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After the pandemic peak, public debt over GDP in Italy has fallen sharply thanks to high real and nominal economic growth; a few institutional changes have further reduced concerns about its medium-term sustainability. Yet, the debt ratio is still too high and needs to be reduced. The gradual adjustment path forecasted by the new Eu fiscal rules seems broadly able to reach this objective without imposing too harsh policies that might turn out to be economically and politically counter-productive. Still, without a serious reform of the Eu and the Eu budget, there remains the problem of how Italy and the other European countries will finance the new spending priorities dictated by the green deal and the mutated geo-political situation. And in the longer run, the demographic shock remains the most serious concern for public debt sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades, several European health systems have abandoned their vertically integrated health care in favour of some form of managed competition (MC), either in a centralised or decentralised format. However, during a pandemic, MC may put health systems under additional strain as they are designed to follow some form of 'organisational self-interest', and hence face reduced incentives for both provider coordination (e.g. temporary hospital close down, change in the case-mix), and information sharing. We illustrate our argument using evidence for the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak in Italy during March and April 2020, which calls for the development of 'coordination mechanisms' at times of a health emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent scholarship on the Italian South has reflected on the otherized, inferiorized and racialized positionality of the region's territories, cultures and populations within the national Italian debate, with the North functioning as an allegedly virtuous norm that the South constantly fails to conform to. The gendered imagery that inscribes this type of ethnic and territorial subordination permits, in this context, the visualization of anomalous, recalcitrant and undomesticated Southern women that function as a metaphor of the irredeemable otherness of the South. In this article, I use as a starting point three films starring and directed by Leonardo Pieraccioni, namely I laureati (The Graduates) (1995), Il ciclone (The Cyclone) (1996) and Il paradiso all'improvviso (Suddenly Paradise) (2003). I consider these films in order to analyse the screen personas of Tosca D'Aquino and Anna Maria Barbera, both of whom embody, in different ways, the encounter between Southern identity, eccentricity and non-normative corporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit from suppliers is an important source of finance for firms. It can sustain firms' financial flexibility even in periods of downturn. In this study, using a large database of 90,763 Italian firms in the 2015–2021 period, we investigated how local financial development affects the trade-credit policies of SMEs and how this effect is conditioned by the degree of judicial enforcement. Given that trade credit can be a substitute for bank financing, we find that firms make more use of trade credit in developed financial markets. Moreover, we highlight the finding that a higher degree of judicial enforcement, which reinforces the role of contracts in the market, amplifies this effect. Finally, we observe that the COVID-19 crisis has reduced both the positive effect of local financial development and the positive moderating effect of enforcement in the use of trade credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study is use a bibliometric analysis to explore the relational nature of knowledge creation in WFM in operations. Companies live under constant pressure to find the best ways to plan their workforce, and the workforce emangement (WFM) is one of the biggest challenges faced by managers. Relevant research on WFM in operations has been published in a several range of journals that vary in their scope and readership, and thus the academic contribution to the topic remains largely fragmented. Design/methodology/approach: To address this gap, this review aims to map research on WFM in operations to understand where it comes from and where it is going and, therefore, provides opportunities for future work. This study combined two bibliometric approaches with manual document coding to examine the literature corpus of WFM in operations to draw a holistic picture of its different aspects. Findings: Content and thematic analysis of the seminal studies resulted in the extraction of three key research themes: workforce cross-training, planning workforce mixed methods and individual workforce characteristics. The findings of this study further highlight the gaps in the WFM in operations literature and raise some research questions that warrant further academic investigation in the future. Originality/value: Likewise, this study has important implications for practitioners who are likely to benefit from a holistic understanding of the different aspects of WFM in operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female representation may be a key factor in improving the quality of governance. In fact, the literature considers that the presence of women in organisations tends to improve performance. In this context, this paper attempts to analyse whether the presence of women in municipal councils has an influence on the efficiency of public services for a sample of 141 Spanish municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants for the period 2014–2018. Our results show a U-shaped relationship between the number of female councillors and the level of efficiency in Spanish municipalities. This means that the presence of women is positively associated with municipal efficiency but only if the number of female councillors is relatively high. On the contrary, their voice and personal characteristics are diluted among their male counterparts, and efficiency may be reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the concept and measurement of regulatory decentralization with a focus on minimum wages and renewable electricity standards. These two policy areas are chosen because they admit of a clear interpretation in continuous terms and vary substantially across jurisdictions. Concurrent central and subcentral regulatory competencies have a straightforward quantitative interpretation in these two policy areas. The article presents data on the effective autonomy of subcentral governments to determine their own minimum wage rates and renewable energy standards. It then tests whether more decentralized minimum wage and renewable energy regulatory regimes yield a consistently lower level of regulation and higher degree of interregional policy variation. I find that central governments are more likely to set regulatory minimums than maximums in these areas, and that therefore regulatory centralization does promote a higher level of regulation, but likely not through a competitive dynamic, and less policy variance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes how economic theory usually investigates corruption. It describes the main traditional economic theories dealing with this issue—principal-agent theory (agency theory) and rent-seeking theory—and it emphasizes that both face some problems, especially their neglect of some important factors as to why corruption occurs which prevents them from accurately analyzing this phenomenon and proposing solutions on how to fight against it. The article further discusses whether institutional economics can overcome these problems. We show that it does, but that it needs to more seriously consider the environment in which corruption occurs. Redistribution system theory can serve as a useful aid here because it reveals that the source of corruption is an environment of undesirable redistribution. The article provides the characteristics of this type of redistribution and shows how its reduction also leads to the reduction in corruption. It can be concluded that economic theory should not rely only on traditional approaches to corruption but should at least add institutional economics and redistribution system theory to its methods of corruption analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All countries are trying their best to achieve maximum economic prosperity through employing efficient economic strategies. Countries seem to be conscious of various factors that can potentially affect economic growth. Given that, the current study examines the impact of various macroeconomic factors on the economic growth of Palestine. By employing the large range of quarterly data spanning from 2001 to 2020, the statistical outputs of the ARDL model show that government debt, donations, government expenditures, and unemployment rate adversely impact economic growth. However, other factors including credit facilities, inflation, and total investments positively impinge upon the economic growth of Palestine. Such dynamic impacts of various macroeconomic factors display both the detrimental and growth-promoting role of macroeconomic factors in determining economic prosperity. Our analysis suggests various policy implications to economic policy officials regarding the effectiveness of various factors for economic health. It is further recommended that international agencies working in aid- and donation-intensive countries should design efficient economic policies that can help such economies in coming out from economic distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]