Equal Opportunities, Fair Work and Social Protection: Impacts of COVID-19 on Young People in Portuguese Rural Territories

Several international organizations, as well as worldwide scholarship, have abundantly shown that young people under 34 are among the groups struggling the most with COVID-19 economic and social impacts. Seldom, however, does scholarship focus on the uneven effects of the pandemic on younger generations across different types of territories. Overall, young people in rural territories tend to face much greater adversities. These territories concentrate less population, show strong ageing trends trend and depict a lower settlement rate. Rural younger generations struggle to strive, because rural areas depend heavily on declining economic activities, such as farming, are plagued by precarious jobs, and display limited institutional support compared to (sub)urban areas. In Portugal, the country's population is unevenly distributed between affluent, high-density coastal areas and inlands and archipelagos with a considerable rural predominance. The COVID-19 crisis has the potential to further stretch the existing inequalities among young people due to spatial distribution. Therefore, in this chapter, we discuss the impact of the recent pandemic crisis on rural Portuguese young people. We will do so by characterizing headline indicators in the three domains of the European Pillar of Social Rights, namely equal opportunities (e.g. Early School Leavers from Education and Training), fair working conditions (e.g. Youth Unemployment), and social protection and inclusion (e.g. at risk of poverty and social exclusion). We expect to reach an initial comprehension of the challenges faced by rural Portuguese young people in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis in three domains: education, employment and social inclusion. We also discuss how more nuanced territorial conceptualizations (e.g. low-density areas) and policymaking can add alternative views about young people's living conditions due to subnational disparities. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The Use of Triangular Norms in Epidemiological Models: A Comparative Study Using COVID-19 Data

In this manuscript we use triangular norms to model contact between susceptible and infected individuals in the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) epidemiological model. In the classical SIR model, the encounter between susceptible and infected individuals is traditionally modelled by the product of their densities (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$SI$</tex-math></inline-formula>). That is, the encounter is modelled by the product t-norm. We use the COVID-19 data and extended versions of the SIR model whose encounters are modelled by four triangular norms, namely, product, minimum, Frank and Hamacher t-norms, to analyze the scenario in three countries: Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. We compare all versions of the SIR model based on these triangular norms, and we analyze their effectiveness in fitting data and determining important parameters for the pandemic, such as the basic and effective reproduction number. In addition, Frank and Hamacher triangular norms present an auxiliary parameter that can be interpreted as an indicator of control measure, which we show to be important in the current pandemic scenario. IEEE

PANDEMICS, TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS, AND THE DISTANCING FROM INTERNATIONAL LAW

History shows that governments confronted with a pandemic tend to impose travel restrictions. This tradition was taken to unprecedented extremes in response to COVID-19. However, contrary to common perceptions, travel restrictions are not effective and at most delay the peak of a pandemic by a few days or weeks. The International Health Regulations (hereinafter "IHR") were created to strike a balance between the protection of public health and the maintenance of international mobility. Yet, States Parties almost universally disregarded the Regulations, imposing measures that only added to the economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic. In recent months, "social distancing" became a household expression. This article argues that the widespread implementation of travel restrictions during the COVID-19 crisis is also a symptom of a different type of distancing-that of states from their international law obligations. It examines some potential explanations for the astonishingly high rate of non-compliance with the IHR and urges states to take their international law obligations more seriously.