Risco de Desabastecimento Hídrico na Região Seridó, Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil.

Este trabalho tem como propósito analisar o risco de desabastecimento hídrico urbano municipal em uma região do estado do Rio Grande do Norte (RN), a partir dos resultados do Índice de Risco de Desabastecimento Hídrico (IRDH). A pesquisa foi direcionada pela hipótese de que a relação entre fatores ambientais, infraestruturais, socioeconômicos e de planejamento estatal, produz territórios de risco de desabastecimento hídrico. Os pressupostos teórico-metodológicos estão baseados em Welle e Birkmann (2015); Almeida, Welle e Birkmann (2016); Medeiros (2018); Oliveira (2018); Macedo e Troleis (2020). Neste contexto, o IRDH foi estruturado em uma perspectiva sistêmica, onde os territórios de risco de desabastecimento hídrico foram identificados a partir de indicadores ambientais, infraestruturais, socioeconômicos e de planejamento estatal, utilizando como instrumentos de análise 19 variáveis. Como resultado o artigo apresenta a região de abastecimento hídrico Seridó, com 23 municípios, dos quais 20 foram classificados como ‘alto risco’ de desabastecimento hídrico (87%); 3 com ‘médio risco’ (13%) e nenhum com ‘baixo’, ‘muito baixo’ e ‘muito alto’ risco conforme a classificação do IRDH. A região apresentou-se extremamente vulnerável ao desabastecimento hídrico, principalmente pelas características ambientais e infraestruturais destacados por períodos de estiagem prolongada, baixa disponibilidade de abastecimento dos mananciais superficiais e subterrâneos, além de fragilidade na infraestrutura de saneamento básico, a partir da exposição dos mananciais à contaminação. Foram propostas a transposição de bacias, integração de sistemas de abastecimento, pesquisa hidrogeológica entre outras, para mitigação do risco de desabastecimento hídrico resultante para esta região.Palavras-chave: Vulnerabilidade; Índice; Seridó, Colapso Hídrico. Risk of Water Shortage in The Seridó Region of Rio Grande Do Norte, Brazil A B S T R A C TThis paper aims to analyze the risk of municipal urban water shortages in a region of the state of Rio Grande do Norte (RN), based on the results of the Water Supply Risk Index (IRDH). The research was guided by the hypothesis that the relationship between environmental, infrastructural, socioeconomic and state planning factors produces territories at risk of water shortages. The theoretical-methodological assumptions are based on Welle e Birkmann (2015); Almeida, Welle and Birkmann (2016); Medeiros (2018); Oliveira (2018); Macedo and Troleis (2020). In this context, the IRDH was structured from a systemic perspective, in which the territories at risk of water shortages were identified through environmental, infrastructural, socioeconomic and state planning indicators - as instruments of analysis, nineteen variables were used. As a result, the article presents the Seridó water supply region, with 23 municipalities, of which 20 were classified as 'high risk' of water shortages (87%); 3 as ‘medium risk’ (13%) and none as ‘low’, ‘very low’ and ‘very high’ risk as per the IRDH rating. The region is extremely vulnerable to water shortages, the main reasons are the environmental and infrastructural characteristics highlighted by periods of prolonged drought, low availability of supply of surface and underground water sources, in addition to shortcoming in basic sanitation infrastructure, which caused by the exposure of water sources to contamination. Watershed transposition, integration of supply systems, hydrogeological research, among others, were proposed to mitigate the risk of resulting water shortages for this region.Keywords: Vulnerability; Index; Seridó, Water Collapse

Changes in Quality of Economic Planning in the Late USSR: Technological and Institutional Dynamics

Introduction. Studying the Soviet economic performance is important in searching for arguments in the ongoing debate on the possibilities of routine and strategic planning application for economic development of the Russian Federation. The purpose of the article is to identify the dynamics of the planning quality of the Soviet economy in the framework of the institutional approach to economic history. Materials and Methods. The author constructed a data set filled with available information on key growth indicators (national income, production volume and labor productivity, capital investment) targeted in five-year and annual plans, which passed their way from initial drafts proposed by academic economists and employees of the State Planning Commission to approved legal documents, and to the further implementation, presented in branch (industry, agriculture, retail) and spatial (union republics) breakdown. The archival data on the growing activity of the State Planning Commission for revising the approved planned indicators is of our primary contribution. Results. The author highlights the factors underlying the deviations for key planned aggregated indicators that arose at various stages of their preparation, adoption and revision, between their approved figures and actual performance. The results of the data analysis basically confirmed our hypothesis that the technological improvement of the planning process was largely offset by the deterioration of institutional interactions between its subjects. Discussion and Conclusion. While there were signs of an increase in the role of scientists in the process of drafting five-year plans from the second half of the 1950s to the mid-1970s, then from the second half of the 1970s we find less and less evidence that they played a meaningful role in the short and medium term planning processes. On the other hand, our analysis revealed a significantly higher level of fulfillment in annual breakdown compared to five-year one. This confirms the view that just annual plans performed more operational functions, as compared to the motivational ones, in managing the Soviet economy.

Cyprus Economy in the Light of Debt Problem

The model created by using the independent variables of total income, total capital, total savings, government expenditures, and employment, which I think has a significant impact on the growth of the Cyprus economy, has been examined in the light of the debt problem. Annual time-series data from 1995Q to 2017Q were obtained from the Cyprus State Planning Office in Cyprus. Unrestricted VAR (Vector Autoregression) model was used to test the causal relationship of the variables considered. Empirical findings revealed that some variables such as Wald test results for 78 lags, respectively, affect the GDP growth rate together. In particular, it was observed that there are bidirectional influences between employment, government expenditures, total capital, and savings which are not estimated in former studies. In addition, total income and total savings coefficients have a unidirectional influence on employment. It has been observed that the expenditure and savings coefficients also affect the total income.

Steady-State Planning in Expected Reward Multichain MDPs

The planning domain has experienced increased interest in the formal synthesis of decision-making policies. This formal synthesis typically entails finding a policy which satisfies formal specifications in the form of some well-defined logic. While many such logics have been proposed with varying degrees of expressiveness and complexity in their capacity to capture desirable agent behavior, their value is limited when deriving decision-making policies which satisfy certain types of asymptotic behavior in general system models. In particular, we are interested in specifying constraints on the steady-state behavior of an agent, which captures the proportion of time an agent spends in each state as it interacts for an indefinite period of time with its environment. This is sometimes called the average or expected behavior of the agent and the associated planning problem is faced with significant challenges unless strong restrictions are imposed on the underlying model in terms of the connectivity of its graph structure. In this paper, we explore this steady-state planning problem that consists of deriving a decision-making policy for an agent such that constraints on its steady-state behavior are satisfied. A linear programming solution for the general case of multichain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is proposed and we prove that optimal solutions to the proposed programs yield stationary policies with rigorous guarantees of behavior.

Markets, Migrants and Institutional Change: The Dynamics of China's Changing Huji System, 1978-2007

<p>This research seeks to understand how institutions of governance are adapting to the changing conditions arising from the large scale internal migrations as a result of the growth of the market economy in China. The primary focus is explaining continuity and change in the formal institutional arrangements of the huji system over the period of study (1978-2007). During China's 'static decades' (late 1950s - late 1970s), internal migration was heavily restricted, regulated and controlled by state planning and state allocation of public resources to the point where internal migration was for most limited to political migrations. The mechanism for controlling population movements was and largely still remains the 'household registration/huji/hukou system' but since the policy of 'reform and opening', the number of people involved in spontaneous, nonsanctioned and 'outside the plan' economic migrations has grown rapidly. Most scholars agree that there are now well over 140 million nongmingong (rural workers), residing in Chinese cities without 'urban household registration'. This research acknowledges the politico-economic dynamics of this contemporary increase, specifically the reintroduction of market economics, integration into the global economy and the geopolitical dispersion of foreign capital, and seeks to investigate how huji management has been adapted to the challenge of 'temporary' residents in urban areas. Liberal economic arguments view the huji system as a hangover of the command economic functioning of central planners and an impediment to economic growth and development. However, the sustained period of rapid economic growth over the period of study suggests the role of huji management in development needs to be reconsidered. This study seeks to ascertain what role the huji system has played in this development and explain how and why it has survived and adapted this revolutionary upheaval. Data is generated from hukou statistics, laws, directives and regulations as well as migration, urbanisation and economic indicators to demonstrate the exact nature of the relationship between domestic economic development, the movement of migrants and changes in law, government policy and regulations regarding people's movement and residency. From this data the major changes are presented, including liberalisation of labour migration, some liberalisation of hukou transfer, decentralisation of hukou decision-making, and a general prioritising of the modern values of efficiency and equality, though far more the former than the latter. From these findings a model of formal institutional change in China's huji system is developed outlining a dynamic process of change that occurs due to a gap between informal institutional practices and formal institutional arrangements brought about by changing socio-economic conditions and an evolving institutional culture. The research gives us a better understanding of the dynamics of institutional change in a transitional society, contributes to institutionalist studies of change and provides well needed insight into the institutional foundations of the Chinese developmental state.</p>

Markets, Migrants and Institutional Change: The Dynamics of China's Changing Huji System, 1978-2007

<p>This research seeks to understand how institutions of governance are adapting to the changing conditions arising from the large scale internal migrations as a result of the growth of the market economy in China. The primary focus is explaining continuity and change in the formal institutional arrangements of the huji system over the period of study (1978-2007). During China's 'static decades' (late 1950s - late 1970s), internal migration was heavily restricted, regulated and controlled by state planning and state allocation of public resources to the point where internal migration was for most limited to political migrations. The mechanism for controlling population movements was and largely still remains the 'household registration/huji/hukou system' but since the policy of 'reform and opening', the number of people involved in spontaneous, nonsanctioned and 'outside the plan' economic migrations has grown rapidly. Most scholars agree that there are now well over 140 million nongmingong (rural workers), residing in Chinese cities without 'urban household registration'. This research acknowledges the politico-economic dynamics of this contemporary increase, specifically the reintroduction of market economics, integration into the global economy and the geopolitical dispersion of foreign capital, and seeks to investigate how huji management has been adapted to the challenge of 'temporary' residents in urban areas. Liberal economic arguments view the huji system as a hangover of the command economic functioning of central planners and an impediment to economic growth and development. However, the sustained period of rapid economic growth over the period of study suggests the role of huji management in development needs to be reconsidered. This study seeks to ascertain what role the huji system has played in this development and explain how and why it has survived and adapted this revolutionary upheaval. Data is generated from hukou statistics, laws, directives and regulations as well as migration, urbanisation and economic indicators to demonstrate the exact nature of the relationship between domestic economic development, the movement of migrants and changes in law, government policy and regulations regarding people's movement and residency. From this data the major changes are presented, including liberalisation of labour migration, some liberalisation of hukou transfer, decentralisation of hukou decision-making, and a general prioritising of the modern values of efficiency and equality, though far more the former than the latter. From these findings a model of formal institutional change in China's huji system is developed outlining a dynamic process of change that occurs due to a gap between informal institutional practices and formal institutional arrangements brought about by changing socio-economic conditions and an evolving institutional culture. The research gives us a better understanding of the dynamics of institutional change in a transitional society, contributes to institutionalist studies of change and provides well needed insight into the institutional foundations of the Chinese developmental state.</p>

The Portuguese Road to Neoliberalism (1976–1989)

The Portuguese constitution, passed in April 1976, considered the nationalisations undertaken after the Carnation Revolution to be ‘irreversible’, prescribing a development model based on state planning. Changes made to the constitutional text, in 1989, allowed for a privatisation programme that curtailed government intervention and reinforced market provision. This mirrored a previous shift in the public sphere. Whereas political debate in 1976 was mostly centred on state-led development models, the next decade witnessed the rise of a pro-market approach. Two crises of the balance of payments encouraged a growing number of economists, businessmen, journalists and politicians to argue for the need to revise the constitution, enhancing the role and scope of markets. This article focuses on the rise of a neoliberal intellectual field in Portugal between 1976 and 1989, analysing its efforts to overcome the legacy of the Carnation Revolution and build a competitive market order in a semiperipheral context.

Procedure for implementation of strategic environmental assessment in the field of land management on the basis of integration models

This article analyses the legal framework for strategic environmental assessment of state planning documents in the EU, where such an assessment has been conducted for a long time, as well as in Ukraine. The lack of scientific and methodological bases for the implementation of the procedure of strategic environmental assessment in the field of land management has been established. The procedure for implementing the SEA in land management has been updated, namely for land management documentation, that is a subject to such assessment. The stage of development of such documentation on which it is most expedient to carry out SEA is offered. In the framework of this study, land management documentation, that is a subject to strategic environmental assessment, as well as the conditions under which individual documents are subject to SEA are defined. The goals and objectives of the SEA in the field of land management are defined, as well as the main stages of the SEA, in particular in the field of land management. We have analysed the models of integration of strategic environmental assessment into land management and found that the introduction of partial and complete models of integration of SEA into land management is the most appropriate. The list of components which should be contained by the SEA of land management documentation is offered, and also the most expedient analytical tools necessary at realization of SEA are defined.

Mathematical modeling of some social processes using game-theoretic approaches and making managerial decisions based on them

In this article, using game-theoretic approaches, the human community is modeled as a dynamic system, and the influence of such ethical norms of behavior as egoism and altruism, morality (on the example of the Kant imperative or the Golden Rule of Morality) on the state of this system is investigated, as well as the question of determining the effectiveness of the community depending on the prevailing worldview of its representatives. Using the example of a game model of social choice between two norms of behavior – one generally accepted, but outdated, and another, new, not yet widespread, but more advanced and progressive – it is shown that communities, among whose representatives a predominantly egoistic worldview prevails, are less likely to innovate and abandon outdated norms of behavior. Conversely, those communities whose representatives share basic ethical principles are more confident and quickly moving to advanced and progressive norms. In conclusion, the paper examines the question of what advantages a society acquires in which purposeful educational and educational activities are conducted, designed to increase the level of morality and morality among its representatives. The results obtained can be used, firstly, as an integral part of the course on the mathematical base of ethics, which could perform the functions of educational work in higher and secondary educational institutions; and, secondly, for the purposes of evaluating the effectiveness of educational work and state planning in this area.

Postgraduate Professional Education in China: Control Mechanisms and Learning Process

China’s strong economic growth is undoubtedly due to a set of government initiatives, among which the priority projects are the reform of the higher education system. Since the 80s of the last century, the state has paid special attention to the training of scientific personnel. Thanks to far-sighted state planning and strong budget financing, China has created a competitive national system of postgraduate professional education almost from scratch. As a result, if only 9 postgraduate students were trained in 1978, then in 1985 – already 17004, in 1998 – 47077, and in 2018 – 604368. The number of doctorates degrees awarded from 2005 to 2018 more than doubled: from 27,677 to 60,700.The important factors in the formation of the system of postgraduate education is the promulgation of national laws and regulations governing this area of educational activity, a well-built mechanism for managing the work of postgraduate studies and a strict system to control all stages of the educational process for masters and doctoral students. Therefore, this article focuses on the organization of the learning process in Chinese universities and academic institutes, as well as the management mechanism of the national system of training scientific personnel.In addition, according to the data of China's Ministry of education, official statistical information, publications that are publicly available on the Chinese Internet, as well as scientific articles published in major publications around the world, it is shown how the number of universities and academic institutions that train masters and doctoral students, as well as the number of students, admission and graduation of specialists have changed over the past ten years.