Economic integration and government size: a review of the empirical literature

This paper reviews the empirical literature concerning the impact of economic integration on the size and the composition of the public budget. From a theoretical perspective, a pessimistic view highlights the threat that economic integration constitutes to the action of the public sector. An optimistic view, instead, emphasizes the beneficial effects of integration in stimulating efficiency – enhancing public policies. Despite some well-established theoretical results, the empirical evidence on this topic is rather controversial. Some studies support the hypothesis that taxes and public spending may increase in order to compensate losers for the risks of a more open economic environment. Other studies support the opposite idea, that the public sector retrenches when having to face increasing mobility of the production factors. Yet, comparability of the wide empirical evidence on the topic is not straightforward and empirical regularities are hard to find.tax revenue, public spending, government size, trade openness, capital openness, economic integration, globalisation

Regressivity reducing VAT reforms

A concern about a more extensive use of the Value Added Tax (VAT) in national tax systems often arises both from its impact on aggregate consumption and its alleged regressivity over income. Yet, the empirical evidence on this latter issue is still narrow mainly due to the lack of joint data on income and expenditures with enough detail to account for commodity-specific tax rates. After discussing relevant problems in the measurement of VAT incidence over current income – which are likely to cause severe upward bias in the estimated regressivity – the paper aixsms at analysing the distributional implications of different VAT structures. In a framework of marginal tax reforms, relying on the concept of Gini elasticity (Yitzhaki, 1983), a general methodology is proposed to analyse and improve the distributional profile of VAT over income. Using a static microsimulation model (EGaLiTe), the methodology is applied on a comprehensive dataset of expenditures and incomes obtained by a statistical matching of two different sources representative of the Italian population. It is shown that an alternative allocation of goods among existing rates could mitigate the regressive profile of the tax over income, and that a properly designed two-rate setting could even improve the distributional outcome compared with the current setting. Finally, behavioural responses to tax-driven price changes are also simulated in order to assess the potential impact of the proposed reforms on aggregate expenditures

Economic integration and government size: a review of the empirical literature

This paper reviews the empirical literature concerning the impact of economic integration on the size and the composition of the public budget. From a theoretical perspective, a pessimistic view highlights the threat that economic integration constitutes to the action of the public sector. An optimistic view, instead, emphasizes the beneficial effects of integration in stimulating efficiency – enhancing public policies. Despite some well-established theoretical results, the empirical evidence on this topic is rather controversial. Some studies support the hypothesis that taxes and public spending may increase in order to compensate losers for the risks of a more open economic environment. Other studies support the opposite idea, that the public sector retrenches when having to face increasing mobility of the production factors. Yet, comparability of the wide empirical evidence on the topic is not straightforward and empirical regularities are hard to find

Web-Based Networked Music Performances via WebRTC: A Low-Latency PCM Audio Solution

Nowadays, widely used videoconferencing software has been diffused even further by the social distancing measures adopted during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. However, none of the Web-based solutions currently available support high-fidelity stereo audio streaming, which is a fundamental prerequisite for networked music applications. This is mainly because of the fact that the WebRTC RTCPeerConnection standard or Web-based audio streaming do not handle uncompressed audio formats. To overcome that limitation, an implementation of 16-bit pulse code modulation (PCM) stereo audio transmission on top of the WebRTC RTCDataChannel, leveraging Web Audio and AudioWorklets, is discussed. Results obtained with multiple configurations, browsers, and operating systems showthat the proposed approach outperforms theWebRTC RTCPeerConnection standard in terms of audio quality and latency, which in the authors' best case to date has been reduced to only 40 ms between twoMacBooks on a local area network

Wearable Inertial Sensors to Assess Standing Balance: A Systematic Review

Wearable sensors are de facto revolutionizing the assessment of standing balance. The aim of this work is to review the state-of-the-art literature that adopts this new posturographic paradigm, i.e., to analyse human postural sway through inertial sensors directly worn on the subject body. After a systematic search on PubMed and Scopus databases, two raters evaluated the quality of 73 full-text articles, selecting 47 high-quality contributions. A good inter-rater reliability was obtained (Cohen’s kappa = 0.79). This selection of papers was used to summarize the available knowledge on the types of sensors used and their positioning, the data acquisition protocols and the main applications in this field (e.g., “active aging”, biofeedback-based rehabilitation for fall prevention, and the management of Parkinson’s disease and other balance-related pathologies), as well as the most adopted outcome measures. A critical discussion on the validation of wearable systems against gold standards is also presented