The Portuguese National Action Plan for Employment (NAP) is the main instrument for the labour market policy. It was adopted in 1998. The NAP transposes to the Portuguese reality the contents of such guidelines, with the adequate adjustments required by the national specificities, establishing...

This chapter offers a primer on poverty, inequality, and vulnerability analysis and a guide to resources on this topic. It is written for decision makers who want to define the type of information they need to monitor poverty reduction and make appropriate policy decisions and for the technical...

Disputes occurring in PPP projects pervade three interfacing levels of agreements: internal, downstream, and peripheral. PPP disputes have been free from arbitral dispute resolution and their legal environment is uncertain and deregulated. While project partners appear to have a natural monopoly...

The principle of uncertain future: the probability of a future event contains a degree of (hidden) uncertainty. As a result, this uncertainty (in a sense, similar to vibrations, fluctuations) pushes the probability value back from the bounds to the middle of its range (from ~100% and ~0% to the...

In this paper we present a model designed to relate the detailed occupational and industrial demands imposed on the economy by several types of water resource investment. This detail provides the basis for adjusting the market cost of such public investments under the employment conditions...

The principle of uncertain future: the probability of a future event contains an (hidden) uncertainty. The first consequence of the principle: the real values of high probabilities are lower than the preliminarily determined ones; conversely, the real values of low probabilities can be higher...

This paper examines the effects of income inequality in a risk sharing model with limited commitment, that is, when insurance agreements have to be self-enforcing. In this context, numerical dynamic programming is used to examine three questions. First, I consider heterogeneity in mean income,...

A linear and lagged relationship between inflation, unemployment and labor force change rate, π(t)=A0UE(t-t0)+A1dLF(t-t1)/LF(t-t1)+A2 (where A0, A1, and A2 are empirical country-specific coefficients), was found for developed economies. The relationship obtained for France is characterized by...

The Indian banking industry is presently in a situation of great flux. There are various developments, changes within the Indian economy and deregulations occurring that have the potential to drastically change the way this industry functions in the future. As per the changes envisaged by the...

This paper estimates trends in absolute poverty in urban China from 1988 to 2002 using the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) surveys. Poverty incidence curves are plotted, showing that poverty has fallen markedly during the period regardless of the exact location of the poverty line....