382 research outputs found
International Transmission Via Trade Links: Theoretically Consistent Indicators of Interdependence for Latin America and South-East Asia
The empirical work on the role of trade linkages in the transmission of economic disturbances has been limited to tests on the significance of variables of simple trade shares of partners, both bilateral and in common markets. This approach ignores additional elements deriving from the new open economy macroeconomics, such as country size, the pricing policy of exporters and the substitutability of exports. It also only considers the Ăâfirst victimĂâ country as the one transmitting the crisis to the others, leaving out the action of all other intra-regional links. This paper bridges this gap by producing theoretically-backed indicators of vulnerability due to trade linkages in a multilateral setting. These indicators are then used to compare the size of trade linkages in Latin America and in South-east Asia, two regions that were affected by financial crises in the 1990s. The proposed indexes show that Latin America is much less vulnerable than Asia to an international transmission of economic disturbances from a country in the same region. This is due to the relatively smaller size of Latin American countries, to the higher share of raw materials in their exports and the lower degree of similarity both of the manufactures exported inside their region and of those exported to their common industrial markets. Moreover, South-east Asian countries are more likely than Latin American ones to transmit economic disturbances to industrial countries due to the higher substitutability of their manufactured exports with those of more advanced economies.trade linkages, currency crises
Taxi regulation and the Bersani reform: a survey of major Italian cities
Using data from a Bank of Italy survey, this paper analyzes the Italian taxi market and its recent
changes. Local regulations are rather homogeneous, while there is a widespread disproportion, within
municipalities advisory committees, between the number of taxi drivers representatives and that of
consumersâ; indicators of service adequacy are seldom used. Service costs are rather homogeneous across
Italian provinces, while there is great variance as to supply and fares. The instruments provided to
municipalities by the new Bersani law have been used mainly in major cities. Service increase, achieved
mainly through additional shifts rather than through the provision of (free) additional licenses, was often
obtained in exchange for fare increases; the use of traffic policies has been almost absent. It is difficult to
evaluate the adequacy of local decisions, given the lack of non-occasional information on market
structure
Taxi and limousine services after the Bersani reform: an investigation on main Italian cities
Using data from a Bank of Italy survey, this paper analyzes the Italian taxi market and its recent changes. Local regulations are rather homogeneous, while there is a widespread disproportion, within municipal advisory committees, between the number of representatives of taxi drivers and that of consumersâ advocates. Indicators of service adequacy are seldom used. The average service costs are rather homogeneous across Italian provinces, while there is great variance of supply and fare structures. The instruments made available to municipalities by the Bersani Law 2006 have been used mainly in large cities. In many cases, the expansion of service, achieved mainly through additional shifts rather than through the issue of (free) additional licenses, has been the result of a trade-off for fare increases (in part to protect driversâ income). Virtually no use has been made of municipal traffic rules. All in all it is difficult to evaluate the suitability of the decisions of municipalities with respect to market characteristics, given the lack of non-occasional information on market structure.Taxi, Regulation, Transportation
The taxi service in Italy: motivation and outline of the recent reform
This paper presents a quantitative and analytical documentation to the debate on taxi service liberalization. The results of a survey of the Bank of Italy on the main Italian cities show that the supply of taxi is much lower than that of other foreign cities. The paper gives also some quantitative and qualitative evidence of the negative effects on consumers and on the creation of rents deriving from the present taxi regulation. The economic analysis and the positive results of the recent experiences of liberalization in other countries show that a rigid regulation on tariffs and supply, like the one adopted in Italy, lacks a solid analytical as well an empirical basis for support. Likely, the lower availability of taxi in Italy does not reflect only quantity and price regulation but also other characteristics of the regulation itself, such as the prohibition of juridical persons to operate on the market and a decentralized decision process that attributes more consideration to the interests of taxi drivers with respect to those of consumers. The paper also presents some proposal, in the light of the effects of the recent Bersani decree, for a reform of the sector.service liberalization, taxi
Tecnologia e dinamica dei vantaggi comparati: un confronto fra quattro regioni italiane
This paper compares the evolution of trade specialisation, by technological content, of Emilia-Romagna, Lombardia, Marche, Veneto and the Italian average over 1992-2002. It is shown that, over the period, the four regionsĂâ export performance has been negatively affected by the stationarity of sectorial comparative advantages vis-ĂÂ -vis the evolution of the structure of world demand. Only Veneto shifted its specialisation from low-tech to high-tech, while the other regions became increasingly despecialised in high-tech productions. At the end of the decade the four regionsĂâ trade specialisation patterns is still dominated by the low-tech Ăâmade in ItalyĂâ goods. The four regions have a comparative disadvantage in the sectors with stronger world export growth, though they show some advantages in industries whose world demand rose at intermediate speed. Over the decade the specialisation in the world fastest growing sectors grew for Veneto, was unchanged for Marche, and decreased for Emilia-Romagna; Lombardia and Italy mitigated their comparative disadvantages in those sectors. The four regionsĂâ exports are generally more concentrated than the worldĂâs in the low-tech sectors; the negative gap between the regional and the world shares of high-tech exports has widened over the decade.commercio internazionale, tecnologia, regioni
Good, but not always Fair: An Evaluation of Gender Bias for three commercial Machine Translation Systems
Machine Translation (MT) continues to make significant strides in quality and
is increasingly adopted on a larger scale. Consequently, analyses have been
redirected to more nuanced aspects, intricate phenomena, as well as potential
risks that may arise from the widespread use of MT tools. Along this line, this
paper offers a meticulous assessment of three commercial MT systems - Google
Translate, DeepL, and Modern MT - with a specific focus on gender translation
and bias. For three language pairs (English/Spanish, English/Italian, and
English/French), we scrutinize the behavior of such systems at several levels
of granularity and on a variety of naturally occurring gender phenomena in
translation. Our study takes stock of the current state of online MT tools, by
revealing significant discrepancies in the gender translation of the three
systems, with each system displaying varying degrees of bias despite their
overall translation quality.Comment: Under review at HERMES Journa
Good, but not always Fair: An Evaluation of Gender Bias for three Commercial Machine Translation Systems
Machine Translation (MT) continues to make significant strides in quality and is increasingly adopted on a larger scale. Consequently, analyses have been redirected to more nuanced aspects, intricate phenomena, as well as potential risks that may arise from the widespread use of MT tools. Along this line, this paper offers a meticulous assessment of three commercial MT systems - Google Translate, DeepL, and Modern MT - with a specific focus on gender translation and bias. For three language pairs (English-Spanish, English-Italian, and English-French), we scrutinize the behavior of such systems at several levels of granularity and on a variety of naturally occurring gender phenomena in translation. Our study takes stock of the current state of online MT tools, by revealing significant discrepancies in the gender translation of the three systems, with each system displaying varying degrees of bias despite their overall translation quality
How To Build Competitive Multi-gender Speech Translation Models For Controlling Speaker Gender Translation
When translating from notional gender languages (e.g., English) into
grammatical gender languages (e.g., Italian), the generated translation
requires explicit gender assignments for various words, including those
referring to the speaker. When the source sentence does not convey the
speaker's gender, speech translation (ST) models either rely on the
possibly-misleading vocal traits of the speaker or default to the masculine
gender, the most frequent in existing training corpora. To avoid such biased
and not inclusive behaviors, the gender assignment of speaker-related
expressions should be guided by externally-provided metadata about the
speaker's gender. While previous work has shown that the most effective
solution is represented by separate, dedicated gender-specific models, the goal
of this paper is to achieve the same results by integrating the speaker's
gender metadata into a single "multi-gender" neural ST model, easier to
maintain. Our experiments demonstrate that a single multi-gender model
outperforms gender-specialized ones when trained from scratch (with gender
accuracy gains up to 12.9 for feminine forms), while fine-tuning from existing
ST models does not lead to competitive results.Comment: To appear in CLiC-it 202
I problemi nella realizzazione delle opere pubbliche: le specificitĂ del Mezzogiorno
This paper studies the relevance of the different factors that influence, at the territorial level, efficiency in the market for public infrastructures in Italy.infrastructures, public works
MAGMATic: A Multi-domain Academic Gold Standard with Manual Annotation of Terminology for Machine Translation Evaluation
This paper presents MAGMATic (Multidomain Academic Gold Standard with Manual Annotation of Terminology), a novel ItalianâEnglish benchmark which allows MT evaluation focused on terminology translation. The data set comprises 2,056 parallel sentences extracted from institutional academic texts, namely course unit and degree program descriptions. This text type is particularly interesting since it contains terminology from multiple domains, e.g. education and different academic disciplines described in the texts. All terms in the English target side of the data set were manually identified and annotated with a domain label, for a total of 7,517 annotated terms. Due to their peculiar features, institutional academic texts represent an interesting test bed for MT. As a further contribution of this paper, we investigate the feasibility of exploiting MT for the translation of this type of documents. To this aim, we evaluate two stateof-the-art Neural MT systems on MAGMATic, focusing on their ability to translate domain-specific terminology
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