The COVID-19 disease and the systemic responses to it has impacted lives, routines and procedures at an unprecedented level. While medical care and emergency response present immediate needs, the implications of this pandemic will likely be far-reaching. Most practices that the clinical research within neuroscience and music field rely on, take place in hospitals or closely connected clinical settings which have been hit hard by the contamination. So too have its preventive and treatment measures. This means that clinical research protocols may have been altered, postponed or put in complete jeopardy. In this context, we would like to present and discuss the problems arising under the current crisis. We do so by critically approaching an online discussion facilitated by an expert panel in the field of music and neuroscience. This effort is hoped to provide an efficient basis to orient ourselves as we begin to map the needs and elements in this field of research as we further propose ideas and solutions on how to overcome, or at least ease the problems and questions we encounter or will encounter, with foresight. Among others, we hope to answer questions on technical or social problems that can be expected, possible solutions and preparatory steps to take in order to improve or ease research implementation, ethical implications and funding considerations. Finally, we further hope to facilitate the process of creating new protocols in order to minimize the impact of this crisis on essential research which may have the potential to relieve health systems.

In most developing countries, local companies have more expensive polluting production technology than those in developed countries. On the other hand, there is a growing concern to produce and consume ecological goods in the world. Based on this reality, and using environmental awareness as public policy, this article uses a theoretical model that determines the level of environmental awareness that a government receiving Foreign Investment is willing to promote, taking into account oligopolistic competition between foreign and local companies in the country. The optimal environmental awareness policy considers the impact of this policy on local investment, the benefit of the consumer, foreign investment flows, and the disutility of the contamination of polluting goods in the population. The optimal level of environmental awareness is found to depend on the degree of disutility of pollution and the introjection of politics induced by the host government.

Using the principal-agent approach, a theoretical model is developed, in which dishonest government officers lobby authorities (in the form of a corrupted political contribution) for getting some advantage over honest officers. The government agency authority should maximize the welfare of the civil service officers by distributing an economic compensation granted by a central government through the use of an institutional policy. The contribution scheme promotes a relevant truthful equilibrium. A larger institutional level favors honest people; a smaller institutional level favors dishonest people and the bribe they offer. This result has two opposite implications. If government is only an efficient authority, the optimal institutional policy will grant the same amount of economic compensation to all officers. On the other hand, if authority is assuming a moral role against corruption, then the government will be inclined to set the strictest institutional policy.

No abstract

The processes of economic integration in Latin American economies have logic that goes beyond the simple interest of trade creation. The governments focus on the benefit produced by Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as one of the most important reasons to formalize trade agreements. FDI differs in the way in which this investment relates with the local producer sector and the strategy trade policy followed by local governments. In this sense Latin American economies may receive horizontal or vertical FDI, and this chapter aims to examine the impact of strategic trade policies on the inflows of FDI into two Latin American regions: North Region and South Region. These investment flows come from three economic zones: Asia, America, and European Union. To this end, the gravity equation to compare the weight of variables such as distance, infrastructure, trade openness, and cultural affinity as independent variables and FDI as the dependent variable is estimated. The results obtained show that the strategy trade policy followed in the North Region in the form of trade liberalization, and the strategy trade policy followed in the South Region in the form of a relative closeness with the custom union plus the proposed trade agreements with other regions encouraged inflows of FDI in both regions during the analyzed period. While the gravity hypothesis holds on the South Region, in the North Region it does not hold. In the North Region, vertical FDI is received, and in the South Region it is horizontal FDI.