare in maniera virtuosa gli ap- parati informativi relativi al Patrimonio Culturale, attraverso una metodologia che integri processi multidisciplinari di interazione con l’informazio- ne, finalizzati al rilievo, documentazione, gestio- ne, conoscenza e valorizzazione del Bene. È necessario ripercorrere, attualizzandolo, il pro- cesso di acquisizione strumentale dell’informa- zione, di normalizzazione e di strutturazione dei dati acquisti in un modello semantico tridimen- sionale e la successiva rappresentabilità e la frui- bilità del modello e della banca dati associata. Se nel campo della progettazione l’utilizzo del Buil- ding Information Modeling ha visto negli ultimi anni un consolidamento nelle procedure e l’indi- viduazione di metodologie standard, nell’ambito dei Beni Culturali, la sfida volta all’individuazione di metodologie operative è ancora aperta.The study aims to answer the growing need for virtuously organize informational apparatuses related to Cultural Heritage. We propose a me- thodology that integrates multidisciplinary pro- cesses of interaction with information aimed at survey, documentation, management, knowled- ge and enhancement of historic artifacts. It is needed to review and update the procedu- re of instrumental data acquisition, standardi- zation and structuring of the acquired data in a three-dimensional semantic model as well as the subsequent representability and accessibility of the model and the related database. If the use of Building Information Modeling has in recent years seen a consolidation in the procedures and the identification of standard methods in design process, nevertheless in the field of architectural heritage, the challenge to identify operational methodologies for the conservation, manage- ment and process enhancement is still open