This paper discusses the development of an energy systems model for the southern countries of Europe. More precisely, for three main actors of the South of the European Union: Spain, Italy and Portugal. The three of them are currently facing economic difficulties due to the world financial crisis. To satisfy their energy demand at the less cost-effective price and following the EU policies in terms of greenhouse emissions requires a deep analysis of the current situation and an accurate forecast for the upcoming years. There are several EU (EU 20/20/20, treaty of Lisbon and EU ETS) and UN (Kyoto Protocol) policies that are taken into account in the model to build the most realistic scenarios that can happen in the three countries in the following years. This paper is based on the electricity consumption coming from the residential, industrial and commercial sectors. The model is developed in the open source program OSINDA (OSeMOSYS with INterface and DAtabase). It considers different possible scenarios for the three countries from 2010 to 2050 and asses the paths to follow in terms of infrastructure investments for the upcoming years. The baseline scenario takes into account the current taxes in CO2 emissions, the current capital, fixed and variable costs and the prices of the imports of fossil fuels. Then, there are plausible futures that analyze different possible scenarios (with the normal uncertainty of the future). The source code and modelling data is publicly available under the intellectual protection of Creative Commons®.

Mortality in countries of Eastern and Southern Europe: trends and patterns Abstract The purpose of this thesis to is to evaluate any variances and commonality in the trends of mortality rates between southern and eastern Europe for the period beginning at the end of World War II (WWII) to present day. In order that the data used in the analysis of the populations of these two European regions is drawn from broad-based yet controlled demographic parameters, two countries from each region have been targeted. From southern Europe, Italy and Portugal, and from Eastern Europe Hungary and Bulgaria. The thesis will present both the analysis of data that relates to the development of the gross mortality rate together with that of more refined data that calculates the standardised mortality rate. A more in-depth analysis of mortality trends based on mortality tables and decomposition methods will also be presented using indicators of life expectancy at birth, infant mortality and life span, together with methods of decomposition of the difference between two demographic indicators (Kitagawy, R. Pressata, E. Arriagy and V. M. Shkolnikova). The conclusion of the analytical section deals with age variability at death. The hypotheses, set out in the introductory chapter, are evaluated at the end of the paper, based on...

This study aims to analyse women’s self-employment in five regions of Europe, namely Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, North-West Europe and Western Europe in two years, 2002 and 2016. To assess the factors affecting women’s self-employment in Europe we base our analysis on push and pull theory and as far as the quantitative part is concerned we estimate a probit model. Our research questions are the following: What socio-economic factors influence women to enter self-employment in the five regions of Europe? How are these factors related to the push and pull theory? Is there a trend of convergence over time in the five European regions studied? The main findings are that being women decreases the probability to become self-employed in the five European regions, except in the Northern part of Europe. The result suggests that women more often than men are pushed into self-employment as they have to balance work with family. Being young (18-35) also decreases the probability of being self-employed compared to middle age individual (36-50) in the year 2002 and 2016. Individuals with low and medium-skill level have a lower probability of being self-employed in comparison to the individual with high skill. Regarding the research questions, this study found that variable age (18-36), age (51-65), married, children, medium education, high education, low skill and high skill are factors that influence women in their decision to become self-employed. Observing the change over time of self-employment, we found that the probability increases being selfemployed in Southern Europe whereas it decreases in Northern Europe.