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Judicial institutions have become the standard solution to umpire multilevel polities across much of the European continent. However, such arrangement is not free from complexities. This paper analyses the problems associated with the construction of legitimacy regarding constitutional courts in European multilevel democracies. In these polities, constitutional courts tend to rely on three different forms of legitimacy, which are embedded into their institutional design: democratic, multilevel; and technocratic. However, these forms of legitimacy are in tension, often undermining one another when combined. Furthermore, this tension is exploited by political actors to attack the courts, resulting in reputational costs for these institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should patent legislative power be allocated between central and local governments in order to construct a patent system conducive to promoting innovation? A comparative analysis of the models of the U.S. and China sheds light on this question. The early American states established their patent systems before the formation of the federal system, but the U.S. Constitution arrogated patent legislative power to the federal government, ending the era of decentralized patent systems. This centralized structure ensures uniformity in rules but migfit hinder the ystem !r adaptability and ability to experiment. In contrast, as China'spatent ystem evolved, its patent legislative power spread from the central to the local governments. This shift led to the coexistence of dual-levelpatent legislative structure. Currently, twenty-nine out of thirty-one province-level authorities (93.5%) and twenty-one out of323 city-level authorities with local legislative power (6.5%) have established localpatent laws. China's patent ystem is not entirely decentralized but rather, semi-decentralized, as the locales not only implement their localpatent laws but also must enforce the central government's national patent laws. China's semidecentralized patent legislation model embodies significant features of cooperative federalism, where the central and local governments share the nationalpower to handle affairs and collaborate to address issues. Yet, the central government maintains a dominant position in this cooperative relationship, as a consequence of China's unitary state structure. Compared to the current centralized patent legislation model in the U.S., China's semi-decentralized patent legislation model has the advantage of making statutory law more adaptable to local specificities and promoting local competition and institutional innovation. However, it also faces challenges, such as increased costs due to inconsistency; efficiency decline stemming from rent-seeking behaviors; and the risk that localprotectionism will create anti-competitive effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While extensive understanding of headship has emerged over the last half-century, the notion of executive headship remains under-explored. This article summarizes a systematic review of evidence relating to executive headship published since 2001. This review found the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed articles into executive headship are small-scale or largely theoretical in nature. Meanwhile, the few larger-scale studies completed have generally been published directly by their commissioning body. Consequently, much is known about the policy and philosophical drivers behind the emergence of this role in English schools, but markedly less on its operationalization in practice. Furthermore, while few attempts have been made to assess the prevalence of this role, there is nevertheless some evidence (albeit limited) that executive headship can positively impact on organizational effectiveness and pupil outcomes. This article recommends that further research be undertaken into understanding how the role is performed in practice, its strengths and limitations, implications for governance, the characteristics it demands of leaders in practice and the support they require. Furthermore, parallels between this and similar roles in other countries (such as superintendents in the US) should also be examined to identify further lessons on how executive headship can best be utilized both strategically and operationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper aims that digital transformation (DT) is crucial for companies to stay competitive. While research on DT has quickly gained great popularity, the intersection of trade associations (TAs) and their role in the DT of their members is not yet researched. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, the authors conducted 20 interviews with Belgian TAs to investigate the role of a TAs in the DT of its members, and how they drive the DT of its members. In addition, the authors investigate the core tasks of TAs, the need of the different industries to digitalize, and the digital projects the different industries are working on. Findings – The findings indicate that TAs can be in a prime position to steer the DT of their members, especially for industries comprised of smaller players. Their roles can range from informing roles to true leaders of DT by creating novel products, such as online platforms and driving the entire sector forwards. Research limitations/implications – These findings call for more research into TAs and how their role can be optimized for steering DT of their members. Originality/value – This is the first study to extensively study the role of TAs on the DT of their members.

Copyright of Universitas, Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas is the property of Universidad Politecnica Salesiana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The evolution of the Swiss Confederation from a local alliance among Imperial estates to a national entity on the European stage can be mapped by tracking the way that federal business was archived from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The original Diet (Tagsatzung) established after the allied cantons gained shared territories in the Aargau in the 1420s lacked the personnel or institutional identity necessary to undertake any archival activity. As the Confederation gained institutional definition and became a regional player in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire and of Central Europe, however, documentary practices became increasingly routinized, and stable federal collections began forming in parallel in the archives of the leading cantons. Consisting of durable representations of ongoing debates and negotiations and preserved in documents (Abschiede) that were circulated differentially depending on the matters and parties involved, the emerging confederal archive was distributed in that no single location possessed a complete version, and imaginary in that contemporaries regarded it as a comprehensive unity despite its very real physical and material fragmentation. In the later sixteenth century, a separate archival collection reflecting the Confederation's shared business emerged in the administrative centre of Baden (Aargau), reflecting the consolidating identity of Confederation as it moved out of the Empire's orbit. Repeated efforts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to complete and protect this collection referred to it as an archive despite its unusual characteristics. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, projects to create a Swiss national archive, either virtually or in print, culminated in the printed Eidgenössische Abschiede that created a documentary record of a Swiss state since the thirteenth century that had never existed historically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives / Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas is the property of Educational Policy Analysis Archives & Education Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

RDF dataset profiling is the task of extracting a formal representation of a dataset's features. Such features may cover various aspects of the RDF dataset ranging from information on licensing and provenance to statistical descriptors of the data distribution and its semantics. In this work, we focus on the characteristics sets profile features that capture both structural and semantic information of an RDF dataset, making them a valuable resource for different downstream applications. While previous research demonstrated the benefits of characteristic sets in centralized and federated query processing, access to these fine-grained statistics is taken for granted. However, especially in federated query processing, computing this profile feature is challenging as it can be difficult and/or costly to access and process the entire data from all federation members. We address this shortcoming by introducing the concept of a profile feature estimation and propose a sampling-based approach to generate estimations for the characteristic sets profile feature. In addition, we showcase the applicability of these feature estimations in federated querying by proposing a query planning approach that is specifically designed to leverage these feature estimations. In our first experimental study, we intrinsically evaluate our approach on the representativeness of the feature estimation. The results show that even small samples of just 0.5 % of the original graph's entities allow for estimating both structural and statistical properties of the characteristic sets profile features. Our second experimental study extrinsically evaluates the estimations by investigating their applicability in our query planner using the well-known FedBench benchmark. The results of the experiments show that the estimated profile features allow for obtaining efficient query plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bolstered by its fight against flags of convenience, the ITF has developed a very large paid staff that allows it to deploy standardized coordinated campaigns combining powerful communication and solidarity between industrial sections. However, it appears that professional identities and regional stakes are too deeply rooted to allow real cohesion. Bureaucratization of the trade unions’ apparatuses feeds a real misunderstanding of the interests and stakes of the rank-and-file, as well as of trade union democracy. This case study suggests reexamining the paths of trade unionism as a tool of counter-power for workers.

Copyright of Wschodnioznawstwo is the property of Jagiellonian University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Educational Thought / Revue de la Pensée Educative is the property of University of Calgary, Faculty of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article demonstrates how the formation of new federations with power asymmetries, such as Canada at the time of Confederation—its constitutional moment—led to asymmetric representation, also referred to as malapportionment. The same power asymmetries that led to asymmetric representation also led to fiscal redistribution in which some sub-national jurisdictions obtained a share of federal government spending that was disproportionate to their share of the country's population or their contribution toward federal government revenues. This article makes use of historical institutionalism to demonstrate that Confederation can best be viewed as a critical juncture and treats Canada as a case study in which both political malapportionment and fiscal redistribution were part of the initial federal bargain. It also shows how path dependence ensures that both malapportionment and fiscal redistribution have been persistent features of the Canadian federation and have become accentuated over time. Malapportionment is measured using the Loosemore-Hanby index of electoral disproportionality, as adapted by David Samuels and Richard Snyder. This permits comparisons between institutions, including the House of Commons and Senate, various caucuses within those institutions, and the federal cabinet. It also permits comparisons between jurisdictions and between different time periods. Fiscal redistribution is measured using Statistics Canada estimates of spending by the federal government in each province and territory and the amount of revenue it collects in those same jurisdictions. Progressive forms of taxation, direct spending by the federal government, and intergovernmental grants have all expanded exponentially and have led to increased fiscal redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue Académique des Études Sociales et Humaines is the property of Hassif Benbouali University of Chlef and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The ITF Tennis Play and Stay campaign has been a crucial initiative to increase the number of tennis players in the world and promote tennis as easy, fun and healthy to all ages, genders, playing standard and physical abilities. The aim of this study was to find out the views on this campaign of those responsible for the participation programmes of the 35 national federations with the largest number of recreational players. These 35 experts responded to a questionnaire developed specifically for this study. The results showed that the 10-and-under competition rule change, implemented by the ITF in 2012, was well communicated to coaches and brings benefits in terms of increased participation, learning and performance improvements in beginner players. In addition, most countries reported that they have implemented the concepts of the campaign both in training and competitions, as well as in coach education programmes. Therefore, it is concluded that, in general, the opinions of the experts within national federations who are responsible for the participation directive and for implementing programmes related to the concepts of the ITF Tennis Play and Stay campaign obtained through this study are extremely positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Recherches Sociographiques is the property of Recherches Sociographiques and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article investigates the political accountability of the EU's executive power (the elephant). It starts from a discussion of some recent contributions to the analysis of the EU's executive power showing their difficulties in conceptualizing its accountability patterns. Then, it analyses executive power's accountability in democratic federal systems, comparing coming-together federations, where executive power's political accountability is institutional, with holding-together federations, where executive power's political accountability is electoral. Thus, it conceptualizes the EU's executive power as consisting in a dual decision-making regime (supranational and intergovernmental) to deal with different policy areas. Using the comparative federalism perspective, the article argues that executive power's accountability is institutional in the supranational regime (although it manages issues of low domestic political salience) while it is neither institutional nor electoral in the intergovernmental regime (which manages issues of high domestic political salience). This differentiation works against the elephant's accountability in crucial policy realms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and how have free movement and social citizenship been reconciled in federal settings characterised by devolved welfare responsibilities and extensive internal diversity? The EU fails to guarantee minimum social protection rights for EU citizens migrating within the Union, as access to social assistance in countries of destination is highly conditional. This situation is very similar to historical experiences in other federations, where fears of welfare migration and tensions between federal and sub-federal competencies made it difficult to guarantee social assistance rights for all citizens. A comparison of the North German Confederation, Switzerland and the USA, demonstrates that such rights nonetheless have been extended to all citizens in federations and that this occurred along two pathways: (a) a judicial pathway through the intervention of a constitutional court; or (b) a political pathway through incremental change. The conclusion considers possible implications of these findings for the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the year 1918 marked the beginning of the great unification of Romania, and for Poles a total rebirth of statehood after 123 years of slavery, between these processes one can find both differences and similarities. This applies in particular to the problems of political and legal integration of Polish territories into one state and the „new“ Romanian provinces with the „old“ Kingdom. At the end of WW I independent Polish and Romanian national councils were established in areas inhabited by Poles and in the lands postulated by the Romanians. Some of them immediately declared their affiliation to their Homelands - this was especially visible in the Polish lands, others were more cautious, took a waiting position - the example of Bessarabia and Transylvania - which was caused by the geopolitical situation, fear of the Bolsheviks, a complex national structure in the region. They also hoped for reforms in Russia, Austria and Hungary towards the federation, and then for autonomy in their home countries. On the other hand, the Germans in Upper Silesia and Hungarians in the areas postulated by Romania were known from the typical separatist movements, who in the projects of their quasi-states created a chance to maintain their positions. The demand for autonomy by the inhabitants of some regions (Bessarabia, Transylvania, Upper Silesia) was also the result of previous experiences of life in countries with a higher civilization level. It was not easy to combine different regions in terms of economic and mental, which makes itself known to this day. Poland and Romania, as well as other Central European countries have become national states, but Romania was more centralized. There were fears about decentralization and national minorities. There were disputes between the center and the regions about how to manage them and it was often heard in such provinces as supranational slogans such as „Basarabia for Basarabian“ and „Bukovina for Bukovinians“. Similar terms appeared in Upper Silesia, although this region was the only one in Poland that gained territorial autonomy.

- Since the formation of Malaysia, the Federation under the Tunku Abdul Rahman-Tun Razak leadership had to deal with the Malaysia-Indonesia confrontation and also issues in Singapore that were stirred up by Lee Kuan Yew. Continual provocation and pressure from Lee Kuan Yew on the Central Government subsequently led to the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia. Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, one of the core leaders of the Federation, viewed Singapore as a ‘thorn in the flesh’ when it was part of Malaysia. Questions were raised about cause his negative views on Singapore. This paper unveils the events which led to the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia (1963-1965), especially the roles of Tun Razak in resolving issues with Singapore when it was part of the Malaysia Federation. - Since the formation of Malaysia, the Federation under the Tunku Abdul Rahman-Tun Razak leadership had to deal with the Malaysia-Indonesia confrontation and also issues in Singapore that were stirred up by Lee Kuan Yew. Continual provocation and pressure from Lee Kuan Yew on the Central Government subsequently led to the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia. Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, one of the core leaders of the Federation, viewed Singapore as a ‘thorn in the flesh’ when it was part of Malaysia. Questions were raised about cause his negative views on Singapore. This paper unveils the events which led to the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia (1963-1965), especially the roles of Tun Razak in resolving issues with Singapore when it was part of the Malaysia Federation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unique challenges of the correctional healthcare environment are well-documented. Access to community-equivalent care, voluntary informed consent of offenders with mental disorder, violence risk, suicide risk, medication misuse, and clinical seclusion, confinement and segregation are just a few of the challenges faced by correctional psychiatric services. This paper shares experiences for dealing with the ongoing challenges for psychiatrists working in the field. It provides an overview of the current state of mental healthcare in the federal correctional system in Canada, the legislative framework and initiatives aimed at addressing the healthcare needs of federal inmates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how a voluntary participation decision in international environmental negotiations affects the endogenous authority structure in a federation. In our model, the federal government of each country decides whether to delegate both the decision to participate in a negotiation that determines the abatement level of pollution (the level of the public good), and the negotiation itself, to a regional government of the polluter region. We show that there exists a subgame perfect equilibrium in which none of the federal governments chooses delegation, which is quite different from the authority structure in the absence of a voluntary participation decision. The main contribution is to explain why the federal government has an incentive not to delegate decisions to a regional government [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Injuries, the cause of an estimated 4.5 million deaths annually and many more disabilities worldwide each year, are the predictable outcome of particular circumstances. One of the most effective ways to prevent injuries is through policy and legislation. The aim of this research study was to identify and critically review all policy and legislation in Nepal that had the potential to prevent injuries.Methods: We identified legislation and policy that met inclusion criteria through a stakeholder meeting, networks and contacts, and websites and electronic resources. Each included document was critically reviewed to identify areas of strength and opportunities for improvement. We compared the included documents against WHO's recommendations of known effective interventions.Results: Sixty-two documents met the inclusion criteria for this review. Of these, 24 (38.7%) were exclusively related to road injuries, 11 (17.7%) to occupational injuries, 6 (9.7%) to injuries in the home and 5 (8.1%) to injuries at school; 30 (48.4%) documents included text related to the first response to injuries. Of 127 strategic recommendations by WHO that provided an area for policy or legislative focus, 21 (16.5%) were considered adequately met by Nepali policy and legislation, 43 (33.9%) were considered partially met and 63 (49.6%) were not met.Conclusion: We drew five conclusions from this critical policy review, which we have related to recommendations as follows: widening the scope of legislation and policy for injury prevention to emphasize injuries occurring at home or school; addressing the causes of injuries and promoting proven preventive measures; greater clarity on both individual and institutional roles and responsibilities; trustworthy data and quality evidence to inform decision-making; and financial investment and capacity-strengthening for injury prevention and first response. The current system of federal governance in Nepal has potential for strengthening injury prevention and first response at the central, provincial and local levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most neopluralist studies consider how interest groups form in robust organizational environments, not during developmental periods such as the Progressive Era. In this article, we argue that neopluralist approaches, specifically the energy-stability-area (ESA) model, can provide insights on group formation in these contexts. Using the case of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), we illustrate how one federated, voluntary association worked to increase its area, and by extension its energy, by diversifying its issue agenda. This led to internal density in the GFWC, further enabling it to engage members and clubs from both urban and rural areas. Thus, the ESA model serves as a theoretical framework for understanding how large-scale, federated voluntary associations sought to incorporate the density and diversity typical of the modern interest population into their own structure during this evolutionary period in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout Latin American federations, programmatic welfare spending is increasingly nationally oriented and bureaucratically delivered. By explaining the logic and the effects of combining two types of federal spending, discretionary and non-discretionary, this article uncovers an additional driver that contributes to understanding policymaking and its implementation not only in Argentina, but potentially in other robust federal systems such as Brazil, Canada, and the United States. Using original data on federal infrastructure and programmatic social welfare spending for the twenty-four provinces of Argentina between 2003 and 2015, we provide empirical evidence that both forms of spending penalize opposition districts and more populated urban provinces (regardless of partisan affinity), and thus undercut the ability of key governors to become future presidential challengers. This research suggests that presidents of territorially diverse federations with strong governors can utilize the dual-punishment spending strategy to alter the balance of power, reinforcing the dominance of the center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and their probable results in three countries: the Czech Republic, the Russian Federation, and the Slovak Republic. The article is based on a multiple case study method. It confirms that in the three countries studied, the timing of policy responses and the success in motivating compliance represent important critical factors in containing the pandemic. It discusses the innovative experiment with nationwide blanket testing in Slovakia and suggests that antigen testing should not be the single and independent policy tool to combat the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of the Federal Reserve System of regional banks. While regional banks have long lacked meaningful influence over monetary policy, their leadership stands to provide a base of elite support for the Federal Reserve. To serve this role effectively, however, regional bank leadership must reflect the ideological diversity of political elites. This article provides the first quantitative empirical analysis of the ideological composition of the regional banking system, introducing a novel data set of all regional bank directors serving from 1980 to 2015 and linking each individual to a measure of political ideology derived from campaign finance contributions. With these data, I examine the degree to which regional banks are ideologically aligned with the districts and industries they are assigned to represent. The results highlight a new function for the decentralized central banking system and opportunity to address declining levels of public confidence in the Fed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article defines a concept of relative trust—the gap between trust in different levels of government in a federalist system—and examines whether it influences public attitudes about which level of government holds authority in specific policy domains. While scholars have explored how trust in government affects political systems from a national perspective, little is known about how trust influences multitiered government systems in which public trust levels differ for national versus subnational governments. This article finds that greater relative trust in the state versus national level of government is associated with support for devolution in several policy areas where governing authority is shared: unemployment, health care, environmental policy, and food safety regulation. The implication is that relative trust shapes public preferences about policy centralization or decentralization and provides an individual‐level mechanism through which windows of opportunity open for changes in the allocation of policy authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1960s and 1970s are often identified as a period of tension and explosive conflict between teachers' unions and communities of color. Instances of this can be found across the United States: in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark, St. Louis, among others. What fails to be documented in the literature are instances of alignment between teachers' unions and communities of color. The case of the 1970 New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT) is an instance of such an alignment. This article demonstrates that this resulted from New Left teachers taking co-leadership of the NHFT, bringing in ideas of participatory democracy and preexisting neighborhood bonds from prior anti-racist social movement and community organizing work. This distinguished the NHFT from other teachers' unions of the time period, where the New Left was either absent or marginalized. Whereas teachers' unions across the United States were often in high pitched conflict with communities of color as most infamously represented by 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the NHFT consciously formed an anomalous alliance and an alternative vision of education, pushing for joint teacher-community control of schools. This article thereby demonstrates the importance of radical ideas for decisively shaping the direction of labor unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Babylon Center for Humanities Studies is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The program of developing the instrument base of reactor complex PIK is reviewed. This program is carried out in correspondence with the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation No. 356 on July 25, 2019 and the Federal Scientific and Technical Program for the Development of Synchrotron and Neutron Research and Research Infrastructure on the 2019–2027s. The general concept and plans of formation of the instrument base are reported in the four-volume manuscript PIK Reactor Complex (editors V.L. Aksenov and M.V. Kovalchuk), published in 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An approach was developed and tested to spatial assessment of soil organic carbon stock in uniform groups of mineral and organic (litters, peat deposits, and peaty horizons of semihydromorphic soils) soil horizons. Estimation algorithm allowed us to utilize various datasets with different scales, both spatially and attributive sparse data of different veracities, which complemented each other. A series of maps of different accuracies and scales, including coarse-scale maps covering the entire country and more detailed maps for regions well covered with field measurements. Using these maps, the total organic carbon amount and its distribution over different pools in the 30-cm topsoil layer for the entire Russia and for three administrative regions of European Russia (more detailed) were estimated. The soil organic carbon pool of mineral soil horizons was estimated at 101 Gt C, which corresponded to 62% of the total organic carbon stock within the layer of 0–30 cm; 38% is allocated in organic horizons, including 9% in litter horizons (in rapidly decomposing organic pool) and 29% in peat deposit and peaty horizons of semihydromorphic soils. The organic carbon stocks in the 30-cm soil layer gradually increase from the north to the south: from 87 t/ha in Vologda oblast to 91 t/ha in Moscow oblast and 109 t/ha in Rostov oblast. The share of organic horizons in the total carbon stock decreases from the north to the south. Information on the size and structure of organic carbon pools may facilitate more reliable assessments of soil tolerance toward natural and anthropogenic changes and the development of regionally specific land use strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the welfare effects of a revenue-neutral environmental tax reform in a federation. The reform consists of increasing a tax on a polluting input and reducing that on labor income. Households are fully mobile within the federation. Regions are unequally endowed with a nonrenewable natural resource. Resource rents are owned by regions and are redistributed to citizens on a residence basis, which generates a motive for inefficiently relocating to the resource-rich jurisdiction. Since the resource-poor region has a higher marginal product of labor than does the resource-rich region in equilibrium, the tax reform mitigates the scope of inefficient migration if labor and the natural resource are complements, but exacerbates it if they are substitutes. This welfare effect may significantly affect fiscal costs of pollution pricing and calls for an adjusted environmental tax, higher when inputs are complements, lower when they are substitutes, as compared with a model where migration is assumed away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is inspired by the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) Auction. The auction was used by the FIGC from the 1950s until 2015 to resolve a 50% co-ownership between two teams in the same league with respect to the performance rights of a football player. Though FIGC banned such joint ownership in 2015, the resolution process is nevertheless interesting with respect to the received literature. In the FIGC Auction each co-owner submits a price offer for the whole asset. The highest bid wins the auction and obtains the asset, while the loser receives as payment the bid that is offered by the winner. Therefore, whether a bidder is a buyer, or a seller, can be established only after the auction has taken place—rather than before the auction. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate the set of pure strategy Nash Equilibria for two extensions of the FIGC Auction, with complete information. The first extension is the Extended Italian Football Federation Auction (EA), where asset shares can differ from 50%. The other extension is the Second Price Extended Italian Football Federation Auction (SEA), which is based on second price rather than first price. As compared to more standard auctions, though in the EA equilibria no bidder may have negative profits, in some circumstances we find that losing the auction may be more profitable than winning the auction. Finally, in the SEA we show that truthful bidding is not a weakly dominant strategy and that—somewhat surprisingly—the set of Nash Equilibria coincides with that of EA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work analyses the relationships between the banking sector and the economy as a whole in the United States between 1990 and 2016. The data are obtained from the Federal Reserve System (FED) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The methodology applied is canonical analysis, and this analysis will allow us to obtain composite indicators on the real and financial state of the economy, among other composite indicators. This study's main contribution and originality is centred on this new way of addressing financial and economic stability. Its contributions to macroprudential policy, as well as the financial and economic stability measures it creates, are valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Candidaemia is associated with high mortality. In the last few years, several guidelines have been published on the management of Candida bloodstream infection. However, adherence to the practice guidelines has been suboptimal. In order to facilitate and objectively measure the adherence to good practice recommendations, a scoring criterion was published by the European Confederation of Medical Mycology (ECMM). The ECMM Quality (EQUAL) of Clinical Candidaemia Management is an audit tool that comprises of 10 quality indicators. Each quality indicator is allotted between 1 and 3 points. The maximum achievable score is 22 or 19 in patients with or without a central venous catheter, respectively. This paper reviews each of the 10 quality indicators and provides the context for improving quality within the individual domains. The review also suggests areas that are in need of further clarity or areas which merit attention in the future updates of the EQUAL scoring system so that clinicians are able to derive maximum benefit from the audit tool. The EQUAL scoring tool is an important milestone in the quality improvement aspect of the management of candidaemia and contributes to the various components of clinical governance in the management of Candida infection of the bloodstream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand both how it controls inflation and how it trades off inflation with its goal of maximum employment, the Federal Reserve System uses a Keynesian framework in which monetary policy moves the unemployment rate relative to a presumed full employment value, termed the NAIRU (non‐accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). Because it does not know the value of the NAIRU, it pursues an expansionary monetary policy until inflation rises. This policy risks reviving the inflationary monetary policy of the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pravnik is the property of Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of State & Law and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)