Decentralization and Local Governments’ Performance: How Does Fiscal Autonomy Affect Spending Efficiency?

In Italy, as in other countries around the world, recent reforms share the goal of increasing the fiscal autonomy of lower tiers of governments, from Regions to Municipalities, in order to align spending with funding responsibilities and increase the efficiency in the provision of essential public services. The purpose of this paper is to assess spending efficiency of local governments and to investigate the effects of tax decentralization, focusing on the role played by incumbent politicians’ accountability. The analysis relies on a sample of Italian municipalities and exploits both parametric (SFA) and nonparametric (DEA) techniques to study spending inefficiency and its main determinants. Consistently with modern fiscal federalism theories, our results show that more fiscally autonomous municipalities exhibit less inefficient behaviours. We also find that the shorter is the distance from new elections, the higher is excess spending, thus giving further support to the traditional “electoral budget cycle” agument. Other political features of governing coalition, such as age and gender of the mayor, do not seem to exert any significant impact on inefficiency levels.Local governments, Fiscal autonomy, Political accountability, Spending efficiency, Parametric and nonparametric frontiers

POSTAL SERVICE: MARKET CHARACTERISTICS AND POSSIBILITIES OF LIBERALIZATION

Postal Services play a fundamental role in each nation, because of the double impact they generate from a social and economic point of view. The introduction of the European directives opens the way towards a larger importance of free competition. But, even if liberalisation of postal markets has just occurred with good results in some countries, it doesn’t exist a unique solutions applicable everywhere. Costs of postal sector are strictly connected with delivered volumes, so liberalisation can change into a great failure in those markets characterised by a small postal volume. The aim of this research is to underline the importance of inquiring into the real existence of natural monopoly structure into the postal sector and to reconsider the definition of universal service obligation. Liberalisation has to be followed by a reduction of the cost supported by the incumbent, especially in a low volume per capita marketnatural monopoly, cream skimming, costs reduction, USO

Self-Assessment in the Development of Mathematical Problem-Solving Skills

Self-assessment, in the education framework, is a methodology that motivates students to play an active role in reviewing their performance. It is defined as “the evaluation or judgment of ‘the worth’ of one’s performance and the identification of one’s strengths and weaknesses with a view to improving one’s learning outcomes”. The goal of this research is to study the relationship between self-assessment and the development and improvement of problem-solving skills in Mathematics. In particular, the investigation focuses on how accurate the students’ self-evaluations are when compared to external ones, and if (and how) the accuracy in self-assessment changed among the various processes involved in the problem-solving activity. Participants are grade 11 students (in all 182 participants) in school year 2020/2021 who were asked to solve 8 real-world mathematical problems using an Advanced Computing Environment (ACE). Each problem was assessed by a tutor and self-assessed by students themselves, according to a shared rubric with five indicators: Comprehension of the problematic situation, identification of the solving strategy, development of the solving process, argumentation of the chosen strategy, and appropriate and effective use of the ACE. Through a quantitative analysis, students’ self-assessment and tutors’ assessment were compared; data were cross-checked with students’ answers to a questionnaire. The results show a general correlation between tutor assessment and self-assessment, with a tendency of students to underestimate their performance. Moreover, students were more precise in self-assessing in the indicators: Development of the solving process and use of the ACE, while they had major difficulties in self-assessment for the indicators: Comprehension of the problematic situation and argumentation

High concentration Yb-Er co-doped multi-component phosphate glasses for compact eye-safe optical amplifiers

In recent years, the increasing need of airborne LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) systems for environmental monitoring and surveillance has noticeably boosted the development of compact eye-safe optical amplifiers. In this scenario, multi-component phosphate glasses can be regarded as ideal candidate materials as they can be doped with a large amount of rare-earth (RE) ions without clustering, thus enabling the realization of few-cm long optical amplifier sections featured by high optical gain per unit length. In this work we will report the ongoing activities and the recent results obtained by our research group on the design, processing and characterization of a series of Yb-Er co-doped phosphate glasses to be used as active materials for the core of a waveguide amplifier. The physical, thermo-mechanical, optical and spectroscopic properties of the prepared glasses have been thoroughly investigated

Optical Quality Resorbable Calcium-Phosphate Glasses for Biophotonic Applications

Recently developed calcium-phosphate glass formulations are proposed in this chapter as a new class of materials for biomedical optics and photonics. The glasses have been designed and carefully prepared in our laboratory to be dissolvable in biological fluids while being optically transparent, mechanically reliable both in dry and humid environments, and suitable for both preform extrusion and fiber drawing. Optical fibers have been drawn from these glasses using our custom-made induction heated drawing tower and showed attenuation loss values from one to two orders of magnitude lower than the counterpart polymeric-based bioresorbable devices reported in literature. In addition, the optical fibers have been implanted in living rats for several weeks and no clinical signs of any adverse effect have been found. Results on the inscription and characterization of different types of fiber Bragg grating-based optical filters will be also shown, together with the demonstration of the suitability of the above-mentioned bioresorbable optical fibers for time-domain diffuse optical spectroscopy

Advancements in Biomedical Applications of Calcium Phosphate Glass and Glass-Based Devices—A Review

Calcium phosphate (CaP) glass has recently gained popularity as a promising material for a wide range of biomedical applications. Recent developments have seen CaP glasses moving from a passive implant material to an active degradable material, particularly as a major constituent of bioresorbable photonic devices. This holds great promise in advanced biomedical applications, since the main constituents of CaP glasses are present in the human body. In this review, the progressive advancements in the biomedical applications of calcium phosphate glass-based devices over the past 50 years are discussed. An overview of their role as reinforcing agents and the studies on doping their matrices for ion releasing and drug and gene delivery are reviewed. Recent applications of CaP glass and fibers in soft-tissue engineering and their potential for optical quality bioresorbable devices are then discussed along with the current challenges and potential future directions, emphasizing the promising role of CaP glass in the next generation of biomaterials. Considering their progress and potential in performing several biomedical functionalities over time, CaP glass-based devices hold promise for becoming enabling tools as an implantable, bioresorbable, multifunctional class of devices in future biomedicine

High concentration Yb-Er co-doped multi-component phosphate glasses for compact eye-safe optical amplifiers

In recent years, the increasing need of airborne LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) systems for environmental monitoring and surveillance has noticeably boosted the development of compact eye-safe optical amplifiers. In this scenario, multi-component phosphate glasses can be regarded as ideal candidate materials as they can be doped with a large amount of rare-earth (RE) ions without clustering, thus enabling the realization of few-cm long optical amplifier sections featured by high optical gain per unit length. In this work we will report the ongoing activities and the recent results obtained by our research group on the design, processing and characterization of a series of Yb-Er co-doped phosphate glasses to be used as active materials for the core of a waveguide amplifier. The physical, thermo-mechanical, optical and spectroscopic properties of the prepared glasses have been thoroughly investigated

LOS SALESIANOS Y LA LENGUA DE LOS SHUAR

La historia de las relaciones entre los salesianos y el idioma shuar es tan rica en datos y nombres que, al intentar relatarla en un espacio reducido, hay que ser necesariamente esquemáticos. Pero antes son indispensables algunas premisas. En un primer momento a los misioneros no les interesó la lengua en sí, ni siquiera como un instrumento para penetrar en la mentalidad del grupo y conocer sus tradiciones, cantos y mitos: lo único que les importaba era traducir el catecismo y poder evangelizar

Los salesianos y la lengua de los Shuar

La historia de las relaciones entre los salesianos y el idioma shuar es tan rica en datos y nombres que, al intentar relatarla en un espacio reducido, hay que ser necesariamente esquemáticos. Pero antes son indispensables algunas premisas.En un primer momento a los misioneros no les interesó la lengua en sí, ni siquiera como un instrumento para penetrar en la mentalidad del grupo y conocer sus tradiciones, cantos y mitos: lo único que les importaba era traducir el catecismo y poder evangelizar.Además, se debe tener presente que ninguno de ellos poseía una preparación específica en campo lingüístico. Lo que conocían era la gramática de su lengua materna, junto con la latina y la griega, así que su esfuerzo se orientó a colocar la lengua shuar en los esquemas clásicos