Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Rate-sharing'

The interaction of radiation with integrated circuits can provoke transient faults due to the deposit of charge in sensitive nodes of transistors. Because of the decrease the size in the process technology, charge sharing between transistors placed close to each other has been more and more observed. This phenomenon can lead to multiple transient faults. Therefore, it is important to analyze the effect of multiple transient faults in integrated circuits and investigate mitigation techniques able to cope with multiple faults. This work investigates the effect known as single-event-induced charge sharing in integrated circuits. Two main techniques are analyzed to cope with this effect. First, a placement constraint methodology is proposed. This technique uses placement constraints in standard cell based circuits. The objective is to achieve a layout for which the Soft-Error Rate (SER) due charge shared at adjacent cell is reduced. A set of fault injection was performed and the results show that the SER can be minimized due to single-event-induced charge sharing in according to the layout structure. Results show that by using placement constraint, it is possible to reduce the error rate from 12.85% to 10.63% due double faults. Second, Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) schemes with different levels of granularities limited by majority voters are analyzed under multiple faults. The TMR versions are implemented using a standard design flow based on a traditional commercial standard cell library. An extensive fault injection campaign is then performed in order to verify the softerror rate due to single-event-induced charge sharing in multiple nodes. Results show that the proposed methodology becomes crucial to find the best trade-off in area, performance and soft-error rate when TMR designs are considered under multiple upsets. Results have been evaluated in a case-study circuit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), synthesized to 90nm Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) library, and they show that combining the two techniques, the error rate resulted from multiple faults can be minimized or masked. By using TMR with different granularities and placement constraint methodology, it is possible to reduce the error rate from 11.06% to 0.00% for double faults. A detailed study of triple, four and five multiple faults combining both techniques are also described. We also tested the TMR with different granularities in SRAM-based FPGA platform. Results show that the versions with a fine grain scheme (FGTMR) were more effectiveness in masking multiple faults, similarly to results observed in the ASICs. In summary, the main contribution of this master thesis is the investigation of charge sharing effects in ASICs and the use of a combination of techniques based on TMR redundancy and placement to improve the tolerance under multiple faults.

Elevated heart rate is considered to be an indicator of stress. Thus, noticing one’s own heartbeat can have a negative connotation. Yet, the heartbeat is simply a physiological function, neither positive nor negative in itself, that is experienced in diverse contexts, such as medical, athletic, or intimate. This study uses first-person  research through design and soma design to increase awareness of the heartbeat from both an individual and social angle and examines the potential benefits of using external sensory stimuli to convey biofeedback information. It also opens up the design space around the heartbeat and sensory stimuli and reflects upon comfort and relaxation, biofeedback and digital mindfulness, the Sensiks sensory reality pod as a tool and space, and the heartbeat as a spectrum and a way of getting to know people. The study results in four deliverables: a design critique of the Sensiks sensory reality pod, a design fiction publication, a design proposal, and an experience prototype. The study proposes the design for the Gallery of Heartbeats – a sensory experience aimed at externalising and sharing the heartbeat of self and others. The Gallery of Heartbeats supports individual reflections, providing the user with real-time numerical, graphical, and auditory biofeedback on their heart rate. It also encourages social communication of this commonly unnoticed physiological feature, allowing users to record and store their heartbeat to an archive and experience the pre-recorded heartbeats of others in a multisensory way. The evaluation of the Gallery of Heartbeats prototype shows that the design succeeds in making people more aware of their cardiovascular activity, triggers their curiosity, and increases empathy. However, the Gallery of Heartbeats also makes the users want to control or change their heart rate which goes against the mindfulness principles of presence-in and presence-with the design was inspired by. Sensory stimuli, especially sound and visuals, are assessed as beneficial for creating feelings of immersion, whereas different representations of the biofeedback information have different effects and use cases.
En förhöjd hjärtfrekvens anses vara en indikator på stress. Därför kan en hög puls tolkas som något negativt. Likväl har hjärtats pulserande enbart en fysiologisk funktion, som i sig varken har en positiv eller negativ betydelse, och som kan erfaras under olika omständigheter, såsom i medicinska sammanhang, vid fysisk träning eller under intima stunder.  Denna studie är en forskning-genom-design ur ett förstapersonsperspektiv samt soma-design för att öka medvetenheten om sina hjärtslag, både från en individuell och en social vinkel, samt en undersökning av de potentiella fördelar som kan finnas med att använda ett yttre stimuli för att ge biofeedback. Den öppnar också upp designrymden kring hjärtslag och sensorisk stimuli, reflekterar kring välbefinnande och avslappning, biofeedback och digital mindfulness, Sensiks sensoriska kapsel som ett verktyg och en plats, samt hjärtfrekvens som ett spektrum och ett sätt att lära känna människor. Resultatet av studien framställs i fyra olika delar: en designkritik av Sensiks sensoriska kapsel, en fiktiv design publikation, ett designförslag, och en prototyp av upplevelser. Detta examensarbete utmynnar i ett förslag på en design kallad “Gallery of Heartbeats” - en sensorisk upplevelse avsedd att ge en yttre form och för att dela hjärtslagen med sig själv och andra. “Gallery of Heartbeats” skapar utrymme för individuell reflektion, och ger användaren i realtid en numerisk, grafisk och ljudmässig biofeedback på sin hjärtfrekvens. Den uppmuntrar också till samtal av detta vanligtvis omärkbara fysiologiska fenomen, den möjliggör användaren att spela in och spara sina hjärtslag i ett arkiv, och användaren ges möjlighet att uppleva förinspelade hjärtslag av andra personer på ett multisensoriskt sätt. Utvärdering av prototypen för “Gallery of Heartbeats” visar att designen lyckas få människor mer medvetna om sin kardiovaskulära aktivitet, väcker deras nyfikenhet och ökar empatin. Dock gör även “Gallery of Heartbeats” att användaren vill kontrollera eller ändra sin hjärtfrekvens, vilket går emot de principerna inom mindfulness av att vara ‘presence-in’ och ‘presence-with’. Sensorisk stimuli, särskilt ljud och bild, ses som främjande av att skapa känslan av att vara absorberad, medan andra signaler från biofeedback har en annan påverkan och andra användningsområden.

For the past 70 years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been the licensing authority for wireless spectrum. Traditionally, spectrum was commercially licensed to primary users with defined uses. With the growth of personal communication systems in the 1990''s, unallocated spectrum has become a scarce commodity. However, since most primary users are active only at certain times and places, much of the allocated spectrum remains underutilized. Substantial holes exist in the spatio-temporal spectrum that could be opportunistically used by unlicensed secondary users. As a result, the FCC is considering allowing secondary users to opportunistically use frequencies that are not being used by primary users. If multiple secondary users are present in the same geographical area, the concept of Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) allows these users to share the opportunistic spectrum. If several secondary users want to use a limited set of frequency resources, they will very likely interfere with each other. Sensing is a distributed technique where each transmitter/receiver pair senses (both passively and actively) the available channels and uses the channel that provides the best performance. While sensing alone allows sharing of the spectrum, it is not the optimal method in terms of maximizing the capacity in such a shared system. If we allow the secondary users to collaborate and share information, optimal capacity might be reached. However, collaboration adds another level of complexity to the transceivers of the secondary users, since they must now be able to communicate (Note that in general, the secondary users may have completely different communication protocols, e.g., Wi-Fi and Bluetooth). Additionally, optimizing the capacity of the available spectrum could have other negative side effects such as impacting the fairness of sharing the resources. Our primary goal is to explore the benefit of this cost-benefit tradeoff by determining the capacity increase obtainable from collaboration. As a secondary goal, we also wish to determine how this increase in capacity affects fairness. To summarize, the goal of this work is to answer the question: Fundamentally, what is the benefit of collaboration in Dynamic Spectrum Sharing?
Master of Science

Les tests d'hypothèses distribués ont de nombreuses applications dans la sécurité, la surveillance de la santé, le contrôle automobile ou la détection d'anomalies. À l'aide de capteurs distribués, les centres de décision de ces systèmes visent à distinguer une situation normale (hypothèse nulle) d'une situation d'alerte (hypothèse alternative). Nous nous concentrons sur la maximisation de la décroissance exponentielle des probabilités d'erreur de type-II (correspondant aux détections manquées), avec un nombre croissant d'observations, tout en maintenant les probabilités d'erreur de type-I (correspondant aux fausses alertes) en dessous de seuils fixés. Dans cette thèse, nous supposons que différents systèmes ou applications partagent les ressources limitées du réseau et imposent des contraintes de taux moyen sur les liens de communication. Nous caractérisons les premières limites fondamentales de la théorie de l'information sous des contraintes de taux moyen pour les systèmes avec capteurs multiples et centres de décision multiples. Notre caractérisation révèle un nouveau compromis entre les exposants maximaux d'erreur de type-II aux différents centres de décision qui découle des différentes marges à exploiter sous des contraintes de taux moyen correspondant aux différents seuils d'erreur de type-I des centres de décision. Nous proposons une nouvelle stratégie de multiplexage et de partage du taux pour atteindre ces exposants d'erreur. Notre stratégie se généralise également à toute configuration avec des contraintes de taux moyen et permet d'obtenir des gains prometteurs par rapport aux résultats sur la même configuration avec des contraintes de taux maximal. La méthode de preuve de "converse" que nous utilisons pour caractériser ces limites théoriques peut également être utilisée pour dériver de nouveaux résultats de "converse forte" sous des contraintes de taux maximal. Elle est même applicable à d'autres problèmes tels que la compression ou le calcul distribué
Distributed hypothesis testing has many applications in security, health monitoring, automotive car control, or anomaly detection. With the help of distributed sensors, the decision centers (DCs) in such systems aim to distinguish between a normal situation (null hypothesis) and an alert situation (alternative hypothesis). Our focus will be on maximizing the exponential decay of the type-II error probabilities (corresponding to missed detections), with increasing numbers of observations, while keeping the type-I error probabilities (corresponding to false alarms) below given thresholds. In this thesis, we assume that different systems or applications share the limited network resources and impose expected-rate constraints on the system's communication links. We characterize the first information-theoretic fundamental limits under expected-rate constraints for multi-sensor multi-DC systems. Our characterization reveals a new tradeoff between the maximum type-II error exponents at the different DCs that stems from different margins to exploit under expected-rate constraints corresponding to the DCs' different type-I error thresholds. We propose a new multiplexing and rate-sharing strategy to achieve the error-exponents. Our strategy also generalizes to any setup with expected-rate constraints with promising gains compared to the results on the same setup under maximum-rate constraints. The converse proof method that we use to characterize the information-theoretic limits can also be used to derive new strong converse results under maximum-rate constraints. It is even applicable to other problems such as distributed compression or computation

We are currently experiencing a rapid development of quantum information, a new branch of science, being an interdisciplinary of quantum physics, information theory, telecommunications, computer science, and many others. This new science branch was born in the middle of the eighties, developed rapidly during the nineties, and in the current decade has brought a technological breakthrough in creating secure quantum key distribution (QKD), quantum secret sharing, and exciting promises in diverse technological fields. Recent QKD experiments have achieved high rate QKD at 200 km distance in optical fiber. Significant QKD results have also been achieved in free-space. Due to the rapid broadband access deployment in many industrialized countries and the standing increasing transmission security treats, the natural development awaiting quantum communications, being a part of quantum information, is its migration into commercial switched telecom networks. Such a migration concerns both multiuser quantum key distribution and multiparty quantum secret sharing that have been the main goal of my PhD studies. They are also the main concern of the thesis. Our research efforts in multiuser QKD has led to a development of the five-user setup for transmissions over switched fiber networks in a star and in a tree configuration. We have achieved longer secure quantum information distances and implemented more nodes than other multi-user QKD experiments. The measurements have shown feasibility of multiuser QKD over switched fiber networks, using standard fiber telecom components. Since circular architecture networks are important parts of both intranets and the Internet, Sagnac QKD has also been a subject of our research efforts. The published experiments in this area have been very few and results were not encouraging, mainly due to the single mode fiber (SMF) birefringence. Our research has led to a development of a computer controlled birefringence compensation in Sagnac that open the door to both classical and quantum Sagnac applications. On the quantum secret sharing side, we have achieved the first quantum secret sharing experiment over telecom fiber in a five-party implementation using the "plug & play" setup and in a four-party implementation using Sagnac configuration. The setup measurements have shown feasibility and scalability of multiparty quantum communication over commercial telecom fiber networks.

Le spectre électromagnétique est une ressource naturelle dont l'usage doit être optimisé. Un grand nombre de travaux actuels visent à améliorer l'utilisation des fréquences radio en y introduisant un degré de flexibilité rendu possible par l'agilité en forme d'onde et en fréquence permise par la radio logicielle (SDR), ainsi que par les méthodes de traitement intelligent du signal (radio cognitive). Cette thèse se place dans ce contexte. Concrètement, nous considérons le problème de partage du spectre électromagnétique entre plusieurs utilisateurs sous contraintes d'interférence mutuelle. Notre objectif est de contribuer à l'évaluation du gain du partage de cette ressource rare qu'est le spectre électromagnétique. En étudiant le canal gaussien d'interférence avec l'interférence traitée comme du bruit additif gaussien aux différents récepteurs, nous avons trouvé une description géométrique et plusieurs caractérisations de la région des débits atteignables. Ensuite, considérant un cas plus réaliste où chaque utilisateur a une certaine qualité de service, nous avons trouvé une condition nécessaire et suffisante pour permettre la communication simultanée à travers le canal gaussien d'interférence pour deux utilisateurs. Dans un scénario de partage entre un utilisateur primaire ayant une plus grande priorité d'accès au spectre et un utilisateur secondaire, après avoir déterminé des bornes minimales pour le débit du primaire en fonction du schéma d'allocation de puissance de l'utilisateur secondaire, nous avons proposé une technique originale d'allocation de puissance pour l'utilisateur secondaire accédant de manière opportuniste au spectre sous contraintes de performance de coupure pour tous les utilisateurs. En particulier, cette technique d'allocation de puissance n'utilise que l'information sur l'état des canaux des liens directs allant de l'émetteur secondaire vers les autres points du réseau. Finalement, considérant des modèles de canaux plus réalistes; après avoir montré l'existence d'une zone d'exclusion autour du récepteur primaire (zone où il n'y a aucun transmetteur secondaire, dans le but de protéger l'utilisateur primaire contre les fortes interférences), nous avons caractérisé l'effet du shadowing et du path-loss sur cette zone d'exclusion du primaire
In this thesis, we address the problem of spectrum-sharing for wireless communication where multiple users attempt to access a common spectrum resource under mutual interference constraints. Our objective is to evaluate the gains of sharing by investigating different scenarios of spectrum access. Studying the Gaussian Interference Channel with interferences considered as noise, we found a geometrical description and several characteristics of the achievable rate region. Considering a more realistic scenario, with each user having a certain QoS, we found necessary and sufficient condition to be fulfilled for simultaneous communication over the two-user Gaussian Interference Channel. Furthermore, we proposed two lower bounds for a single-primary-user mean rate, depending on the secondary user power control scheme. Specially, we investigated an original power control policy, for a secondary user, under outage performance requirement for both users and partial knowledge of the channel state information. Finally, considering a spectrums-haring with a licensee or primary user and several secondary or cognitive users, we showed the existence of an exclusive region around the primary receiver and we characterized the effects of shadowing and path-loss on this exclusive region (or no-talk zone)

碩士
國立中央大學
土木工程學系
85
Joint venturing (JV) is a useful concept to be employed by constructors for reducing construction risks and acquiring technology and know-how external to their organization. This concept is particularly critical, as the construction project in consideration is both large-scale and technically complicated. Constructors of different business scales and with diverse areas of technical capability can form a project-based team for meeting the client''s needs, while each participating firm can produce reasonable profit for himself and others and perhaps establish a new specialty.In this study, it is argued that the key bottleneck for JV among constructors is the lack of a systematic means for sharing construction risks which may or may not be rationally evaluated among partners. A crucial index for examining the risk-sharing behavior is the share of capital earmarked by each partner for the project. Clearly, the higher the share, the more sensitive to the gain or loss of the partnering. If the share of each partner can be rationally justified against his tolerance to loss and the distribution of the projected return, it may be possible for the entire team to act more towards the common goal, without the cost of moral hazard among partners.This study incorporates the idea of utility to represent a constructor''s risk attitude and preference towards riskdecisions. By characterizing the JV models, various partnering strategies are simulated. The major finding of this study is that JV can be a profitable strategy, regardless the constructor''s ability to contract the entire project. Also, for the JV team to form with ease, a rule of thumb is that the partners need to have highly diverse risk attitudes and a consensus on the distribution of projected return.

碩士
國立中央大學
人力資源管理研究所
92
Profit sharing and employee stock ownership plans, which are considered as effective incentive methods to attract and retain high quality employees, have been regarded as successful factors to increase productivity and profitability for the firms in Taiwan. However, there are few empirical studies concerning to the effects of profit- sharing plans on employee turnover rate and firm performance and, the effects of employee turnover rate on firm performance in Taiwan. To fill the research gap, the study collected a pooled time-series data during 1999-2001 from 146 listed firms, including employee turnover rate and the financial data. This study used the amount of cash bonus and stock bonus to indicate profit sharing and employee stock ownership plans of a firm. As to the research method, this study used LISREL to examine the effects on firm performance, and the intermediary effect of employee turnover rate. The results of this empirical study can be summarized as follows：the amount of profit sharing plans did not have significant effect on employee turnover rate but have positive effect on productivity and profitability; and the employee turnover rate did not have significant effect on productivity and profitability. Therefore, the amount of profit-sharing had positive lagged effects on productivity and profitability, yet it won’t have effect on employee turnover rate. It may suggest that for talent retention, the other design on management practices of the profit-sharing plan should be also taken into consideration as well as the cash and stock bonus plans.

碩士
東吳大學
財務工程與精算數學系
107
The sharing economy in Taipei has flourished. Since the introduction of the shared bicycle -YouBike, it has exceeded 100 million passengers last year and has gradually changed from recreational bicycles to commuter bicycles. As the 100th city in the world to introduce cycling culture, Taipei currently has 400 sites and 13,072 bicycles. However, in addition to the vehicle wear rate of the shared bicycle, the accident that occurs when the user is riding is also known. The consumer thinks that the rental cost is cheap and it is easy to ignore the safety of riding. This study discusses the types of damage that consumers have encountered when riding a shared bicycle, and uses Logis regression to analyze the relationship between consumer self-fall, collision and vehicle damage, and design a shared bicycle comprehensive insurance rate simulation.

碩士
國立中央大學
產業經濟研究所
96
We construct a two-stage game to analyze how the rate of profit sharing affects behaviors of firms and employees. We explore such impact under situations that before and after new policy of expensing employees’ profit sharing in Taiwan respectively. We find that the rate of profit sharing after expensing will be higher than before. However, if management echelon takes self-interests into account or employees care about the relative profit sharing rate to those in the other firms, the rate could be lower, under some situations, contrast with common impression that the policy of expensing employee profit sharing will raise the rate of profit sharing. We further discuss two-firm competition with Cournot analysis, showing that the optimal rate of profit sharing would be the same. Also, the rate after expensing will be higher than before and still the same. This article helps addressing that the essence of profit sharing program and elaborating how the policy of ESOPs expense affects high-tech firms in Taiwan.

The Device to Device communication acting as an underlay to the cellular networks is a promising technology which greatly improves the local services. This system thoroughly optimizes the system throughput over all the shared resources, without compromising the cellular service constraints which are prioritized. Under various resource sharing modes, the same resources which are shared between a D2D user and cellular user are optimized by power control and resource allocation. The optimality is subjected to various practical real constraints like maximum transmit power and energy constraint, spectral efficiency constraints. The significance of D2D underlay system is considered under a single cell and Manhattan grid environment which has many WINNER II office setup buildings. After simulation, the results indicate, that by effective and judicious management of resources, Device to Device communication can cater to the total throughput without attributing unnecessary interference to the cellular system.

abstract: Cognitive radio (CR) and device-to-device (D2D) systems are two promising dynamic spectrum access schemes in wireless communication systems to provide improved quality-of-service, and efficient spectrum utilization. This dissertation shows that both CR and D2D systems benefit from properly designed cooperation scheme. In underlay CR systems, where secondary users (SUs) transmit simultaneously with primary users (PUs), reliable communication is by all means guaranteed for PUs, which likely deteriorates SUs’ performance. To overcome this issue, cooperation exclusively among SUs is achieved through multi-user diversity (MUD), where each SU is subject to an instantaneous interference constraint at the primary receiver. Therefore, the active number of SUs satisfying this constraint is random. Under different user distributions with the same mean number of SUs, the stochastic ordering of SU performance metrics including bit error rate (BER), outage probability, and ergodic capacity are made possible even without observing closed form expressions. Furthermore, a cooperation is assumed between primary and secondary networks, where those SUs exceeding the interference constraint facilitate PU’s transmission by relaying its signal. A fundamental performance trade-off between primary and secondary networks is observed, and it is illustrated that the proposed scheme outperforms non-cooperative underlay CR systems in the sense of system overall BER and sum achievable rate. Similar to conventional cellular networks, CR systems suffer from an overloaded receiver having to manage signals from a large number of users. To address this issue, D2D communications has been proposed, where direct transmission links are established between users in close proximity to offload the system traffic. Several new cooperative spectrum access policies are proposed allowing coexistence of multiple D2D pairs in order to improve the spectral efficiency. Despite the additional interference, it is shown that both the cellular user’s (CU) and the individual D2D user's achievable rates can be improved simultaneously when the number of D2D pairs is below a certain threshold, resulting in a significant multiplexing gain in the sense of D2D sum rate. This threshold is quantified for different policies using second order approximations for the average achievable rates for both the CU and the individual D2D user.
Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2017

博士
國立成功大學
企業管理學系
105
This paper uses the theoretical model created by Ghosh (2009) to analyze the extent of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) for traditional trade and different production sharing cases. Comparing the differences among these scenarios revealed that production sharing could be a reason for the continual decline in ERPT. Furthermore, empirical evidence from Taiwan discovered that under production sharing, the pricing-to-market for intermediate goods exporters and the currency fluctuation in the home nation of final goods exporters will further influence the magnitude of decline in the ERPT.

碩士
元智大學
領導學程
99
The work value has changed quickly in recent years. This trend leads to higher human resource cost in recruitment, staffing, and personnel training for organizations, besides, personnel instability and turnover were also found to be negatively related to organizational performance. Moreover, according to knowledge-based view, the turbulence of the environment also forces organizations to increasingly rely on acquisition and application of knowledge to strengthen competitive advantages and create values. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the influence of organizational learning capacity on the relationship between personnel turnover and organizational performance. The data was collected from 47 teams in Taiwan banking industry by using questionnaires, results indicated that： 1) Organizational turnover rate is negatively related to organizational performance. 2) Organizational absorptive capacity will moderate the relationship between organizational turnover and performance. 3) Organizational knowledge sharing will moderate the relationship between organizational turnover and performance.

The thesis consists of four core essays which focus on important issues relating to international trade, growth and inequality. The first essay examines the determinants of trade based on global production sharing (network trade) by building a theoretical framework and empirically testing it using a panel dataset covering 44 countries over the period 1996 to 2013. Over the past four decades, network trade has grown at a much faster rate than total world manufacturing trade. Identification of the determinants of this emerging trade pattern is, therefore, important for informing trade policy debates. The model used in the empirical analysis captures a number of important explanatory variables ignored in the previous literature. A range of panel data estimation techniques are used in the model. The results suggest that technology, institutions and macroeconomic stability all play a significant role in determining inter-country differences in network trade. The paper concludes with a discussion on the challenges for policy makers in their attempt to reap gains from global production sharing. The second essay studies the transmission of exchange rate changes into import prices (exchange rate pass-through) in the presence of global production sharing. The chapter builds and simulates a model, which postulates that exchange rate pass-through is lower for network trade compared to final goods trade. It is hypothesised that trade in parts and components, within network trade, is relatively sheltered from exchange rate movements because network trade is largely ‘relationship-specific,' including intra-firm trade. Empirically, exchange rate pass-through is examined using a new dataset of manufacturing import prices compiled from the trade price database of the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. The findings indicate that the degree of exchange rate pass-through into the import prices of parts and components is considerably lower than that for import prices of final goods. These results are robust to a number of sensitivity tests. The third essay examines patterns and determinants of global production sharing with an emphasis on how Australian manufacturing fits into global production sharing. Though Australia is a minor player in global production sharing, there is evidence that Australian manufacturing has a distinct competitive edge in specialised, skill-intensive tasks in several industries including aircraft, medical devices, machine tools, measuring and scientific equipment and photographic equipment. Specialisation within global production sharing in high value-to-weight components and final goods, which are suitable for air transport, helps Australian manufacturing to overcome the ‘tyranny of distance’ in world trade. Being predominantly ‘relationship-specific’, Australian network trade exports are not significantly susceptible to real exchange rate appreciation. Institutions and technological base also give Australia a competitive edge within global production sharing. The last essay examines the impact of inequality and poverty on economic growth. Recent research has highlighted a negative impact of inequality on economic growth. The paper re-evaluates this hypothesis, focusing on both inequality and poverty and their interaction. The econometric model controls for standard growth covariates including education, investment, trade, population growth and redistribution. The paper initially replicates previous results, showing that inequality has a negative impact on growth. However, it is shown that after taking into account both inequality and poverty, the negative effect of inequality on growth appears to be concentrated amongst countries with high poverty. This finding makes a case for policies targeted towards alleviating poverty, rather than policies that redistribute without addressing absolute poverty.

This Thesis aims to understand how far does extent the issue of low birthrate in Portugal as it affects the sustainability of the welfare system. Furthermore verifying to what extent valid answers on the legal system contribute in this sense to the efficient forestall on this subject. In addiction, the issue of this research focus on the study of the Portuguese Public Policies in support of Birth, analysing the politic narrative along side with the funding benefits of the Welfare Public Foundation, by also centralizing valid questions in the context of the labour law, particularly the parental leave terms, the part-time and flexible hours of work status on its entirety for what concerns the worker with family entitlements and duties. Lastly, as a means of ultimate reflection, one general and constructive argument is made regarding the current public encouragement of portuguese birth, in which the possible social and political aspects to improve are considered.
O presente trabalho tem como finalidade compreender de que forma o problema do baixo índice de natalidade, em Portugal, afeta a sustentabilidade do SSS, averiguando, posteriormente, em que medida, as respostas vigentes no O.J. contribuem para o eficiente tratamento do tema. Para tal, esta investigação tem como objecto de estudo as políticas públicas portuguesas de apoio à natalidade, analisando-se a narrativa política e, num plano jurídico, analisando as prestações pecuniárias do SSS, assim como as respostas vigentes no contexto do direito laboral, concretamente as licenças parentais e o tempo parcial de trabalho e horário flexível de TRF. Por último, num exercício de reflexão final é feita uma crítica geral e construtiva, em relação ao atual incentivo público à natalidade portuguesa, ponderando-se sobre os possíveis aspetos a melhorar.