The article aims to explain whether in 2004–2015 Poland experienced economic convergence between regions and counties (Polish: powiat), and whether this process occurred within the regions (Polish: województwo). Following Poland’s EU accession, the Polish policy became dominated by the polarization and diffusion concept of regional development, which may cause differences in the short term, while in the long run it may contribute not only to the increased efficiency of public funds allocation, but also to the elimination of disparities in growth levels. In the analysed period Poland experienced a process of economic divergence between the regions, only the years 2006–2008 saw a short-term reduction in regional disparities. On the other hand, a slow process of reducing economic inequalities between counties took place after 2004. It was, however, varied – a clear reduction in disparities occurred between the land counties (Polish: powiat ziemski) in an almost monotonic manner, whereas city counties (Polish: miasto na prawach powiatu) did not undergo any convergence. Within the regions, the process of economic convergence varied: in five regions, β-convergence was identified, and σ-convergence occurred in all the regions. The process of reducing disparities was significantly dependent on the development pathway of the region.
This is the first insight into effect of development of nonpublic and paid schools on social stratification in Poland. Logistic and multinomial regression of the Polish general Social Survey data 1998 is conducted to test hypotheses concerning effect of the fathers’s EGP category on access to various types of schools in secondary and tertiary education. Results confirm the hypotheses that respondents from intelligentsia families are overrepresented in both secondary and tertiary paid schools and have greater odds of entry in to public tertiary education in comparison to lower non-manual categories, owners, working class and peasants. Children of intelligentsia also have more opportunities to attend “better” stationary (than non-stationary) schools in comparison to other categories. This analysis provides support for the thesis about growing role of qualitative differentiation in education.
New equivalent conditions of the asymptotical stability and stabilization of positive linear dynamical systems are investigated in this paper. The asymptotical stability of the positive linear systems means that there is a solution for linear inequalities systems. New necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions of the linear inequalities systems as well as the asymptotical stability of the linear dynamical systems are obtained. New conditions for the stabilization of the resultant closed-loop systems to be asymptotically stable and positive are also presented. Both the stability and the stabilization conditions can be easily checked by the so-called I-rank of a matrix and by solving linear programming (LP). The proposed LP has compact form and is ready to be implemented, which can be considered as an improvement of existing LP methods. Numerical examples are provided in the end to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
This article aims at verifying the findings by Richard g. Wilkinson and Kate e. Pickett (2009) which point to a strong correlation between the income gap and the escalation of social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett’s thesis, described here as ‘the Spirit level concept’, states that all kinds of social problems (ranging from drug abuse to lack of trust among people) are directly connected with the scale of social inequality in a given country. In this article we test this concept by analyzing the relation between the income gap in a particular country and four important problems: health condition, trust, social activity and cultural activity. We investigate this relation in european union countries.
The paper concerns a strength optimization of continuous beams with variable cross-section. The continuous beams are subjected to a dead weight and a useful load, the six (seven) combinations of loads were analyzed. Optimal design problems in structural mechanics can by mathematically formulated as optimal control tasks. To solve the above formulated optimization problems, the minimum principle was applied. The paper is an introductory and survey paper of the treatment of realistically modelled optimal control problems from application in the structural mechanics. Especially those problems are considered, which include different types of constraints. The optimization problem is reduced to the solution of multipoint boundary value problems (MPBVP) composed of differential equations. Dimension of MPBVP is usually a large number, what produces numerical difficulties. Optimal control theory does not give much information about the control structure. The correctness of the assumed control structure can be checked after obtaining the solution of the boundary problem.
The main task of the paper is to analyse pope Benedict XVI’s social teaching on poverty as introduced in the encyclical letter ‘Caritas in veritate’. While the methodo-logical language of the papal teaching is anthropological and theological in character, the document uses its own interdisciplinary approach that is characteristic of Catholic Social Teaching. Consequently such a Christian reflection on social issues like pover-ty, inequality, marginalisation and globalisation can be compared with other social fin-dings. In the global context the pope identifies growing economic inequalities but also the advantages of cooperation within the global economy. The analysis also discerns the theories of social development that are convergent with the papal social diagnosis. Finally, comparing the pope’s social teaching with some studies in economy, sociolo-gy and political sciences, the author of the paper examines the possibility to construct an interdisciplinary link between Catholic Social Teaching and other social sciences.
This paper addresses weighted L2 gain performance switching controller design of discrete-time switched linear systems with average dwell time (ADT) scheme. Two kinds of methods, so called linearizing change-of-variables based method and controller variable elimination method, are considered for the output-feedback control with a supervisor enforcing a reset rule at each switching instant are considered respectively. Furthermore, some comparison between these two methods are also given.
The paper addresses the problem of constrained pole placement in discrete-time linear systems. The design conditions are outlined in terms of linear matrix inequalities for the Dstable ellipse region in the complex Z plain. In addition, it is demonstrated that the D-stable circle region formulation is the special case of by this way formulated and solved pole placement problem. The proposed principle is enhanced for discrete-lime linear systems with polytopic uncertainties.