We address empirically the factors affecting the dynamics of income inequality among industrialized economies. Using a panel for 32 developed countries spanning the last four decades, our results indicate that the predictions of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem concerning the effects of international trade on income inequality find support in the data if we concentrate on imports from developing countries as a trade measure, as theory would imply. We find that democratization, the interaction of technology and education and changes in the relative power of labour unions affect inequality dynamics robustly.

The Swedish Curriculum for the upper secondary school states that teachers should “ensure that teaching in terms of content and its organisation is typified by a gender perspective” (Skolverket 2011, p. 9). Considering that there is no further information regarding what a “gender perspective” means in reality, this sentence could be interpreted in many different ways. This study aims to explore how EFL teachers deal with linguistic gender equality, and which strategies they use to maintain a gender inclusive language in their classroom. Six interviews were conducted with EFL teachers at upper secondary schools in Stockholm, Sweden. The results indicated that the teachers thought this was an important issue to consider in teaching, and that they had well-reasoned strategies for maintaining a gender perspective. The most prominently discussed strategies were encouraging reflection and discussion on these matters, and choosing appropriate literature that either would show a variety of different perspectives, or else would question the social norm. However, concerning their own language production, some of the teachers lacked explicit strategies for maintaining a gender inclusive language, which could derive from a lack in knowledge. Thus, this essay proposes that gender inequality in language needs to be more explicitly explored, both in teacher education and in further education for employed teachers. The teachers displayed an ambition to maintain a gender equal language teaching; and would benefit from more explicit tools to realize that.

In this thesis, fixed point theory is used to construct a fractal type sets and to solve data classification problem. Fixed point method, which is a beautiful mixture of analysis, topology, and geometry has been revealed as a very powerful and important tool in the study of nonlinear phenomena. The existence of fixed points is therefore of paramount importance in several areas of mathematics and other sciences. In particular, fixed points techniques have been applied in such diverse fields as biology, chemistry, economics, engineering, game theory and physics. In Chapter 2 of this thesis it is demonstrated how to define and construct a fractal type sets with the help of iterations of a finite family of generalized F-contraction mappings, a class of mappings more general than contraction mappings, defined in the context of b-metric space. This leads to a variety of results for iterated function system satisfying a different set of contractive conditions. The results unify, generalize and extend various results in the existing literature. In Chapter 3, the theory of support vector machine for linear and nonlinear classification of data and the notion of generalized support vector machine is considered. In the thesis it is also shown that the problem of generalized support vector machine can be considered in the framework of generalized variation inequalities and results on the existence of solutions are established. / FUSION

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<p>This dissertation is a three-part analysis examining how the welfare state in advanced Western democracies has responded to recent demographic changes. Specifically, this dissertation investigates two primary relationships, beginning with the influence of government spending on poverty. I analyze two at-risk populations in particular: immigrants and children of single mothers. Next, attention is turned to the influence of individual and environmental traits on preferences for social spending. I focus specifically on religiosity, religious beliefs and religious identity. I pool data from a number of international macro- and micro-data sources including the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), International Social Survey Program (ISSP), the World Bank Databank, and the OECD Databank. Analyses highlight the power of the welfare state to reduce poverty, but also the effectiveness of specific areas of spending focused on addressing new social risks. While previous research has touted the strength of the welfare state, my analyses highlight the need to consider new social risks and encourage closer attention to how social position affects preferences for the welfare state.</p> / Dissertation

<p>My dissertation investigates twin financial interventions—urban development and emergency management—in a single small town. Once a thriving city drawing blacks as blue-collar workers during the Great Migration, Benton Harbor, Michigan has suffered from waves of out-migration, debt, and alleged poor management. Benton Harbor’s emphasis on high-end economic development to attract white-collar workers and tourism, amidst the poverty, unemployment, and disenfranchisement of black residents, highlights an extreme case of American urban inequality. At the same time, many bystanders and representative observers argue that this urban redevelopment scheme and the city’s takeover by the state represent Benton Harbor residents’ only hope for a better life. I interviewed 44 key players and observers in local politics and development, attended 20 public meetings, conducted three months of observations, and collected extensive archival data. Examining Benton Harbor’s time under emergency management and its luxury golf course development as two exemplars of a larger relationship, I find that the top-down processes allegedly intended to alleviate Benton Harbor’s inequality actually reproduce and deepen the city’s problems. I propose that the beneficiaries of both plans constitute a white urban regime active in Benton Harbor. I show how the white urban regime serves its interests by operating an extraction machine in the city, which serves to reproduce local poverty and wealth by directing resources toward the white urban regime and away from the city.</p> / Dissertation

The goal of this work is to outline the problems of equal opportunities in the Czech republic and to judge sex discrimination in the labour market and its factors.

This study aims at investigating how economic inequality affects the possibilities for successful water cooperation between neighboring states sharing a transboundary watershed. As of 2019, researchers have concluded that there are 310 international river basins affecting 150 countries and 52 percent of the world’s population. Drawing on theories from research on cross-border cooperation and openness focusing on the relative attributes of bordering states, the hypothesis is that the more economically equal two bordering states are, the more they will cooperate regarding their shared waters, while the total economic development of the dyad will also have a positive effect on transboundary water cooperation. Initial regression analyses show no effect of economic inequality in a dyad on its transboundary water cooperation, while the effect of the accumulated economic development is significant. However, after including control variables on joint democracy, cultural similarities, conflict history, quality of government and region in the model, economic inequality is shown to have a statistically significant effect on transboundary water cooperation. Contrary to the predictions, this correlation is positive, which means that economic inequality between riparian states actually enhances cooperation in this study. One possible explanation may be the power imbalance economic inequality creates, which might allow the economically more powerful state to dictate the terms and impose cooperative arrangements on the weaker state that serve its own interests.

[pt] A dissertação pretende repensar a desigualdade nas Relações Internacionais a partir da obra Power and Interdependence, publicada em 1977 por Robert Keohane e Joseph Nye. Argumenta-se que, ao contrário do que os autores afirmam, os novos processos políticos que caracterizam a política internacional desde o início do século XX não necessariamente resultaram na diminuição da hierarquia no sistema internacional. Pelo contrário, as organizações internacionais permitem a articulação de outras formas de discriminação entre os Estados que não podem ser resumidas a fatores econômicos ou assimetrias de poder. O cerne discussão sobre a desigualdade na obra de Keohane e Nye está no próprio conceito de interdependência complexa, o qual divide o sistema internacional entre os avançados ou pluralistas e industrializados, e aqueles que não podem fazer parte desse grupo sem os devidos ajustes. As organizações internacionais, portanto, não seriam fatores que diminuiriam a hierarquia no sistema internacional, mas seriam reprodutoras da desigualdade por meio da atribuição de organizationally dependent capabilities. / [en] The dissertation intends to rethink the inequality in International Relations based on the book Power and Interdependence, published in 1977 by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye. It is argued that, contrary to what the authors say, the new political processes that characterize international politics since the beginning of the twentieth century did not resulted necessarily in the decrease of international hierarchy. On the contrary, international organizations allow the articulation of other forms of discrimination among the states that cannot be reduced to economic factors or asymmetries of power. The core discussion about inequality in the work of Keohane and Nye is on the very concept of complex interdependence, which divides the international system between the advanced or pluralistic, industrialized, and those that cannot join this group without the proper adjustments. Therefore, international organizations would not be factors that decrease the hierarchy in the international system, but are reproducing inequality through the allocation of organizationally dependent capabilities.

Cette thèse traite des méthodes de descente d’ordre un pour les problèmes de minimisation. Elle comprend trois parties. Dans la première partie, nous apportons une vue d’ensemble des bornes d’erreur et les premières briques d’unification d’un concept. Nous montrons en effet la place centrale de l’inégalité du gradient de Lojasiewicz, en mettant en relation cette inégalité avec les bornes d’erreur. Dans la seconde partie, en usant de l’inégalité de Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL), nous apportons un nouvel outil pour calculer la complexité des m´méthodes de descente d’ordre un pour la minimisation convexe. Notre approche est totalement originale et utilise une suite proximale “worst-case” unidimensionnelle. Ces résultats introduisent une méthodologie simple : trouver une borne d’erreur, calculer la fonction KL désingularisante quand c’est possible, identifier les constantes pertinentes dans la méthode de descente, et puis calculer la complexité en usant de la suite proximale “worst-case” unidimensionnelle. Enfin, nous étendons la méthode extragradient pour minimiser la somme de deux fonctions, la première étant lisse et la seconde convexe. Sous l’hypothèse de l’inégalité KL, nous montrons que la suite produite par la méthode extragradient converge vers un point critique de ce problème et qu’elle est de longueur finie. Quand les deux fonctions sont convexes, nous donnons la vitesse de convergence O(1/k) qui est classique pour la méthode de gradient. De plus, nous montrons que notre complexité de la seconde partie peut être appliquée à cette méthode. Considérer la méthode extragradient est l’occasion de d´écrire la recherche linéaire exacte pour les méthodes de décomposition proximales. Nous donnons des détails pour l’implémentation de ce programme pour le problème des moindres carrés avec régularisation ℓ1 et nous donnons des résultats numériques qui suggèrent que combiner des méthodes non-accélérées avec la recherche linéaire exacte peut être un choix performant. / This thesis focuses on first order descent methods in the minimization problems. There are three parts. Firstly, we give an overview on local and global error bounds. We try to provide the first bricks of a unified theory by showing the centrality of the Lojasiewicz gradient inequality. In the second part, by using Kurdyka- Lojasiewicz (KL) inequality, we provide new tools to compute the complexity of first-order descent methods in convex minimization. Our approach is completely original and makes use of a one-dimensional worst-case proximal sequence. This result inaugurates a simple methodology: derive an error bound, compute the KL esingularizing function whenever possible, identify essential constants in the descent method and finally compute the complexity using the one-dimensional worst case proximal sequence. Lastly, we extend the extragradient method to minimize the sum of two functions, the first one being smooth and the second being convex. Under Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz assumption, we prove that the sequence produced by the extragradient method converges to a critical point of this problem and has finite length. When both functions are convex, we provide a O(1/k) convergence rate. Furthermore, we show that our complexity result in the second part can be applied to this method. Considering the extragradient method is the occasion to describe exact line search for proximal decomposition methods. We provide details for the implementation of this scheme for the ℓ1 regularized least squares problem and give numerical results which suggest that combining nonaccelerated methods with exact line search can be a competitive choice.