The problems of social inequality has plagued the Indian society since the history known. The caste system and its intersection with other religions have compounded the situations even further. This study focuses on the issue of marginalization between the three religious communities of India, namely Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Furthermore this investigation try to propose a solution to this ensuing problem of marginalization by involving the case of green energy sector and its components. The potential that green energy entails for the economy will be studied at close quarters and evidences will be portrayed to see the positive effects. The creation and realization of the fertile grounds for the intersection or the juxtaposition of green energy over marginalization will be studied by combining the two philosophies of complex equality and equality of condition. The investigation reveals that marginalization can be solved by introducing Green energy on a large scale. The proposed model under the architectures of the conceptual frameworks of Spheres of Justice and Development as Freedom creates Green Energy as an independent sphere of influence that shows positive effect in reducing Inequality by interacting with other spheres of influence. Keywords Social inequality,green energy,HDI,Capability...

Data cleansing approaches have usually focused on detecting and fixing errors with little attention to big data scaling. This presents a serious impediment since identify- ing and repairing dirty data often involves processing huge input datasets, handling sophisticated error discovery approaches and managing huge arbitrary errors. With large datasets, error detection becomes overly expensive and complicated especially when considering user-defined functions. Furthermore, a distinctive algorithm is de- sired to optimize inequality joins in sophisticated error discovery rather than na ̈ıvely parallelizing them. Also, when repairing large errors, their skewed distribution may obstruct effective error repairs. In this dissertation, I present solutions to overcome the above three problems in scaling data cleansing. First, I present BigDansing as a general system to tackle efficiency, scalability, and ease-of-use issues in data cleansing for Big Data. It automatically parallelizes the user’s code on top of general-purpose distributed platforms. Its programming inter- face allows users to express data quality rules independently from the requirements of parallel and distributed environments. Without sacrificing their quality, BigDans- ing also enables parallel execution of serial repair algorithms by exploiting the graph representation of discovered errors. The experimental results show that BigDansing outperforms existing baselines up to more than two orders of magnitude. Although BigDansing scales cleansing jobs, it still lacks the ability to handle sophisticated error discovery requiring inequality joins. Therefore, I developed IEJoin as an algorithm for fast inequality joins. It is based on sorted arrays and space efficient bit-arrays to reduce the problem’s search space. By comparing IEJoin against well- known optimizations, I show that it is more scalable, and several orders of magnitude faster. BigDansing depends on vertex-centric graph systems, i.e., Pregel, to efficiently store and process discovered errors. Although Pregel scales general-purpose graph computations, it is not able to handle skewed workloads efficiently. Therefore, I introduce Mizan, a Pregel system that balances the workload transparently during runtime to adapt for changes in computing needs. Mizan is general; it does not assume any a priori knowledge of the graph structure or the algorithm behavior. Through extensive evaluations, I show that Mizan provides up to 84% improvement over techniques leveraging static graph pre-partitioning.

In advanced democracies, many citizens abstain from participating in the political process. Does low and unequal voter turnout influence partisan election results or public policies? If so, how can participation be increased and how can the electorate become more representative of the greater population? / Government

This dissertation adresses financialization – the increasing role of financial activities in the overall economy – in Sweden in 1900-2013. The focus is on the long run relationships between private debt, asset markets, inequality and financial crisis during this period. In line with established scholarship, the present study finds that changes in bank debt had a positive impact on the probability of financial crisis in Sweden. Functional income distribution between profits and wages was an underlying factor influencing the formation of bank debt levels through its impact on collateral in stock markets. Expenses related to the Swedish welfare state – the size of the public sector, government investment and housing construction – had a long run relationship with the wage share. The welfare state has been an effective counter-measure not just against a high profit share, but also against financialization. Moreover, the dissertation shows that the recent era of financialization in Swedish capitalism is not unique in kind. Rather, recent financialization is very similar to the macroeconomic situation during the early decades of the 20th Century. These findings are consistent with much of heterodox economic theory, in particular the Neo-Marxist approach. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine three distributional issues in macroeconomics. First I explore the effects fiscal federalism on economic growth across regions in China. Using the comprehensive official data set of China for 31 regions from 1952 until 1999, I investigate a number of indicators used by the literature to measure federalism and find robust support for only one such measure: the ratio of local total revenue to local tax revenue. Using a difference-in-difference approach and exploiting the two-year gap in the implementation of a tax reform across different regions of China, I also identify a positive relationship between fiscal federalism and regional economic growth. The second paper hypothesizes that an inequitable distribution of income negatively affects the rule of law in resource-rich economies and provides robust evidence in support of this hypothesis. By investigating a data set that contains 193 countries and using econometric methodologies such as the fixed effects estimator and the generalized method of moments estimator, I find that resource-abundance improves the quality of institutions, as long as income and wealth disparity remains below a certain threshold. When inequality moves beyond this threshold, the positive effects of the resource-abundance level on institutions diminish quickly and turn negative eventually. This paper, thus, provides robust evidence about the endogeneity of institutions and the role income and wealth inequality plays in the determination of long-run growth rates. The third paper sets up a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents to investigate the causal channels which run from a concern for international status to long-run economic growth. The simulation results show that the initial distribution of income and wealth play an important role in whether agents gain or lose from globalization.

This dissertation maps the roots of systemic inequality within Seattle’s housing market, zeroing in on the residential mobility of Japanese and African Americans over the course of the 20th century. It analyzes the experiences that have led Japanese and African Americans to occupy distinctive positions within the city’s housing market, as they fought for belonging in a segregated city. Though they shared the burden of living in segregated neighborhoods through much of the first half of the 20th century, Japanese and African Americans occupied distinct economic positions within the city. While Japanese Americans far outnumbered African Americans until World War II, the segregation of African Americans within the city followed a separate trajectory. Shaped by the legacy of slavery and the nation’s Jim Crow order, African Americans became increasingly set apart within the housing market. Seeing how Japanese and African Americans have navigated a segregated housing market is crucial to understanding the racial dimensions of Seattle’s development. While the ghettoization of Japanese Americans facilitated their incarceration during World War II, the city’s fixation on restricting black mobility during the 1950s and 1960s opened up spaces for Japanese Americans. Rather than simply refuting the model minority image, this dissertation examines how it came to shape Seattle’s housing market after World War II. The city’s open housing movement brought about fair housing laws but also a renewed commitment to property rights and the exclusion of African Americans. Weak and unenforced fair housing legislation – though it opened doors to those of a particular class – led to growing divides. These divides are explored in the last part of this dissertation, which highlights the dimensions of post-civil rights era segregation and the struggles waged by low-income black renters to challenge the city’s raced, classed, and gendered boundaries.

The problems we study in this thesis are all related to covering arrays. Covering arrays are combinatorial designs, widely used as templates for efficient interaction-testing suites. They have connections to many areas including extremal set theory, design theory, and graph theory. We define and study several generalizations of covering arrays, and we develop a method which produces an infinite family of LYM inequalities for graph-intersecting collections. A common theme throughout is the dependence of these problems on graphs. Our main contribution is an extremal method yielding LYM inequalities for $H$-intersecting collections, for every undirected graph $H$. Briefly, an $H$-intersecting collection is a collection of packings (or partitions) of an $n$-set in which the classes of every two distinct packings in the collection intersect according to the edges of $H$. We define ``$F$-following" collections which, by definition, satisfy a LYM-like inequality that depends on the arcs of a ``follow" digraph $F$ and a permutation-counting technique. We fully characterize the correspondence between ``$F$-following" and ``$H$-intersecting" collections. This enables us to apply our inequalities to $H$-intersecting collections. For each graph $H$, the corresponding inequality inherently bounds the maximum number of columns in a covering array with alphabet graph $H$. We use this feature to derive bounds for covering arrays with the alphabet graphs $S_3$ (the star on three vertices) and $\kvloop{3}$ ($K_3$ with loops). The latter improves a known bound for classical covering arrays of strength two. We define covering arrays on column graphs and alphabet graphs which generalize covering arrays on graphs. The column graph encodes which pairs of columns must be $H$-intersecting, where $H$ is a given alphabet graph. Optimizing covering arrays on column graphs and alphabet graphs is equivalent to a graph-homomorphism problem to a suitable family of targets which generalize qualitative independence graphs. When $H$ is the two-vertex tournament, we give constructions and bounds for covering arrays on directed column graphs. FOR arrays are the broadest generalization of covering arrays that we consider. We define FOR arrays to encompass testing applications where constraints must be considered, leading to forbidden, optional, and required interactions of any strength. We model these testing problems using a hypergraph. We investigate the existence of FOR arrays, the compatibility of their required interactions, critical systems, and binary relational systems that model the problem using homomorphisms.

The increasing burden of chronic disease in ageing populations has shifted focus towards illness prevention and the self-management of health. Middle-aged and menopausal women’s transitioning bodies, specifically with respect to weight gain and changes in body fat composition, have received much attention by public health officials during the alleged obesity epidemic. In addition to these transformations, socioeconomic status has been shown to interact with obesity by decreasing the psychosocial health of vulnerable women. Although public health actions have targeted the health practices of clinically obese women throughout the menopausal transition, their effectiveness is limited because of existing socioeconomic inequalities, narrow focus on body weight interventions, and the psychosocial impact of an obesity stigma. Drawing on Bourdieu’s sociocultural theory of practice, and namely his concepts of body habitus and symbolic violence, this study aims: (a) to identify the norms and values of clinically overweight and obese postmenopausal women from contrasting socioeconomic backgrounds with regard to the ways they treat and care for their body, and (b) to outline the socio-cultural processes which incline them (or not) to pursue weight-loss strategies. Forty semi-structured interviews were conducted with clinically overweight and obese postmenopausal women from underprivileged (n=20) and middle class (n=20) milieus in the city of Sherbrooke, Québec. An intersectional (gender, age, socioeconomic status) thematic analysis was employed in order to analyze the data and identify emergent themes within and between both socioeconomic groups. This thesis is composed of two distinct studies. The first identifies the diverse contexts of occurrence of obesity stigma and weight shaming, as well as the contrasting responses between the two socioeconomic groups. Although all participants experienced obesity stigma, participants from lower social positions were more vulnerable to the psychosocial impact of dominant obesity discourses. In contrast, a higher access to social, economic, and educational resources provided middle-class women with more protection from weight shaming and discrimination. In the second article, from a public health perspective, the analysis of hierarchies of priorities, perception of control, as well as barriers and facilitators show that weight management needs to be understood as the outcome of a social process in which living conditions, material and psychosocial, offer a number of conditions of possibilities. Globally speaking, middle-class conditions privileged the adherence to public health recommendations, while socially deprived conditions inclined women to adopt unsustainable and risk-oriented weight-loss practices.

Topic of territorial inequalities has gained importance recently, with increased number of authors investigating the topic in Latin American region, where it became a serious issue. Chilean incapability to export a benefits of its national growth to the regions, are a matter of concern of Chilean government as territorial inequalities already prevents the country in further increasing its level of national aggregate growth. Through analysis of economic, demographic, and labor market indicators over the 2000-2012 period on regional level I identify slow and fast growing regions, regions endangered by population decline and answer a question if national Chilean economic growth is visible also in its regions or strictly concentrated in a capital, Santiago. The differences in results of calculations based on administrative and functional regions division demonstrate the need of change in regional approach of Chilean National statistical office such as putting greater focus on rural-urban partnerships in order to unlock the growth potential of Chilean regions.

Chile is one the most developed countries in Latin America with stable market-oriented economy and sustainable economic growth, becoming the first South American country to join the OECD. Nevertheless, it is also the country with the highest inequality of income in the OECD and one of the most unequal countries in the world. The biggest challenge for the next decade seems to be the reduction of inequalities and poverty. To achieve these goals, Chile needs to implement better policy in the area of production, innovations, finances, but also health and education. The thesis examines the development of inequality in Chile, its current situation and the impacts of inequality on the society, focusing on the problematic areas such as education and health. Additionally, it presents possible solutions and recommendations for Chile to reduce the high level of inequalities, including the external help. The main resources used for the analysis are the information published by the World Bank, OECD or European Commission and complemented with statistics and reports of Chilean government.