Jorge Guardiola

Gender differences in e-learning satisfaction

Student learning skills differ depending on gender. The importance of studying this situation in the classroom is that recommendations can be made taking gender into consideration. In e-learning, the roles of students and teachers change. In line with recent research, the question this paper raises is whether or not gender differences also exist in e-learning. The main contribution this research makes to the literature is to provide evidence on the issues male and female students consider important in their assessment of e-subjects. This study is based on a sample of 1185 students who are doing on-line courses at the Universidad de Granada in Spain. The main conclusion is that female students are more satisfied than male students with the e-learning subjects that make up the sample. Furthermore, we find that female students assign more importance to the planning of learning, as well as to being able to contact the teacher in various ways.

A Duration Model for the Estimation of the Contracting Out of Urban Water Management in Southern Spain

Research that tries to explain the decisions of local government in the contracting out of certain services frequently disregards the temporal dimension. In this article, the authors take time into account in the analysis, proposing a duration model as an alternative to discrete choice models. The objective is to analyze the explanatory factors in the contracting out of municipal services. This methodology is applied to the water services of 744 municipalities in southern Spain during the period from 1985 to 2006. From the results, the authors conclude that complexity in the environment, economies of scale, financial restrictions, and stability of the local government are determinants in the decision.

Why Is Non-revenue Water So High in So Many Cities?

The efficient management of water resources is a growing necessity. Paradoxically, although people are aware of this need, non-revenue water is excessive in many cities in the world. Non-revenue water data indicate that there is much room for improvement in water resource management in cities and they also suggest a lack of motivation to solve the problem in the short-term. This paper investigates the reasons why non-revenue water is so high in many cities around the world. The lack of incentives for management units, the defence of private interests due to corruption, the lack of awareness of citizens-users of the water service and the lack of political willingness are the main causes.

Is Access to Water as Good as the Data Claim? Case Study of Yucatan

Access to water is fundamental for peoples survival. Unfortunately, statistics indicate that 13% of the worlds population lack access to water. Moreover, this figure more than likely underestimates the real dimension of the problem, mainly due to definitions of access to water being too lax and not capturing the real dimension of the problem. In order to illustrate this phenomenon, an example of the situation of access to water in the Mexican State of Yucatan is examined based on original fieldwork. The study shows that the problem of access to water in this state is indeed underestimated. This is unlikely to be an isolated case, which leads us to recommend that action be taken to obtain a more accurate picture regarding the reality of access to water.

Do neighbouring municipalities matter in water pricing

This research analyses the existence of a spillover effect in water price setting. In order to do so, spatial econometrics techniques are applied to a database of 392 municipalities in Southern Spain. In the absence of an agency to regulate and control tariff design and the price levels, nearby municipalities are found to approve similar water prices. The results suggest that the local governments observe the prices in neighbouring municipalities when revising tariffs. In this sense, local governments more than likely seek to avoid citizens perceiving a comparative disadvantage in water tariff payments. However, such political interests could be detrimental to price setting aimed at promoting an efficient use of water resources and recovering costs.

Desalination in Spain: A Growing Alternative for Water Supply

The Spanish Mediterranean coast has a significant water deficit. In order to deal with potential shortages in the future, the AGUA programme has been constructing desalination plants since 2004. Taking into account the growing importance of desalination in Spain, the objective of this research is to offer an overview of desalination in this country, its evolution and its present situation. This paper sets out to review the legal framework, the stakeholders who participate and support this activity, the technologies employed, the production costs and the environmental impacts. Some of the factors that have helped boost the interest in desalination are political support, the implementation of more adequate technologies and the favourable evolution of the associated costs.

Urban Water Service Policies and Management in Spain: Pending Issues

In the context of a developed nation like Spain, there are still important challenges to improving urban water service. Pending issues include the insufficient supervision and control of water service management, low prices that do not foster an efficient use of water, enormous disparity in water tariff design, deterioration of water quality at origin, insufficient network renewal, high level of water losses, lack of waste water treatment plans and supply quality problems. This paper describes all these problems and proposes measures and recommendations to solve them.

Water access in Sucre, Bolivia: a case of governance deficit

Bolivia is one of the countries on the American continent with the lowest rates of access to water, a situation that has caused confrontation between civil society and water utility managers in some cities. This research describes the water access scenario in Sucre, the capital of Bolivia, together with the key challenges faced by the company that manages the water services in the city. The case of Sucre is an example of how poor water governance can generate inefficiencies in the management of the service. Taking this into consideration, policy and institutional reforms are recommended to facilitate decision making aimed at improving the current situation of access to water.

Logistic evolutionary product-unit neural networks : Innovation capacity of poor Guatemalan households

A new logistic regression algorithm based on evolutionary product-unit (PU) neural networks is used in this paper to determine the assets that influence the decision of poor households with respect to the cultivation of non-traditional crops (NTC) in the Guatemalan Highlands. In order to evaluate high-order covariate interactions, PUs were considered to be independent variables in product-unit neural networks (PUNN) analysing two different models either including the initial covariates (logistic regression by the product-unit and initial covariate model) or not (logistic regression by the product-unit model). Our results were compared with those obtained using a standard logistic regression model and allow us to interpret the most relevant household assets and their complex interactions when adopting NTC, in order to aid in the design of rural policies.

¿Qué aportan los estudios de felicidad al buen vivir, y viceversa?

In the last years, science has studied happiness and its causes. However, research has not given much attention to groups that share a particular view of happiness, that goes beyond the western idea. This paper aims to analyze the possible advantages and disadvantages, as well as limitations and contributions of happiness research in the comprehension of Buen Vivir of Latin American indigenous people. We also draw conclusions on the contribution of Buen Vivir in happiness studies.