It is widely known that regional disparities do not lead to economic growth. By this, it is meant that convergence among regions might be responsible for a propensity to national growth. In the same way, if there is a sub regional division (with different economic realities) the same phenomenon...

The competitiveness of regions, as a means of promoting the competitiveness of a country as a whole, has been one of the main topics on the agenda of policy makers over the last decades. Several attempts at promoting competitiveness have been made with different degrees of success. In most...

This insightful book shows how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from some of the traditionally less dynamic peripheral economies of the ‘old’ EU – namely Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain – have responded to the twin challenges of globalisation and industrial...

Most of the problems in Spanish public universities come from their complicated and inefficient governance system. This system is sometimes conceived as a simile of the political corps of a nation; sometimes it's conceived as an enterprise not regulated by offer-demand law. A drastic governance...

In recent years, particularly in developed societies, we have witnessed a spectacular advanced in the “amount” of lived years, but the same cannot be stated if we refer to the “quality” of those years, i.e. the amount of years lived free of illness or disability. The quality of life...

This paper deals with electing candidates. In elections voters are frequently offered a small set of actions (voting in favor of one candidate, voting blank, spoiling the ballot, and not showing up). Thus voters can express neither a negative opinion nor an opinion on more than one candidate....

Local wind climate is usually measured and described as the result of a regional wind climate modulated by local topography effects, roughness and obstacles in the surrounding area. This paper renders a fuzzy-logic-based method designed to generate the local wind conditions originated by these...

A non-hydrostatic hydrodynamic model of the Strait of Gibraltar with high spatial and temporal resolution has been used to assess suitable areas for energy extraction from marine currents. The model shows great spatial variability of the available energy flux, ranging from 200Wm−2 to more than...

We introduce the use of the Mahalanobis distance for the analysis of the cohesiveness of a group of linear orders or complete preorders. We prove that arbitrary codifications of the preferences are incompatible with this formulation, while affine transformations permit to compare profiles on the...

La era de la socialización de la información ha llegado para quedarse de manera definitiva. El universo digital sigue en expansión, no sólo con un número creciente de portales, sino también, con numerosas fuentes de datos, redes sociales y conversaciones que están impulsando esta nueva...