sweeping changes have taken place in the world’s economy in recent decades, changes that have reshaped the structure of employment on a global scale. national economies are now more integrated into the global system more than any other time in the recent past. the volume of international trade and the magnitude of cross-border capital flows have reached historically high levels. advances in com...

In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington argued that the primary axis of global conflict was no longer ideological or economic but cultural and religious, and that this division would characterize the “battle lines of the future.” In contrast to the "top down" approach in previous research focused on the relations among nation states, we focused on the flows of interpersonal communicati...

The literature on political economy has over the years divided into two reasonably distinct areas of concern: international and comparative political economy. International political economy tends to concern itself with global trends—in terms of global flows of investment and trade—and with global actors and industries—including multinational corporations, international regulatory regimes and b...

The level, tenor and instability of capital flows from global financial markets towards developing countries are a major source of concern for macroeconomic managers, while their causes remain largely unexplained by economic theory. Country ‘fundamentals’ (such as economic growth, monetary stability and institutional capacity) as sources of default risk have been the main focus of economic rese...

Global commodity trade networks are critical to our collective sustainable development. Their increasing interconnectedness pose two practical questions: (i) Do the current network configurations support their further growth? (ii) How resilient are these networks to economic shocks? We analyze the data of global commodity trade flows from 1996 to 2012 to evaluate the relationship between struct...

Economic aspects of possible land use strategies and protection measures in coastal zones as a response to global environmental change are examined. First, some key elements are mentioned that are of critical importance for water and land management in coastal zones. Next, various socio-economic repercussions are discussed. In this context, research needs will be addressed. Subsequently, these ...

This work presents dispatching strategies based on methods of job-flow and application-level scheduling in virtual organizations of distributed computational environments with non-dedicated resources. Job-flow management is implemented with the set of specific rules for resource usage. Applications are considered as parallel jobs. Strategies are based on economic scheduling models and diverse a...

We study the Casimir force on a single surface immersed in an inhomoge-neous medium. Specifically we study the vacuum fluctuations of a scalar field with a spatially varying squared mass, m 2 + λ∆(x − a) + V (x), where V is a smooth potential and ∆(x) is a unit-area function sharply peaked around x = 0. ∆(x − a) represents a semi-penetrable thin plate placed at x = a. In the limits {∆(x−a) → δ(...