Smart Cities : is It Just a Fad?

This editorial frames the contents of this special issue within the broad context of the smart city literature. In particular, the editorial first argues for the novelty of the smart city concept with respect to previous planning notions. The smart city literature has provided much insight into present-day urban management issues. In this sense, this special issues presents new insights into the following topics: (i) The smart city literature is characterized by remarkable heterogeneity in terms of geographical and disciplinary approaches; (ii) Relevant attention is being paid to the impact of smart city policies; (iii) New findings are presented for the relevance of benchmarking exercises and a first quantitative impact measurement is discussed; (iv) Beyond the new results presented in the Special Issue, ample space is dedicated to the discussion of future challenges for this literature, for both academics and policymaker

Smart cities in Europe

Urban performance depends nowadays not only on the endowment of hard infrastructure, but also, and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of communication and social infrastructure. The concept of “smart city” has been devised to encompass modern urban production factors into a common framework and in particular to interpret the wide diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the last twenty years. The present paper aims at shedding light on the elusive definition of the concept of smart cities. We provide a narrower and clearer definition of this idea and present consistent evidence on the geography of smart cities in the EU27. Our statistical and graphical analysis exploit in depth, for the first time to our knowledge, the most recent version of the Urban Audit dataset. We show that the presence of a creative class, the quality of and attention to the urban environment, the level of education, multimodal accessibility and the use of ICTs for the Public Administration are all positively correlated with urban wealth. This defines a feasible agenda for European smart cities, in order to achieve sustainable development and a better urban landscape

A map of human capital in European cities

Human capital is a fundamental input in modern knowledge-based economies; it increases the individual productivity of workers, while also making their interactions more productive. Moreover, cities are the major loci of innovation. In Europe, evidence suggests that human capital levels are increasing in cities. However, the distribution of human capital shows a widening gap between top performers and laggards. This paper aims to analyse the spatial and relational geography of human capital in European cities. With the use of a novel and comprehensive data set based on the Urban Audit (UA-EUROSTAT), the European Values Study (EVS) and Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) data, we highlight the general spatio-temporal trends in the endowment, distribution, and evolution of European urban human capital. The economic literature on human capital identifies three main dimensions of this concept: namely, formal education; the sectoral composition of the labour force; and creativity. The link between human capital and relational and managerial capital, with particular reference to the functional urban hierarchy, is analysed on the basis of the presence of international and human capital-intensive firms in cities. In the present work we measure human capital along these four dimensions, and assess the extent to which spatial and temporal disparities affect European cities. Our approach is based on ESDA (Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis) and geographical information systems (GIS), while also taking into account the presence of networks among cities. In addition, we also address the time variation of the human capital indicators.The combination of these techniques allows us to provide an insightful analysis of the map of human capital in European cities, to verify its change in space and time, and to provide statistical support for decision makers. The wealth of information gathered by us allows a better understanding and interpretation of the current trends, thus offering a clearer explanation of the different performance levels of European cities, in terms of both human capital accumulation and economic activit

Quality of institutions and productivity of State-Invested Enterprises: International evidence from major telecom companies

The quality of institutions is at the core of the differences in the growth of income and productivity of nations. A growing body of evidence shows how this is also true at the firm level. After taking stock of earlier theoretical and empirical literature on the efficiency of state-owned versus private enterprises, while we consider ownership as the core internal governance mechanism of firms, we add quality of government as a determinant of the external institutional environment. To disentangle the effect of internal and external institutions on firms' productivity, we use different sets of ownership and institutional environment indicators. After having identified the top 350 private, state-invested (i.e. partially state-owned)and state-owned enterprises in the telecommunications industry in EU28 and in more than 60 other countries between 2007 and 2015, we empirically investigate models of firms' productivity augmented with ownership and quality of government. Our findings suggest that, after controlling for the regulatory and competitive conditions at the country level, on average, public ownership has a negative impact on firm-level TFP. This effect is however mitigated by high external institutional quality and even reversed in some countries with a particularly favourable institutional environment

Comparative performance assessment of Smart Cities around the North Sea basin

A solid knowledge base in combination with innovative entrepreneurship and creative communities are likely to be the prominent success factors putting cities at the forefront of new and innovative developments

Public enterprises, policy adoption and planning: three welfare propositions

Public enterprises are production units of goods or services under government control. In spite of wide privatizations in the last two decades, public provision in this form can be observed in many countries and sectors, particularly in education, health, transport, energy and environment. This paper uses social Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) theory to explore the rationale for public enterprises. Three welfare propositions arise from CBA theory in a general equilibrium setting: (1) Under symmetric information and benevolent government, public provision is socially beneficial if: (a) there is a well defined production plan for some goods; (b) optimal policy and socially desirable projects are selected in such a way as to pass a social cost-benefit test at shadow prices; (c) production can never be shut down for some socially desirable goods and optimal procurement is equivalent to public production. (2) Under not (fully) benevolent government, and asymmetric information: (a) sub-optimal policy adoption leads to inconsistency in project selection; (b) the allocation of property rights will also be distorted, as privatization or government ownership are signals fixed by the government; (c) public provision and public procurement will be no more equivalent, because fo differences in information costs. (3) If the social planner is not fully benevolent, but cannot profit from policy design: (a) shadow prices are still sufficient statistics for the evaluating changes of the public plan; (b) public enterprises will be welfare superior to privately-owned enterprises (POEs) when the rents of the planner related to public ownership are less than the rents of the private providers under procurement, and shadow prices must be used to compare the outcomes. The message of the paper points to the overall quality of institutions as a pre-condition for socially desirable public enterprises as this environment provides policy-makers with the correct incentives to design and implement meaningful policies even when public administrators adopt sub-optimal plans. Hence, the building of a sound quality of institutions should be primarily focused on those mechanisms that select policies. Institutions should constrain self-interested policy-makers from disrupting the welfare signals for policy adoption as well as for project appraisal

Effect of two different sublingual dosages of vitamin B12 on cobalamin nutritional status in vegans and vegetarians with a marginal deficiency : a randomized controlled trial

Background & Aims: Vegetarians and vegans are more vulnerable to vitamin B12 deficiency with severe risks of megaloblastic anemia, cognitive decline, neuropathy, and depression. An easy and simple method of supplementation consists of taking one weekly dosage of 2000 \ub5g. However, single large oral doses of vitamin B12 are poorly absorbed. The present research evaluates the ability of two different sublingual dosages of vitamin B12 (350 \ub5g/week vs. 2000 \ub5g/week) in improving cyanocobalamin (vitamin B12) nutritional status in vegans and vegetarians with a marginal deficiency. Methods: A 12-week randomized, double-blind, controlled, parallel intervention trial was performed. Forty subjects with marginal vitamin B12 deficiency were enrolled and randomly divided into two groups: test group Ld (low dose, 350 \ub5g/week) and control group Hd (high dose, 2000 \ub5g/week) vitamin B12 supplementation. Blood samples were collected at baseline and after 15, 30, 60, and 90 days from the intervention for the determination of vitamin B12, related metabolic markers, and blood cell counts. Results: Two-way analysis of variance showed a significant effect of time (P < 0.0001) and of time x treatment interaction (P = 0.012) on serum concentration of vitamin B12. In particular, 90 days of supplementation increased the levels of cyanocobalamin (+81.8% in the Ld group and +144.0% in the Hd group) compared to baseline. A significant increase was observed for the levels of holotranscobalamin (+64.5% in the Ld group and +165.2% in the Hd group), while a decrease occurred for the levels of methylmalonic acid (-72.3% in the Ld group and -69.4% in the Hd group), homocysteine (-56.8% in the Ld group and -53.6% in the Hd group), and folate (-22.8% in the Ld group and -17.7% in the Hd group) compared to baseline (time effect, P < 0.0001). No difference was observed between groups (Ld vs. Hd). No effect was detected for the other variables under study. Conclusions: In our experimental conditions, both supplements were able to restore adequate serum concentrations of vitamin B12 and to improve the levels of related metabolic blood markers in subjects with a marginal deficiency. The results support the use of a sublingual dosage of 50 \ub5g/day (350 \ub5g/week) of cobalamin, instead of 2000 \ub5g/week (provided as a single dose), to reach a state of nutritional adequacy of vitamin B12 in this target population