Trade is a fundamental pillar of economy and a form of social organization. Its empirical characterization at the worldwide scale is represented by the World Trade Web (WTW), the network built upon the trade relationships between the different countries. Several scientific studies have focused on the structural characterization of this network, as well as its dynamical properties, since we have...

This paper presents a general model of a Group Management Service (GMS) which is designed to support collaborative interactions among groups of distributed users using di erent applications. There are two main bene ts of such a service. Firstly, it would be easier to implement new collaborative applications because of the possibility to use an existing service. Secondly, it would be possible fo...

Editorial Globalization in health care: is international standardization of quality a step toward outsourcing? Though different in many respects from other types of services, health care services are also impacted by globalization. For example, some countries, especially developing ones, can attract customers by offering high quality health care at a lower cost than is available in their home c...