Equity in healthcare financing in Italy

This Ph.D. dissertation discusses equity in healthcare financing in Italy. Each of the three chapters of this dissertation constitutes an independent research output, answering stand-alone research questions. Chapter 1 is a systematic review on equity in healthcare financing in OECD and non- OECD countries. This deals both with the methodology used and the evidence around the world on vertical equity in healthcare financing. Chapters 2 and 3 report empirical evidence from Italy. Chapter 2 analyses the progressivity of healthcare financing in the Italian system and focuses on Italian regions, performing a comparison of progressivity of the healthcare financing across regional systems. Chapter 3 provides an assessment of how differences in co-payments between the Italian regions contribute to growing inequalities in access to public health care services in Italy. A common ground among chapters is the measurement of equity and inequalities in health financing, with particular reference to differences among the Italian regions

Problems involved in translating South African prose into Italian, with reference to N. Gordimer's Burger's daughter

A Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the tfitwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Translation. Johannesburg, 1982This study consists of three chapters of varying length dealing with the- problem of literary translation from contemporary South African English to modern Italian. Talcing as our model the recent Gordimer novel Burger's Daughter (Jonathan Cape Ltd.., London, 1979), we consider the various responsibilities of the literary translator, detaching his problems from those of the commercial version of a piece of prose, which require qualities of paraphrase, word to word correspondence and accuracy at expense of style. In our opening chapter we look at the extraordinary difference between the educated literary reader's expectation when handling a modern classic in the target language and this version's actual treatment of the original language. We taice Capriolo's La figlia fid Burger (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S. p . A . , Milanoj 197S) as the model of an average* competent, professional exercise in South African/Italian translation and we note that most of our criteria are contravened or even ignored In chapter II our study turns to a detailed listing of omissions, adjustments, inaccuracies, misunderstandings, unresearched technical points and plain imperfections of style and manner. In most cases the study accounts for the imperfection or error and proceeds to suggest not only why it arose, but also how it could be rectified. Our criteria for improvement rest on categories of (a) stylistic compensation for individual features of the original, (b) homogeneous Hi manner and (political equivalences. In chapter III we offer a sample translation into Italian of four selected pages of the text (original, pp. 353-356) in our own hand, hoping thereby to establish tighter and more rigorous categories for the rendition of this exemplary modern South Africa

Three Essays on the Italian Labour Market: The Measurement of Unemployment, The Determinants of Registration at the Public Employment Agencies, and The Gap between Subjective and Objective Position of Immigrants

The first chapter of this dissertation addresses the measurement of unemployment in the Italian regional context. Specifically, retrieving data from Tuscany, we compare the picture of unemployment that emerges by exploring official data and administrative records over the period after the burst of the Great Recession. Consistently with previous findings, we find that registered unemployment is higher, more persistent and more concentrated on women than its official measure. Nevertheless, we show that the cyclical behaviour of registered job seekers is similar to the one of official job seekers. Moreover, we provide a way to reconcile the two measures of unemployment. Thereafter, we develop a model that provides a rationale for the coexistence of official and registered job seekers and we explore how it reacts to productivity shocks and its policy implications. Finally, we offer some insights about the desirability of an integrated use of these data. The second chapter investigates some issues related to the measure of unemployment by using microdata from the Italian labour force survey. First, by cross-checking registered individuals in public employment agencies and official unemployment, I show that only 50% of the formers are unemployed according to official criteria. Moreover, I analyse some of the reasons that lie behind the heterogeneity between official and registered unemployment with a special focus on the determinants of the decision to register in public employment agency to search for work. By using a probability model, I show that the eligibility for unemployment benefits and the participation to vocational training programs substantially affect the decision to register. Finally, the third chapter investigates the matter of that immigrant population report relatively higher levels of perceived income and job satisfaction even though their situation in the labour market tends to be worse than that of natives. The investigation is in two steps using a large sample of workers from the Italian Labour Force Survey. First, the determinants of objective labour market position and subjective work perceptions are assessed separately, particularly from the perspective of gender and migration status but also taking into account other personal characteristics of workers and labour market variables. Second, this paper estimates the gap between subjective work perceptions and objective work status, breaking it down by various dimensions. Results indicate that female immigrants and immigrants from developing countries report higher income and job satisfaction than natives when considering the actual job position

Italy in the Australian news media, 2005-2012

Presents a systematic analysis of the coverage of Italian matters in the Australian news media in the period 2005-2012. Executive summary The study presents a systematic analysis of the coverage of Italian matters in the Australian news media in the period 2005-2012. As far as the authors are aware it is largest study of the representation of Italy in the news media of a foreign country ever undertaken.   The study was undertaken by the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre (N&MRC) in association with the On. Marco Fedi, who commissioned research on coverage of Italian politics in selected Australian newspapers.   During the period covered by the study there was more than usual interest in Italian political developments in Australia, both because of their inherent newsworthiness and because of the newly-acquired right of direct participation of expatriate Italians in Australia in the 2006 and 2008 Italian general elections.   To obtain as wide a view of Italy in the Australian news as practicable both the press and television were included in the study.   Three well -known and respected newspapers, namely The Australian, the major national newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) published in Sydney and The Age published in Melbourne were selected for the study. All editorial matter in all issues of these newspapers for the years 2005-2012 was searched using ‘Factiva’– a business information and research tool owned by Dow Jones & Company. The initial search for relevant news in the press generated a very large number of items (around 10,000) which were then assessed individually for relevance and eligibility for inclusion in the analysis. This process generated a data set of 5325 news items

A Long Journey towards Citizenship: District Areas and Social Services in Goteborg

The main purpose of the present research is to investigate the implemented decentralized model of administration in local areas of Goteborg City and its effects on local welfare, or what I associate with the concept of social citizenship. In 1990 in Goteborg City the social sector - together with some other sectors (i.e. school and leisure) – was split up in 21 administrative District Councils. At that time politicians said that the main purpose of the district reform was to enhance social services management and citizenship. Citizenship entails a combination of participation and rights. This study will investigate the ways the reform improved local welfare. More precisely, it may be said that this is a study focusing on social administration mainly concerning the development of collective action and improved administrative performances for the advancement of local welfare. In Italy, instead of dealing with the increase of the complexity in social field through public intervention, the social services reform enacted by the law 328/2000 paved the way to partly privatize the Italian welfare state. This meant a much more massive presence of private actors in the social field. On the contrary, as it will be seen the Swedish government kept private subjects away from the management of social services by giving them the possibility to perform in political and cultural activities. The methodological design for this study can be complicated, since the implementation process could be seen as a journey that in Sweden started since 1952 and it is still in progress. Thus, I had to limit my purpose mainly in three questions: (1) How did the new institutional frame of reference contribute to improve social citizenship? (2) How did the district reform affect social services with regard to the building process of the local welfare? (3) In which way is Goteborg’s model to strengthen social citizenship distinguished from the Italian one? Our data consists of ten semi-structured interviews conducted thanks to the availability of key persons working in the municipality as city or district managers and social workers. The result is a clearer understanding of the district reform and its mechanism of functioning. For instance, it was possible to register the improvement of citizenship rights fulfilment due to the new local welfare model characterized by the institutional proximity to citizens, integration of different public services and sectors, coordination through decision-making decentralisation

Sensory Experiences and Expectations of Organic Food. Results of Focus Group Discussions

This executive summary describes the main objectives and findings from a qualitative survey on consumers’ sensory experiences, expectations and preferences with respect to organic food. The survey was conducted in the frame of the European Commission funded project ECROPOLIS in 2009 in Germany (DE), France (FR), Italy (IT), Netherlands (NL), Poland (PL) and Switzerland (CH). The objectives of this research were to explore: - the range of experiences, expectations and preferences for specific sensory properties of organic food. - words that are used by consumers to differentiate the taste of organic products amongst themselves and compared to conventional ones. - symbolic’ meanings and images which participants relate to sensory characteristics of organic food. - consumers’ sensory expectations and preferences related to the variability and standardisation of organic food. - consumers’ experiences to marketing of sensory characteristics of organic food. - possible differences in consumers’ sensory expectations and preferences between the participating countries

Enhancing Word Embeddings with Knowledge Extracted from Lexical Resources

In this work, we present an effective method for semantic specialization of word vector representations. To this end, we use traditional word embeddings and apply specialization methods to better capture semantic relations between words. In our approach, we leverage external knowledge from rich lexical resources such as BabelNet. We also show that our proposed post-specialization method based on an adversarial neural network with the Wasserstein distance allows to gain improvements over state-of-the-art methods on two tasks: word similarity and dialog state tracking.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2020 SR