La spesa pubblica in Italia: una crescita senza limiti?

Using new historical data, this paper evaluates Wagner’s Law in Italy over the time period from 1862 to 2009. To this aim, cointegration and Granger causation are used to investigate the long run relationship between government expenditure and GDP. Moreover, DOLS method is applied to estimate consistent long run elasticity between these two variables. Our main findings are that Wagner’s Law does not hold in the long run for total government expenditure. However, we find strong support for Wagner’s Law in the shorter time span from 1862 to the end of the 19th century. Such a result seems the consequence of state-building after Italy’s political unification. The new-born Italian state made a huge effort to create nation-wide infrastructures (i.e., railways, telegraph, mail, and so on) as well as an administrative structure well-ramified throughout the country. Conversely, evidence in support of Wagner’s Law is weaker in the period following WW2. Now Wagner’s Law is not verified for total government expenditure, but only for social spending, infrastructure spending, and spending for subsidies to the economy. This seems the consequence of the expansion of income-elastic cultural and welfare expenditures that were demanded to the state

Government expenditure and economic development: evidence from Italy 1862-2009

Using a new historical dataset over the time period 1862-2009, this paper tests the validity of Wagner’s Law of public spending (WL) in Italy. To this aim, cointegration and Granger causation are used to investigate the long run relationship between GDP and government expenditure. Moreover, DOLS method is applied to estimate consistent long run elasticity between these two variables. In contrast to previous studies, we evaluate WL for both total government expenditure and some specific items of spending. Our main findings are that WL does not hold in the long run for total government expenditure. However, we find strong support for WL in the shorter time span from 1862 to the end of the 19th century. Here WL is confirmed as regards both total government expenditure and all the specific items of spending we have considered. Conversely, in the post-Second World War years, WL holds only for capital expenditure, compensation of employees, justice and national security, welfare and redistribution by the state. Thus, it seems that Italy invested a great deal and for a long period in infrastructures, justice, national security, and welfare, and less in items such as education and culture that play a paramount role in the formation of human capital

Facility for fast neutron irradiation tests of electronics at the ISIS spallation neutron source

The VESUVIO beam line at the ISIS spallation neutron source was set up for neutron irradiation tests in the neutron energy range above 10 MeV. The neutron flux and energy spectrum were shown, in benchmark activation measurements, to provide a neutron spectrum similar to the ambient one at sea level, but with an enhancement in intensity of a factor of 107. Such conditions are suitable for accelerated testing of electronic components, as was demonstrated here by measurements of soft error rates in recent technology field programable gate arrays

ICONA: Inter Cluster ONOS Network Application

Several Network Operating Systems (NOS) have been proposed in the last few years for Software Defined Networks; however, a few of them are currently offering the resiliency, scalability and high availability required for production environments. Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) is an open source NOS, designed to be reliable and to scale up to thousands of managed devices. It supports multiple concurrent instances (a cluster of controllers) with distributed data stores. A tight requirement of ONOS is that all instances must be close enough to have negligible communication delays, which means they are typically installed within a single datacenter or a LAN network. However in certain wide area network scenarios, this constraint may limit the speed of responsiveness of the controller toward network events like failures or congested links, an important requirement from the point of view of a Service Provider. This paper presents ICONA, a tool developed on top of ONOS and designed in order to extend ONOS capability in network scenarios where there are stringent requirements in term of control plane responsiveness. In particular the paper describes the architecture behind ICONA and provides some initial evaluation obtained on a preliminary version of the tool.Comment: Paper submitted to a conferenc

SIP-based mobility management in next generation networks

The ITU-T definition of next generation networks includes the ability to make use of multiple broadband transport technologies and to support generalized mobility. Next generation networks must integrate several IP-based access technologies in a seamless way. In this article, we first describe the requirements of a mobility management scheme for multimedia real-time communication services; then, we report a survey of the mobility management schemes proposed in the recent literature to perform vertical handovers between heterogeneous networks. Based on this analysis, we propose an application-layer solution for mobility management that is based on the SIP protocol and satisfies the most important requirements for a proper implementation of vertical handovers. We also implemented our proposed solution, testing it in the field, and proving its overall feasibility and its interoperability with different terminals and SIP servers

Government expenditure and economic development: evidence from Italy 1862-2009

Using a new historical dataset over the time period 1862-2009, this paper tests the validity of Wagner\u2019s Law of public spending (WL) in Italy. To this aim, cointegration and Granger causation are used to investigate the long run relationship between GDP and government expenditure. Moreover, DOLS method is applied to estimate consistent long run elasticity between these two variables. In contrast to previous studies, we evaluate WL for both total government expenditure and some specific items of spending. Our main findings are that WL does not hold in the long run for total government expenditure. However, we find strong support for WL in the shorter time span from 1862 to the end of the 19th century. Here WL is confirmed as regards both total government expenditure and all the specific items of spending we have considered. Conversely, in the post-Second World War years, WL holds only for capital expenditure, compensation of employees, justice and national security, welfare and redistribution by the state. Thus, it seems that Italy invested a great deal and for a long period in infrastructures, justice, national security, and welfare, and less in items such as education and culture that play a paramount role in the formation of human capital

Mycobacterium tuberculosis Surgical Site Infection after Cardiac Surgery in the COVID-19 Era: A Case Report

Infection of surgical wounds with acid-fast bacilli, including tubercle bacilli, is rare, and is poorly described in the literature. We present the case of a 74-year-old male who developed a sternal wound infection after cardiac surgery due to Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, diagnosed post-mortem. SARS-CoV-2 infection contributed to worsened clinical conditions and surgical site infection. A high degree of suspicion to avoid unnecessary treatments and progression to severe disease with dismal prognosis is necessary in these types of infections