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Summary Unemployment rate estimates for small areas are used to efficiently support the distribution of services and the allocation of resources, grants and funding. A Fay–Herriot type model is the most used tool to obtain these estimates. Under this approach out‐of‐sample areas require some synthetic estimates. As the geographical context is extremely important for analysing local economies, in this paper, we allow for area random effects to be spatially correlated. The spatial model parameters are estimated by a marginal likelihood method and are used to predict in‐sample as well as out‐of‐sample areas. Extensive simulation experiments are used to assess the impact of the auto‐regression parameter and of the rate of out‐of‐sample areas on the performance of this approach. The paper concludes with an illustrative application on real data from the Italian Labour Force Survey in which the estimation of the unemployment rate in each Local Labour Market Area is addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the people categorized as members of the "Jewish race" under Italy's draconian antisemitic racial laws of 1938–1943 sought relief through recategorization as "Aryans." This required the collaboration of Church officials to certify the individual's Catholic credentials, as race categorization depended heavily on one's religion, having little to do with biology. The newly available Ebrei (Jews) series from the Historical Archive of the Secretariat of State, Section for Relations with States and International Organizations (ASRS) offers a rich trove of materials that illuminate how a large number of those categorized as Jews sought to attain Aryan status. Here we take a first look at the impassioned pleas to the Vatican by offering examples of how the petitioners sought to distance themselves from the Jewish "racial" identity assigned to them by the Italian state. As a result of this research, the key role played by the Roman Catholic Church in the administration of Italy's racial laws comes into clearer focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 1938, Italy's Fascist regime announced its new 'racial' policy, soon to be followed by a series of draconian racial laws. The policy was based on the principle that Catholic Italians were of the Aryan race and Jewish Italians belonged to a separate race of non-Aryans. Previously the Vatican had made no such racial distinction. Yet, notwithstanding the frequent claim that the Church has never distinguished between Catholics and Jews on racial grounds, the Vatican quickly began to assimilate to the Fascist state's distinction of Jews as racially marked as non-Aryan. The opening in 2020 of the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XII (1939–58) has made available a huge trove of documents bearing on the way the pope and the Vatican secretariat of state dealt with Italy's racial laws and with the subsequent persecution of Italy's Jews during German occupation. As shown in this article, these documents make clear the Vatican's use of racial language and racial concepts as it dealt with the racial laws and the persecution of Italy's Jews from the time the racial laws were introduced in 1938 to the years of the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the war was going badly in early 1943, Mussolini took the dramatic step of replacing most of his government ministers. Of the men sacked, none drew more attention than Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, who had served as minister of foreign affairs since 1936. The announcement that Ciano would immediately be appointed as Italy's ambassador to the Holy See sparked much speculation in the diplomatic community, where it was viewed as a possible move by Mussolini to employ the Vatican to broker an Italian exit from the war. Others saw the appointment as a desperate move by Ciano himself to find a way out of the war. The recently opened Vatican archives for these years, along with archival evidence from Germany, Britain, the U.S., France, and Italy, offer new insight both into Ciano's attempts to ingratiate himself with Pope Pius XII and to how he in fact operated in his role as Italian ambassador to the Holy See in the months preceding the collapse of the Fascist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the larger debate over Italians' attitudes toward the decision to join the Second World War on Germany's side, and their subsequent attitude toward fighting alongside the Nazis, the question of the role played by the Roman Catholic Church remains controversial. By focusing on Italy's three major Catholic daily newspapers for the years 1939 to 1943, and on the behind-the-scenes actions of the Fascist authorities, we here show one of the principal ways that the institutional Church communicated to Italy's Catholics the proper attitudes to take toward the war. The active role played by the papers and their editors in urging Italian Catholic support for the Axis cause is made clear. We examine the Bologna-based L'Avvenire d'Italia, the Rome-based L'Avvenire, and the Milan-based L'Italia, along with a variety of government and church-related archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maximum likelihood estimation of the model parameters for a spatial population based on data collected from a survey sample is usually straightforward when sampling and non‐response are both non‐informative, since the model can then usually be fitted using the available sample data, and no allowance is necessary for the fact that only a part of the population has been observed. Although for many regression models this naive strategy yields consistent estimates, this is not the case for some models, such as spatial auto‐regressive models. In this paper, we show that for a broad class of such models, a maximum marginal likelihood approach that uses both sample and population data leads to more efficient estimates since it uses spatial information from sampled as well as non‐sampled units. Extensive simulation experiments based on two well‐known data sets are used to assess the impact of the spatial sampling design, the auto‐correlation parameter and the sample size on the performance of this approach. When compared to some widely used methods that use only sample data, the results from these experiments show that the maximum marginal likelihood approach is much more precise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological progress has widely been acknowledged as a key driver in the achievement of environmental sustainability, and a new concern has recently arisen for assessing the role of differences in regional innovation performances with respect to the pursuit of pollution targets. We investigate the impact of innovative activities on environmental efficiency at the regional level, adopting a spatial panel data approach to account for dependence between geographical observations and to get deeper insights into spatial knowledge spillovers arising from agglomeration economies. The spatial panel analysis covers 103 Italian provinces (equivalent to NUTS3 regions) on four major air pollutants (i.e., CO2, CH4, NMVOC, CO) over the 1995–2010 period. Our findings show that the state of local technology development, proxied by patents, has a positive impact on GDP emission efficiency and that its magnitude is higher for more localized pollutants as a result of larger spillover effects. Finally, to analyze the Italian North‐South dualism of emission levels of pollutants, we offer a spillover effect study to emphasize the remarkable difference among effects in the territory. This calls for closer attention to the local relevance of the pollution damage when environmental impact of innovation strategies is to be evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O Bloqueio do Plano do Músculo Eretor da Espinha (ESP block) é um bloqueio relativamente novo, inicialmente descrito para analgesia de dor torácica crônica, porém já descrito para anestesia e analgesia em procedimentos cirúrgicos torácicos e, mais recentemente, para cirurgias abdominais altas. O estudo objetivou comparar as técnicas de bloqueio ESP e bloqueio Epidural com morfina e anestésico local para analgesia pós‐operatória de cirurgias de colecistectomia aberta. Estudo clínico randomizado controlado, unicego com 31 pacientes (ESP block, n = 15; Epidural, n = 16), de ambos os sexos, idades entre 27 e 77 anos. O ESP block foi realizado no nível de T8 com injeção de 20 mL de ropivacaína 0,5% bilateral. O bloqueio Epidural foi realizado no espaço T8‐T9 com 20 mL de ropivacaína 0,5% e 1 mg de morfina. O grupo ESP block apresentou valores médios de dor pela Escala Visual Numérica (EVN) maiores nas avaliações até 2 horas (p = 0,001) e em 24 horas (p = 0,001). O grupo ESP block apresentou um risco três vezes maior – 43,7% vs. 13,3% – de uso de opioide de resgate em 24 horas pós‐operatórias do que o grupo epidural (RR = 3,72; 95% IC 0,91 a 15,31; p = 0,046). Nas doses realizadas nesse estudo, o ESP block não se mostrou uma técnica efetiva para analgesia pós‐operatória de colecistectomia aberta, com mais uso de opioide de resgate e sem diferenças na escala visual numérica de dor. Necessita‐se de estudos mais abrangentes avaliando a eficácia do ESP block para o componente visceral e somático abdominal, considerando o nível do bloqueio específico. Blockade of the Erector Spinal Muscle (ESP block) is a relatively new block, initially described for chronic thoracic pain analgesia, but it has already been described for anesthesia and analgesia in thoracic surgical procedures and, more recently, for high abdominal surgeries. The aim of the study was to compare two techniques, ESP Block and Epidural block with morphine and local anesthetic for postoperative analgesia of open cholecystectomy surgeries. Controlled single‐blind randomized clinical trial with 31 patients (ESP block, n = 15; Epidural, n = 16), of both genders, ages between 27 and 77 years. The ESP block was performed at the T8 level with injection of 20 mL of 0.5% ropivacaine bilaterally. The epidural block was performed at the T8‐T9 space with 20 mL of 0.5% ropivacaine and 1 mg of morphine. The ESP block group presented higher mean Numeric Pain Scale (NPS) values for pain in the up to 2 hour (p = 0.001) and in the 24 hour (p = 0.001) assessments. The ESP block group had a three‐fold increased risk (43.7% vs. 13.3%) of rescue opioid use in the 24 postoperative hours when compared to the epidural group (RR = 3.72, 95% CI: 0.91 to 15.31, p = 0.046). ESP block did not prove to be an effective technique for postoperative analgesia of open cholecystectomy, at the doses performed in this study, having required more use of rescue opioid, and without differences in NPS. More comprehensive studies are required to assess the efficacy of ESP block for the visceral and abdominal somatic component, considering the specific blockade level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical data in economic, social or environmental sciences are usually recorded as compositions, i.e. relative frequencies, and a common inquiring problem concerns the analysis of these data over different geographical regions. In the present paper we define a new statistical test to verify spatial dependence of such geographical distributions based on distance correlation, a recently introduced measure of dependence between random vectors. The proposed index computes the non‐linear spatial distance between distributions and can be applied on compositional frequency distributions. Simulations and an application on Italian electoral data are presented, to illustrate the capabilities of the proposed test to detect spatial dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper proposes a new technique based on an iterated spatially weighted regression procedure to verify the presence of economic growth heterogeneities in EU regions in the period 1981-2009. The approach extends a procedure originally proposed in the field of image analysis based on the assumption of local homogeneity of the signal. The presence of the heterogeneity is a criterion to divide the sample of observations (i.e. regions) into smaller homogeneous groups. Our results highlight the presence in the EU regions of five different clubs with different growth paths within each subgroup. Spatial dependence is also considered in the definition of the economic convergence model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The units observed in a biological, agricultural, and environmental survey are often randomly selected from a finite population whose main feature is to be geo-referenced thus its spatial distribution should be used as essential information in designing the sample. In particular our interest is focused on probability samples that are well spread over the population in every dimension which in recent literature are defined as spatially balanced samples. To approach the problem we used the within sample distance as the summary index of the spatial distribution of a random selection criterion. Moreover numerical comparisons are made between the relative efficiency, measured with respect to the simple random sampling, of the suggested design and some other classical solutions as the Generalized Random Tessellation Stratified (GRTS) design used by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other balanced or spatially balanced selection procedures as the Spatially Correlated Poisson Sampling (SCPS), the balanced sampling (CUBE), and the Local Pivotal method (LPM). These experiments on real and simulated data show that the design based on the within sample distance selects samples with a better spatial balance thus gives estimates with a lower sampling error than those obtained by using the other methods. The suggested method is very flexible to the introduction of stratification and coordination of samples and, even if in its nature it is computationally intensive, it is shown to be a suitable solution even when dealing with high sampling rates and large population frames where the main problem arises from the size of the distance matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last year, a central issue in regional economic growth debate has been represented by the empirical analysis of Verdoorn's law related to the long-term dynamic relationship between the rate of growth in output and the productivity growth due to increasing returns. Several papers have tested Verdoorn's law on European countries as well as many other world economies. Recently, attempts have been made to provide foundations for a spatial version of the original law specification. The main contributions were dedicated to the inclusion of spatial dependence in the economic model. Surprisingly, in the literature on Verdoom's law the analysis of the spatial heterogeneity is not often considered. The aim of this paper is the regional analysis of the spatial dependence and heterogeneity in Verdoorn's law, identifying spatial regimes that can be interpreted as clusters of productivity growth in European regions at NUTS 2 level. To pursue this objective, an optimization algorithm for the identification of groups is used. This constitutes a modified version of Simulated Annealing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]