Portuguese Scientists’ Migration: a study on the 2008 crisis aftermath

In the economic and social aftermath of the 2008 crisis there has been an important and growing new wave of highly qualified Portuguese emigration comprising scientists. No or very few public policies have been designed to reverse this phenomenon, risking the consequences of brain drain. International literature argues that professional reasons are central to scientists’ decision to migrate, even after the 2008 crisis. Spending some time in a foreign country to study, research, or teach, is perceived as a common step in an individual academic trajectory and an advantage for a successful professional career in academia. It is also encouraged by European Union policies. Twelve individual portraits of Portuguese scientists living in central Europe reveal how important other factors are to the migration decision‐making process. These factors include the economic crisis, student mobility programmes, and the current Portuguese scientific system revision.     

Introduction: decolonising the “undecolonisable”? Portugal and the independence of Lusophone Africa

In 2015, Lusophone Africa celebrated 40 years since independence. Portuguese colonies in Africa became independent in the aftermath of two orders of interlinked events. The first was the fierce-armed opposition to the colonial order – through the action of nationalist movements and nationalist thinkers such as Amílcar Cabral – which escalated after 1960 when French and English colonies in Africa were achieving independence. The second was the Carnation Revolution, in 1974, which, despite having taken place in Lisbon, had powerful reverberations across Portuguese Africa. Here, I argue that the Carnation Revolution was a by-product of the emergence of nationalist movements in Africa, when it became apparent that popular uprisings there could not be won by conventional armed struggle. Or, to put it slightly different, anticolonial struggle in Africa opened the way not only for the end of Portuguese rule on the continent, but also for the demise of dictatorship in Portugal itself.     

Skew-normal alpha-power model

In this paper, authors study properties and inference for the newly introduced skew-normal alpha-power model, generalizing both, the power-normal and skew-normal models. Inference is approached via maximum likelihood. Fisher information matrix is derived and shown to be nonsingular at the whole parametric space. Special emphasis is placed on the special case of the power–skew-normal model. Studies with real data illustrate the fact that the model can be very useful in applications, being able to overfit less general models entertained in the literature.     

Exit, Voice, Loyalty in Transition: A Theoretical Framework

On the grounds of borrowing and reforming Hirschman’s terminology, ‘exit, voice, loyalty’, we show both a conceptual and a methodological framework that can be used to raise questions in transitology studies. These issues include the following points: are there any models being developed concerning the transition countries?; are there any similar models in Western Europe?; is there any convergence between the models of both Eastern and Western Europe? If the answer to the last issue is yes, then in which areas? Or if it is a no, is it true that a special economic, social and also political system is developing in Eastern Europe? Another issue concerns how strong the growth potential of the different models is. It also examines which are the successful models and which are not, and what is the role of the economic and political elite in the development of these models. This study includes only the theoretical framework.     

A study of Bayesian local robustness with applications in actuarial statistics

Local or infinitesimal Bayesian robustness is a powerful tool to study the sensitivity of posterior magnitudes, which cannot be expressed in a simple manner. For these expressions, the global Bayesian robustness methodology does not seem adequate since the practitioner cannot avoid using inappropriate classes of prior distributions in order to make the model mathematically tractable. This situation occurs, for example, when we compute some types of premiums in actuarial statistics in order to fix the premium to be charged to an insurance policy. In this paper, analytical and simple expressions that allow us to study the sensitivity of premiums, which are usually used in automobile insurance are provided by using the local Bayesian robustness methodology. Some examples are examined by using real automobile claim insurance data.     

The Impact of Remittances on Nutritional Status of Children in Ecuador1

This work analyzes the impact of remittances on nutritional status of children aged <5 years old in Ecuador in 2006. Using a set of anthropometric indicators constructed according to the new World Health Organization standards, the last household survey available for this country, and an instrumental variables strategy controlling for endogeneity of remittances, this study finds a positive and significant effect of remittance income on short-term and middle-term child nutritional status; nevertheless, no significant impact on long-run anthropometric indicators.     

The Determinants of Retail Productivity: A Critical Review of the Evidence

This paper discusses the literature on the established determinants of productivity in the retail sector. It also draws attention to some neglected strands of research which provide useful insights into strategies that could allow productivity enhancements in this area of the economy. To date, very few attempts have been made to integrate different specialisms in order to explain what drives productivity in retail. Here this paper rectifies this omission by putting together studies from economics, geography, knowledge management and employment studies. It is the authors’ view that quantitative studies of retail productivity should focus on total factor productivity in retailing as the result of competition/composition effects, planning regulations, information and communications technology, the multinational operation element and workforce skills. Further, the fact that retail firms possess advantages that are transferable between locations suggests that investment in strategies enhancing the transfer of explicit and tacit knowledge between and within businesses are crucial to achieve productivity gains.     

Epsilon Birnbaum–Saunders distribution family: properties and inference

In this paper we introduce a new extension for the Birnbaum–Saunder distribution based on the family of the epsilon-skew-symmetric distributions studied in Arellano-Valle et al. (J Stat Plan Inference 128(2):427–443, 2005). The extension allows generating Birnbaun–Saunders type distributions able to deal with extreme or outlying observations (Dupuis and Mills, IEEE Trans Reliab 47:88–95, 1998). Basic properties such as moments and Fisher information matrix are also studied. Results of a real data application are reported illustrating good fitting properties of the proposed model.