ICEC 2016 – ABSTRACTS

Here below the abstracts of the papers that I am preparing for the ICEC World Congress to be held in Rio de Janeiro, October 2016.

Semantics in total cost management

The paper focuses on some words that, albeit having the same etymology, assume a different meaning from one language to another: reference is made to English and Italian, together with some other Latin languages. Notwithstanding the fact that we are normally, in any business relationship, speak and write in English, in a lot of cases we are doing so with the mental filter of our mother tongue, namely we are using the English word with the meaning the same word has in our own language, and this can be cause of misunderstandings and confusion.

Majority of the words taken into consideration are related to our profession such as “project”, “controls”, “management”, “engineer”, “design” and so on.

An engineering approach to economic development

A lot of theories and consideration have been written up to now on economic development, mainly by sociologists and economists. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the problem from an engineering point of view, focusing on quantitative aspects as well as try to point out some conditions under a proper equation, namely shifting from words to figures.

Useless to say, mathematics will never govern the economy, since the behavior of human beings is never perfectly rational, however some mathematics can help.

Equitable payment and social inequalities

The problem of properly defining the equitable payment for different levels of work has been discussed since longtime, reference should also be made to a proper scheme of comparison of the work level in different organizations, starting from the basic theory of the “time span of discretionality” defined by Elliot Jaques immediately after the second world war and still subject of discussions and consideration. Also we shall set up a model trying to justify why a difference in payment for high level and lower level works can be easily accepted in a so called “rich country” while it cannot be accepted in poorer countries.