Developing Data Literacy Competences at University: the experience of the DEDALUS project

Nowadays, data are everywhere becoming more and more important in everyday life. Recently, during the COVID-19 outbreak, data are being used on a massive scale, and having the skills to understand the information conveyed through numbers, percentages and trends curves became essential. From this perspective, data literacy is a competence not only important for those operating in computer science or technological sectors, but it is acquiring a key role in other sectors such as social science, humanities, and journalism. In this paper, we present the DEDALUS project, an EU-funded project aimed at developing data literacy courses for university students. DEDALUS defined a competence framework that identifies a set of competences related to data literacy, to which modular university courses in different disciplines are based upon. The outcomes of the project were piloted in 5 European countries in order to define the implementation strategies that identifies different models of data literacy inclusion in the higher education domain.

Macroeconomic effects of trade tariffs: A case study of the U.S.-China trade war effects on the economy of the United States

This paper explores the macroeconomic effects of trade tariffs in the context of the recent trade conflict between the United States and China. The focus is laid on two trade war scenarios, and one of them takes into account the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global trade flows. After deploying the partial equilibrium SMART model, the authors conclude that solely due to the trade war with China, in 2020, the US total trade balance will improve by 41,020 million USD (0.21% of real GDP), while 43,777 million USD (0.22% of real GDP) of the US imports will have to be sourced from other countries. The US trade intensity with China and welfare will decline. However, our study has found that the potential economic consequences of COVID-19 will reduce the relative effects of the trade war. The study has revealed that the United States economy will benefit from the trade war, which can be explained by a relatively weak China's retaliatory response. Nevertheless, the US agriculture and automotive sectors will suffer most. Copyright © 2020 Sandra Žemaitytė, Laimutė Urbšienė. Published by Vilnius University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.