Kenya's quest for growth stabilization and reforms - but political stability ?

Kenya has long had a reputation of being politically risky, manifested in corruption, uncertainty about policies, and the importance of political connections in doing business. Kenya began its economic liberalization in 1993. Reform picked up speed after a tightening of aid by donors on governance grounds and an attempt to re-establish credibility following the costly Goldenberg scandal uncovered in 1992. But tangible results in the shape of favorable government debt dynamics and a pick up in growth took a decade to materialize. The paper argues that the peaceful presidential election and transfer of power in December 2002 was central to the economic upswing after 2002. The subsequent decline in political risk was singled out by the private sector as an important development. The paper draws on an analysis of debt dynamics, the evolution of domestic interest rates, and the latest Investment Climate Assessment to present evidence on the criticality of low political risk in facilitating good economic outcomes after 2003. The December 2007 elections have highlighted other aspects of political risk - ethnic and social tensions with roots in inequality. The findings of this paper underline the importance of establishing a foundation for long-term political stability and social cohesion in view of the disruptions following the December 2007 elections. This process is likely to be at least as difficult and lengthy as fundamental economic policy and institutional reform.Debt Markets,Emerging Markets,,Public Sector Expenditure Analysis&Management,Access to Finance

The 2018 Italian general election: a ‘new Italy’ or a ‘dead end’?

To what extent can the 2018 Italian general election be considered as critical? This article examines how the contributors of six volumes published in the aftermath of the election answer this question by focusing on three major dimensions of change in comparison with the 2013 election: changes in the patterns of party competition; changing patterns of voting behaviour in terms of socio-economic characteristics of the electorate; changes in the salience of issue cleavages and in the way new issues affected the electoral outcomes. The picture originating from the volumes under review is not so sharp as that emerging from the literature that flourished after the 2013 election, whereas several contributions stressed the revolutionary traits of that electoral contest. Despite the important changes observed in comparison to 2013, defining the 2018 general election as critical is adequate only to a certain extent

Euroscettica sarà lei! Il volto della nuova Europa

2noopenopenPinto, Luca; Regalia, MartaPinto, Luca; Regalia, Mart

Контактні лінзи: біохімічний, гістохімічний та мікробіологічний аспекти застосування

У статті на підставі аналізу зарубіжної та вітчизняної офтальмологічної літератури розглядається біохімічний, гістохімічний та мікробіологічний аспекти застосування контактних лінз

Candidate selection procedures and women's representation in Italy

Political parties play the most prominent role in shaping the gender composition of parliaments. Through political recruitment, parties might act in such ways as to promote or hinder gender equality in terms of women’s chances of accessing parliamentary seats. While external factors, such as the electoral system and the presence of legislated gender quotas, have been widely studied as affecting parties’ attitudes towards gender equality, candidate selection procedures are one of the most important, although still understudied, features internal to party organisation that have an impact on women’s representation. By taking the Italian 2013 elections as a case study, our empirical analysis shows that inclusive selection methods, such as open primaries, increase female candidates’ chances of getting elected in comparison to other, more exclusive methods, such as selection by party leadership

Faraway, so close: a spatial account of the Conte I government formation in Italy, 2018

The formation of the ‘yellow-green’ government that took office in Italy after the general election held on 4 March 2018 looked puzzling to many commentators as the two coalition partners – the Five Star Movement and the League – appeared to be quite distant on the left–right continuum. In this article, we argue that despite being widely used in the literature, a unidimensional representation of parties' policy positions on the encompassing left–right scale is inadequate to explain the process of coalition governments' formation. We focus first on coalition outcomes in Italy in the period 2001–18. Our statistical analysis including, among other variables, parties' policy distance on the left–right dimension performs rather well until 2013 but fails to predict the coalition outcome in 2018. To solve the puzzle, we propose a two-dimensional spatial account of the Conte I government formation in which the first dimension coincides with the economic left–right and the second one is related to immigration, the European Union issues and social conservatism. We show that the coalition outcome ceases to be poorly understandable once parties' policy positions are measured along these two dimensions, rather than on the general left–right continuum

Exploring Computation and Communication Trade-offs in the Design of Automatic Video Surveillance Networks

Video surveillance is one of the fastest-growing class of networked embedded systems. An increasing number of cameras are networked to support various applications including security in city streets, emergency evacuation in large buildings and direct marketing in department stores. The large number of networked cameras motivates the need for automatic video analysis, which, as of today, relies mostly on centralized computation. Still, trends in embedded computing enable the cost-effective realization of smart camera nodes and, consequently, the distribution of part or all of the computation. Starting from a particular application of automatic video surveillance for building automation, we derive a system-level model of the main computational tasks that are necessary to process a collection of video streams together with their requirements in terms of computation and communication resources. Then, we define a set of alternative implementation platforms based on a detailed analysis of the possible choices in terms of off-the-shelf components and interconnection network technologies. Finally, we present a methodology and supporting CAD tool that assists us in evaluating alternative partitioning/mapping of the computational tasks onto the various platforms

Let's speak more? How the ECB responds to public contestation

Although the post-crisis politicisation of the ECB is widely acknowledged, little empirical evidence exists about how this important non-majoritarian institution has responded to public contestation. This article starts filling this gap by investigating whether and how public opinion affects ECB communication. Based on automated text analysis of the speeches delivered by Executive Board members (2001\u20132017), the article shows that negative public opinion is associated with an expansion of the scope of ECB communication and a reduction in the salience attributed to monetary policy issues. These results challenge the view according to which the ECB conceives of its sources of legitimation based almost exclusive on the achievement of its mandate. In particular, our findings suggest that increased politicisation leads the ECB to reassess the sources of its legitimation strategy from a strategy based on output achievement towards one based on participation to broader policy debates

CVA6 RISC-V Virtualization: Architecture, Microarchitecture, and Design Space Exploration

Virtualization is a key technology used in a wide range of applications, from cloud computing to embedded systems. Over the last few years, mainstream computer architectures were extended with hardware virtualization support, giving rise to a set of virtualization technologies (e.g., Intel VT, Arm VE) that are now proliferating in modern processors and SoCs. In this article, we describe our work on hardware virtualization support in the RISC-V CVA6 core. Our contribution is multifold and encompasses architecture, microarchitecture, and design space exploration. In particular, we highlight the design of a set of microarchitectural enhancements (i.e., G-Stage Translation Lookaside Buffer (GTLB), L2 TLB) to alleviate the virtualization performance overhead. We also perform a Design Space Exploration (DSE) and accompanying post-layout simulations (based on 22nm FDX technology) to assess Performance, Power ,and Area (PPA). Further, we map design variants on an FPGA platform (Genesys 2) to assess the functional performance-area trade-off. Based on the DSE, we select an optimal design point for the CVA6 with hardware virtualization support. For this optimal hardware configuration, we collected functional performance results by running the MiBench benchmark on Linux atop Bao hypervisor for a single-core configuration. We observed a performance speedup of up to 16% (approx. 12.5% on average) compared with virtualization-aware non-optimized design at the minimal cost of 0.78% in area and 0.33% in power. Finally, all work described in this article is publicly available and open-sourced for the community to further evaluate additional design configurations and software stacks

Synthesis of On-Chip Interconnection Structures:From Point-to-Point Links to Networks-on-Chip

Packet-switched networks-on-chip (NOC) have been advocated as the solution to the challenge of organizing efficient and reliable communication structures among the components of a system-on-chip (SOC). A critical issue in designing a NOC is to determine its topology given the set of point-to-point communication requirements among these components. We present a novel approach to on-chip communication synthesis that is based on the iterative combination of two efficient computational steps: (1) an application of the k-Median algorithm to coarsely determine the global communication structure (which may turned out not be a network after all), and a (2) a variation of the shortest-path algorithm in order to finely tune the data flows on the communication channels. The application of our method to case studies taken from the literature shows that we can automatically synthesize optimal NOC topologies for multi-core on-chip processors and it offers new insights on why NOC are not necessarily a value proposition for some classes of applcation-specific SOCs