One of the concerns in our time is the need to integrate economic, social and environmental aspects, which is known as sustainable development. The role of higher education is essential for providing future professionals with the necessary profiles to respond to the sustainability challenges in increasingly complex and global contexts. That is why numerous authors have sought to define key competencies, skills and learning outcomes for sustainability. However, there is still no agreement on what these key competencies for sustainability in higher education really are. For that reason, the objective of this paper is to determine which are the sustainability core competencies, considering three different geographical regions (Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia), and the perspective of four different stakeholders (graduates, employers, students and academics). The framework of the research is the development of the so-called Tuning projects, which aim to design comparable and compatible higher education degrees in different regions of the world, based on student-centered and competency-based learning. Using an exploratory factor analysis (EFA), the results of this study reveal the existence of a factor intimately related to sustainability, which includes competencies such as commitment to the preservation of the environment, social responsibility or respect for diversity and multiculturality, among others.

This article analyses the influence of workforce ageing on labour productivity in Europe. This question is relevant because of the impact it may have on economic activity, social security systems sustainability and the wellbeing of the population. The method applied is a quantitative contrast using the panel data technique for 24 countries in the period 1983–2014. This research is framed in the open conversation in the literature on the possible impact of ageing on productivity and takes as reference the seminal work of James Feyrer and the contrast model developed by Shekhar Aiyar, Christian Ebeke, and Xiaobo Shao. The results obtained show how a 1% increase in the workforce between the ages of 55 and 64 is related to a decrease of the annual increase in productivity between −0.106% and −0.479%. The main contribution of the article is to provide, as far as the authors are aware, the first evidence of this negative relationship for the period 1983–2014, in addition to suggesting that the influence of ageing on productivity may be reduced by the evolution of the economies in question toward capital and/or knowledge-intensive sectors.

Experimental research on argument structure has reported mixed results regarding the processing of unaccusative and unergative predicates. Using eye tracking in the visual world paradigm, this study seeks to fill a gap in the literature by presenting new evidence of the processing distinction between agent and theme subjects. We considered two hypotheses. First, the Unaccusative Hypothesis states that unaccusative (theme) subjects involve a more complex syntactic representation than unergative (agent) subjects. It predicts a delayed reactivation of unaccusative subjects compared to unergatives after the presentation of the verb. Second, the Agent First Hypothesis states that the first ambiguous NP of a sentence will preferably be interpreted as an agent due to an attentional preference to agents over themes. It predicts a larger reactivation of agent subjects than themes. We monitored the time course of gaze fixations of 44 native speakers across a visual display while processing sentences with unaccusative, unergative and transitive verbs. One of the pictures in the visual display was semantically related to the sentential subject. We analyzed fixation patterns in three different time frames: the verb frame, the post-verb frame, and the global post-verbal frame. Results indicated that sentential subjects across the three conditions were significantly activated when participants heard the verb; this is compatible with observing a post-verbal reactivation effect. Time course and magnitude of the gaze-fixation patterns are fully compatible with the predictions made by the Agent First Hypothesis. Thus, we report new evidence for (a) a processing distinction between unaccusative and unergative predicates in sentence comprehension, and (b) an attentional preference towards agents over themes, reflected by a larger reactivation effect in agent subjects.