Inequality in CO2 emissions across countries and its relationship with income inequality: a distributive approach

This paper analyses the inequality in CO2 emissions across countries (and groups of countries) and the relationship of this inequality with income inequality across countries for the period (1971-1999). The research employs the tools that are usually applied in income distribution analysis. The methodology used here gives qualitative and quantitative information on some of the features of the inequalities across countries that are considered most relevant for the design and discussion of policies aimed at mitigating climate change. The paper studies the relationship between CO2 emissions and GDP and shows that income inequality across countries has been followed by an important inequality in the distribution of emissions. This inequality has diminished mildly, although the inequality in emissions across countries ordered in the increasing value of income (inequality between rich and poor countries) has diminished less than the “simple” inequality in emissions. Lastly, the paper shows that the inequality in CO2 emissions is mostly explained by the inequality between groups with different per capita income level. The importance of the inequality within groups of similar per capita income is much lower and has diminished during the period, especially in the low-middle income group.

On the stability of periodic orbits in Rn

We consider an autonomous differential system in Rn with a periodic orbit and we give a new method for computing the characteristic multipliers associated to it. Our method works when the periodic orbit is given by the transversal intersection of n ¡ 1 codimension one hypersurfaces and is an alternative to the use of the first order variational equations. We apply it to study the stability of the periodic orbits in several examples, including a periodic solution found by Steklov studying the rigid body dynamics.

Convergence of the mass-transport steepest descent scheme for the sub-critical Patlak-Keller-Segel model

Variational steepest descent approximation schemes for the modified Patlak-Keller-Segel equation with a logarithmic interaction kernel in any dimension are considered. We prove the convergence of the suitably interpolated in time implicit Euler scheme, defined in terms of the Euclidean Wasserstein distance, associated to this equation for sub-critical masses. As a consequence, we recover the recent result about the global in time existence of weak-solutions to the modified Patlak-Keller-Segel equation for the logarithmic interaction kernel in any dimension in the sub-critical case. Moreover, we show how this method performs numerically in one dimension. In this particular case, this numerical scheme corresponds to a standard implicit Euler method for the pseudo-inverse of the cumulative distribution function. We demonstrate its capabilities to reproduce easily without the need of mesh-refinement the blow-up of solutions for super-critical masses.

Equity and CO2 emissions distribution in climate change integrated assessment

Emissions distribution is a focus variable for the design of future international agreements to tackle global warming. This paper specifically analyses the future path of emissions distribution and its determinants in different scenarios. Whereas our analysis is driven by tools which are typically applied in the income distribution literature and which have recently been applied to the analysis of CO2 emissions distribution, a new methodological approach is that our study is driven by simulations run with a popular regionalised optimal growth climate change model over the 1995-2105 period. We find that the architecture of environmental policies, the implementation of flexible mechanisms and income concentration are key determinants of emissions distribution over time. In particular we find a robust positive relationship between measures of inequalities.

Les temporalités des médicaments : trajectoires en soins palliatifs à l'hôpital

A partir d'un terrain ethnographique réalisé au sein d'une équipe mobile de soins palliatifs d'un hôpital universitaire, cette thèse de doctorat porte sur les médicaments dans le contexte de la fin de vie. Au carrefour d'une socio-anthropologie de la maladie grave, du mourir et des médicaments, elle interroge les rapports à la morphine, ainsi qu'à certains psychotropes et sédatifs utilisés en soins palliatifs. Entre temporalité vécue et temporalité institutionnelle, les manières d'investir le temps lorsqu'il est compté, y sont centrales. Dans une dimension microsociale, les résultats montrent que l'introduction de certains médicaments comme la morphine et l'entrée en scène d'une équipe mobile de soins palliatifs sont des points de repère et peuvent sonner comme une annonce, sorte de sanction, dans la trajectoire incertaine de la personne malade. En outre, les médicaments permettent d'agir sur « le temps qui reste » en plus de soulager les symptômes lorsque la maladie grave bascule en maladie incurable. Ils font l'objet d'usages détournés du but initial de soulagement des symptômes pour repousser, altérer ou accélérer la mort dans une perspective de maîtrise de sa fin de vie. Dans une dimension mésosociale, ce travail considère les médicaments à la base d'échanges entre groupements professionnels sur fond d'institutionnalisation des soins palliatifs par rapport à d'autres segments de la médecine actifs dans la gestion de la fin de vie. Dans une médecine caractérisée par l'incertitude et les décisions -avec une teinte toute particulière en Suisse où le suicide assisté est toléré - les médicaments en soins palliatifs peuvent être considérés comme des instruments de mort, qu'ils soient redoutés ou recherchés. Interrogeant les risques de reproduire un certain nombre d'inégalités de traitements à l'approche de la mort, qui s'accentuent dans un contexte de plus en plus favorable aux pratiques euthanasiques, ce travail se propose, en définitive, de discuter le temps contraint de la mort dans les institutions hospitalo-universitaires, entre acharnement et abstention thérapeutique.¦-¦Based on ethnographie fieldwork conducted within a palliative care mobile team in an academic hospital, this doctoral thesis focuses on medicines used in end of life contexts. At the intersection of a socio-anthropology of illness, dying and pharmaceuticals, the relations to morphine, as well as to some psychotropic and sedative drugs used in palliative care are questioned. Between "lived" experiences of temporality and institutional temporality, the ways by which actors invest time when it is counted, appeared to be central. In a microsocial dimension, the results showed that introducing drugs such as morphine, as well as the arrival of a palliative care mobile team, are landmarks and sound like an announcement, a sort of sanction, during the uncertain trajectory of the ill person. In addition, medicines can act on "the remaining time" when severe illness shifts into incurable illness. Indeed, medicines are being diverted from the initial aim of symptom relief in order to defer, alter or hasten death in a perspective of control over one's death. In a mesosocial dimension, pharmaceuticals are seen as core to professional exchanges and to palliative care institutionalisation compared to other active medical segments in end of life care. In a medical context characterised by uncertainty and decision-taking-with a special shade in Switzerland where assisted suicide is tolerated - palliative medicines can be seen as instruments of death, whether sought or feared. Questioning the risks of reproducing treatment inequalities at the approach of death, which are accentuated in a context increasingly favorable to euthanasia practices, this study aims, ultimately, at discussing death's constrained time in academic hospitals, between therapeutic intervention and abstention.

Horospheres in hyperbolic geometry

In this paper we investigate the role of horospheres in Integral Geometry and Differential Geometry. In particular we study envelopes of families of horocycles by means of “support maps”. We define invariant “linear combinations” of support maps or curves. Finally we obtain Gauss-Bonnet type formulas and Chern-Lashof type inequalities.

Memòria justificativa del treball realitzat durant l’estada a la Universitat de Wisconsin-Madison

Projecte de recerca elaborat a partir d’una estada a la Universitat de Wisconsin-Madison, EUA, Departament de Curriculum and Instruction, des de mitjans d’agost a mitjans de novembre de 2006. S’ha treballat en relació a la preparació de la tesi “Els grups interactius: una pràctica de les comunitats d’aprenentatge per a la inclusió de l’alumnat amb discapacitat “. La universitat de Wisconsin-Madison i en concret el departament de Curriculum and instruction compta amb professorat de reconegut prestigi internacional en l’àmbit de l’educació. Entre els temes que es treballen al departament i que vaig poder conèixer, en destaco les implicacions de l’educació en l’existència de desigualtats socials, així com les implicacions del govern i de les polítiques educatives en la creació i manteniment d’aquestes desigualtats, les reformes i polítiques educatives i el paper de l’educació en el més ampli context de la societat i les seves estructures, l’anàlisi del llenguatge vinculat amb les desigualtats i l’educació, la necessitat de tenir en compte la multiculturalitat des d’una perspectiva crítica, i les possibilitats de transformació en educació facilitades per les oportunitats d’interacció.

Médecine sociate en 2013: quand la précarité précède la pauvrete [Social medicine: does it still make sense in 2013?].

Social medicine is a medicine that seeks to understand the impact of socio-economic conditions on human health and diseases in order to improve the health of a society and its individuals. In this field of medicine, determining the socio-economic status of individuals is generally not sufficient to explain and/or understand the underlying mechanisms leading to social inequalities in health. Other factors must be considered such as environmental, psychosocial, behavioral and biological factors that, together, can lead to more or less permanent damages to the health of the individuals in a society. In a time where considerable progresses have been made in the field of the biomedicine, does the practice of social medicine in a primary care setting still make sense?

Longitudinal analysis of income-related health inequality: welfare foundations and alternative measures

This paper elaborates the approach to the longitudinal analysis of income-related health inequalities first proposed in Allanson, Gerdtham and Petrie (2010). In particular, the paper establishes the normative basis of their mobility indices by embedding their decomposition of the change in the health concentration index within a broader analysis of the change in “health achievement” or wellbeing. The paper further shows that their decomposition procedure can also be used to analyse the change in a range of other commonly-used incomerelated health inequality measures, including the generalised concentration index and the relative inequality index. We illustrate our work by extending their investigation of mobility in the General Health Questionnaire measure of psychological well-being over the first nine waves of the British Household Panel Survey from 1991 to 1999.

The Fair Trade movement: an economic perspective

Fair Trade (FT) products such as coffee and textiles are becoming increasingly popular with altruistic consumers all over the world. This paper seeks to understand the economic effects of this grassroots movement which directly links ethically-minded consumers in industrialised countries with marginalised producers in developing economies. We extend the Ricardian trade model and introduce a FT sector in developing South that offers a fair wage – the FT premium. There are indeed positive welfare effects from FT but those come at the expense of rising inequalities within South which are in turn a rational by-product of FT. The degree of inequalities depends on the specifics of the cooperative structures in the FT sector. Given the rigidities and inequalities FT introduces and rests upon, this form of alternative trade appears to be only sustainable as niche movement.

On decomposing the causes of changes in income-related health inequality with longitudinal data

Regression-based decomposition procedures are used to both standardise the concentration index and to determine the contribution of inequalities in the individual health determinants to the overall value of the index. The main contribution of this paper is to develop analogous procedures to decompose the income-related health mobility and health-related income mobility indices first proposed in Allanson, Gerdtham and Petrie (2010) and subsequently extended in Petrie, Allanson and Gerdtham (2010) to account for deaths. The application of the procedures is illustrated by an empirical study that uses British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data to analyse the performance of Scotland in tackling income-related health inequalities relative to England & Wales over the five year period 1999 to 2004.

Continuity of set-valued maps revisited in the light of tame geometry

Continuity of set-valued maps is hereby revisited: after recalling some basic concepts of variational analysis and a short description of the State-of-the-Art, we obtain as by-product two Sard type results concerning local minima of scalar and vector valued functions. Our main result though, is inscribed in the framework of tame geometry, stating that a closed-valued semialgebraic set-valued map is almost everywhere continuous (in both topological and measure-theoretic sense). The result –depending on stratification techniques– holds true in a more general setting of o-minimal (or tame) set-valued maps. Some applications are briefly discussed at the end.

Sharp weighted bounds for fractional integral operators

The relationship between the operator norms of fractional integral operators acting on weighted Lebesgue spaces and the constant of the weights is investigated. Sharp bounds are obtained for both the fractional integral operators and the associated fractional maximal functions. As an application improved Sobolev inequalities are obtained. Some of the techniques used include a sharp off-diagonal version of the extrapolation theorem of Rubio de Francia and characterizations of two-weight norm inequalities.

Faire la ville juste : une analyse "in itinere" de la maîtrise publique d'ouvrage du projet urbain Carré de Soie (métropole lyonnaise)

Dans certaines portions des agglomérations (poches de pauvreté de centre-ville, couronnes suburbaines dégradées, espaces périurbains sans aménité), un cumul entre des inégalités sociales (pauvreté, chômage, etc.) et environnementales (exposition au bruit, aux risques industriels, etc.) peut être observé. La persistance de ces inégalités croisées dans le temps indique une tendance de fond : la capacité d'accéder à un cadre de vie de qualité n'est pas équitablement partagée parmi les individus. Ce constat interroge : comment se créent ces inégalités ? Comment infléchir cette tendance et faire la ville plus juste ?¦Apporter des réponses à cette problématique nécessite d'identifier les facteurs de causalités qui entrent en jeu dans le système de (re)production des inégalités urbaines. Le fonctionnement des marchés foncier et immobilier, la « tyrannie des petites décisions » et les politiques publiques à incidence spatiale sont principalement impliqués. Ces dernières, agissant sur tous les éléments du système, sont placées au coeur de ce travail. On va ainsi s'intéresser précisément à la manière dont les collectivités publiques pilotent la production de la ville contemporaine, en portant l'attention sur la maîtrise publique d'ouvrage (MPO) des grands projets urbains.¦Poser la question de la justice dans la fabrique de la ville implique également de questionner les référentiels normatifs de l'action publique : à quelle conception de la justice celle-ci doit- elle obéir? Quatre perspectives (radicale, substantialiste, procédurale et intégrative) sont caractérisées, chacune se traduisant par des principes d'action différenciés. Une méthodologie hybride - empruntant à la sociologie des organisations et à l'analyse des politiques publiques - vient clore le volet théorique, proposant par un détour métaphorique d'appréhender le projet urbain comme une pièce de théâtre dont le déroulement dépend du jeu d'acteurs.¦Cette méthodologie est utilisée dans le volet empirique de la recherche, qui consiste en une analyse de la MPO d'un projet urbain en cours dans la première couronne de l'agglomération lyonnaise : le Carré de Soie. Trois grands objectifs sont poursuivis : descriptif (reconstruire le scénario), analytique (évaluer la nature de la pièce : conte de fée, tragédie ou match d'improvisation ?) et prescriptif (tirer la morale de l'histoire). La description de la MPO montre le déploiement successif de quatre stratégies de pilotage, dont les implications sur les temporalités, le contenu du projet (programmes, morphologies) et les financements publics vont être déterminantes. Sur la base de l'analyse, plusieurs recommandations peuvent être formulées - importance de l'anticipation et de l'articulation entre planification et stratégie foncière notamment - pour permettre à la sphère publique de dominer le jeu et d'assurer la production de justice par le projet urbain (réalisation puis entretien des équipements et espaces publics, financement de logements de qualité à destination d'un large éventail de populations, etc.). Plus généralement, un décalage problématique peut être souligné entre les territoires stratégiques pour le développement de l'agglomération et les capacités de portage limitées des communes concernées. Ce déficit plaide pour le renforcement des capacités d'investissement de la structure intercommunale.¦La seule logique du marché (foncier, immobilier) mène à la polarisation sociale et à la production d'inégalités urbaines. Faire la ville juste nécessite une forte volonté des collectivités publiques, laquelle doit se traduire aussi bien dans l'ambition affichée - une juste hiérarchisation des priorités dans le développement urbain - que dans son opérationnalisation - une juste maîtrise publique d'ouvrage des projets urbains.¦Inner-city neighborhoods, poor outskirts, and peri-urban spaces with no amenities usually suffer from social and environmental inequalities, such as poverty, unemployment, and exposure to noise and industrial hazards. The observed persistence of these inequalities over time points to an underlying trend - namely, that access to proper living conditions is fundamentally unequal, thus eliciting the question of how such inequalities are effected and how this trend can be reversed so as to build a more equitable city.¦Providing answers to such questions requires that the causal factors at play within the system of (re)production of urban inequalities be identified. Real estate markets, "micromotives and macrobehavior", and public policies that bear on space are mostly involved. The latter are central in that they act on all the elements of the system. This thesis therefore focuses on the way public authorities shape the production of contemporary cities, by studying the public project ownership of major urban projects.¦The study of justice within the urban fabric also implies that the normative frames of reference of public action be questioned: what conception of justice should public action refer to? This thesis examines four perspectives (radical, substantialist, procedural, and integrative) each of which results in different principles of action. This theoretical part is concluded by a hybrid methodology that draws from sociology of organizations and public policy analysis and that suggests that the urban project may be understood as a play, whose outcome hinges on the actors' acting.¦This methodology is applied to the empirical analysis of the public project ownership of an ongoing urban project in the Lyon first-ring suburbs: the Carré de Soie. Three main objectives are pursued: descriptive (reconstructing the scenario), analytical (assessing the nature of the play - fairy tale, tragedy or improvisation match), and prescriptive (drawing the moral of the story). The description of the public project ownership shows the successive deployment of four control strategies, whose implications on deadlines, project content (programs, morphologies), and public funding are significant. Building on the analysis, several recommendations can be made to allow the public sphere to control the process and ensure the urban project produces equity (most notably, anticipation and articulation of planning and real- estate strategy, as well as provision and maintenance of equipment and public spaces, funding of quality housing for a wide range of populations, etc.). More generally, a gap can be highlighted between those territories that are strategic to the development of the agglomeration and the limited resources of the municipalities involved. This deficit calls for strengthening the investment abilities of the intermunicipal structure.¦By itself, the real-estate market logic brings about social polarization and urban inequalities. Building an equitable city requires a strong will on the part of public authorities, a will that must be reflected both in the stated ambition - setting priorities of urban development equitably - and in its implementation managing urban public projects fairly.