Francesca Castellani – författare

This book looks at both the potential and limits of policies to promote entrepreneurship as an important vehicle for social mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean. Who are the region’s entrepreneurs? They tend to be middle-aged males with secondary and, often, tertiary education who represent only a small segment of the economically-active population in the six countries considered in this book. They come from families in which a parent is, or was, an entrepreneur. In fact, a parent’s occupation is more important in the decision to become an entrepreneur than a parent's wealth, income or education.Middle class entrepreneurship tends to dominate the sample in part since this is the majority class in society. However, as a percentage of each social class, entrepreneurship tends to be higher in the upper class, followed by the middle and lower classes. Entrepreneurs concentrate in micro-enterprises with fewer than five employees. They enjoy greater social mobility than employees and the self-employed, but this mobility is not always in the upward direction. Entrepreneurs face multiple obstacles including stifling bureaucracy, burdensome tax procedures, and lack of financing, human capital, technological skills, and supportive networks. The support of family and friends, and a modicum of social capital, help them cope with these obstacles to entrepreneurship.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Second International and - terdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT’99), held in Trento (Italy) from 9 to 11 September 1999. CONTEXT’99 is the second in the CONTEXT series. The rst was held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1997. The CONTEXT conference series is meant to provide an interdisciplinary - rum where researchers can exchange ideas, methodologies, and results on c- text, and is increasingly becoming an important reference for all people doing research on context. This is testi ed by the larger number of research areas that are represented at CONTEXT’99 (in particular, Philosophy and Cognitive Psychology were not signi cantly present at the rst conference), and by the number and quality of submitted papers. Speci cally, we received 118 papers, mostly of good or excellent quality. Among them, 33 (28%) have been accepted as full papers, and 21 as short papers. We think it is fair to say that the 54 papers collected in this volume provide a signi cant picture of the international research on context currently going on. The notion of context plays an important role in many areas, both theoretical and applied, such as Formal Logic, Arti cial Intelligence, Philosophy, Pragm- ics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Cognitive Psychology.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Second International and - terdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT’99), held in Trento (Italy) from 9 to 11 September 1999. CONTEXT’99 is the second in the CONTEXT series. The rst was held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1997. The CONTEXT conference series is meant to provide an interdisciplinary - rum where researchers can exchange ideas, methodologies, and results on c- text, and is increasingly becoming an important reference for all people doing research on context. This is testi ed by the larger number of research areas that are represented at CONTEXT’99 (in particular, Philosophy and Cognitive Psychology were not signi cantly present at the rst conference), and by the number and quality of submitted papers. Speci cally, we received 118 papers, mostly of good or excellent quality. Among them, 33 (28%) have been accepted as full papers, and 21 as short papers. We think it is fair to say that the 54 papers collected in this volume provide a signi cant picture of the international research on context currently going on. The notion of context plays an important role in many areas, both theoretical and applied, such as Formal Logic, Arti cial Intelligence, Philosophy, Pragm- ics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Cognitive Psychology.