La cultura marittima nei progetti di rigenarazione urbana del porto vecchio, Barcellona

Port cities have represented one of the first forms of urbanization in which maritime culture has had an important role in the construction of the city. This culture has often been the foundation of an evolving tendency confronted with other lines of development, against which it has alternately integrated itself creatively, or has had to compete. The study of the multiplicity of these evolving processes, with their corresponding conflicts, can be useful to develop a critical vision of the grand transformations of industrial ports in urban areas and to initiate a critical reflection which would help to interpret current tendencies. The Barcelona case seems to be exemplary because the new projects for the transformation of the old port, focused on providing a service for luxury boats, have reopened a discussion on urban transformation works carried out in the past and have mostly revealed that the relationship between the port and the city is in constant evolution.For this reason there is a discussion about the extent to which large scale port transformations can have repercussions on maritime culture in a locality and what the role of maritime culture is with respect to fundamental economic strategies linked mostly to the construction of the post-Fordist city

The global welfare impact of China: Trade integration and technological change

This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of China's trade integration and technological change in a multi-country quantitative Ricardian-Heckscher-Ohlin model.We simulate two alternative growth scenarios: a "balanced" one in which China's productivity grows at the same rate in each sector, and an "unbalanced" one in whichChina's comparative disadvantage sectors catch up disproportionately faster to theworld productivity frontier. Contrary to a well-known conjecture (Samuelson 2004),the large majority of countries experience significantly larger welfare gains whenChina's productivity growth is biased towards its comparative disadvantage sectors.This finding is driven by the inherently multilateral nature of world trade.