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European local authoritiesâ financial resilience in the face of austerity: a comparison across Austria, Italy and England
European local authorities have been particularly stricken by the current context of decline and cutback management, and represent an ideal place where to study how governments respond to shocks affecting their financial conditions and management. Along these lines, this paper adopt the perspective of financial resilience for looking at the current context of austerity, and related responses, by shedding new lights on the role of internal capacities and conditions in influencing such responses and, ultimately, performance. Through a multiple case study analysis based on 12 European local authorities in Austria, Italy and England, the paper identifies the main shocks perceived by local management, the related short-term and long-term responses, highlighting the dynamics of financial vulnerabilty, awareness, anticipatory capacity, flexibility and recovery ability (ie, financial resilience) in its interaction with the external context and shocks. From the analysis, four patterns of resilience emerge: pro-active resilience, adaptive resilience, passive/fatalist resilience, complacent resilience
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Financial resilience in local authorities: an exploration of Anglo-Italian experiences
For more than thirty years public management and accounting theories and practice have been strongly influenced by the search for efficiency, heralded by the New Public Management and similar public sector modernization movements. Public administrations have focused their attention on economy, efficiency and effectiveness, looking for cost containment, matching resources and goals, output maximization or input minimization. Even the wave of development of performance measurement and management tools have mainly emphasized the importance of short-term efficiency, often without worrying too much about their ability to ensure public administrationsâ responsiveness in the face of unexpected events and crises
Il ruolo del principio dâeguaglianza nei sistemi multilevel: riflettendo su alcune recenti sentenze della Corte di Giustizia
Articolo pubblicato sul sito www.europeanrights.e
Baseline design of the filters for the LAD detector on board LOFT
The Large Observatory for X-ray Timing (LOFT) was one of the M3 missions
selected for the phase A study in the ESA's Cosmic Vision program. LOFT is
designed to perform high-time-resolution X-ray observations of black holes and
neutron stars. The main instrument on the LOFT payload is the Large Area
Detector (LAD), a collimated experiment with a nominal effective area of ~10 m
2 @ 8 keV, and a spectral resolution of ~240 eV in the energy band 2-30 keV.
These performances are achieved covering a large collecting area with more than
2000 large-area Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs) each one coupled to a collimator
based on lead-glass micro-channel plates. In order to reduce the thermal load
onto the detectors, which are open to Sky, and to protect them from out of band
radiation, optical-thermal filter will be mounted in front of the SDDs.
Different options have been considered for the LAD filters for best compromise
between high quantum efficiency and high mechanical robustness. We present the
baseline design of the optical-thermal filters, show the nominal performances,
and present preliminary test results performed during the phase A study.Comment: Proc. SPIE 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014:
Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 91446
Characterizing the nature of Fossil Groups with XMM
We present an X-ray follow-up, based on XMM plus Chandra, of six Fossil Group
(FG) candidates identified in our previous work using SDSS and RASS data. Four
candidates (out of six) exhibit extended X-ray emission, confirming them as
true FGs. For the other two groups, the RASS emission has its origin as either
an optically dull/X-ray bright AGN, or the blending of distinct X-ray sources.
Using SDSS-DR7 data, we confirm, for all groups, the presence of an r-band
magnitude gap between the seed elliptical and the second-rank galaxy. However,
the gap value depends, up to 0.5mag, on how one estimates the seed galaxy total
flux, which is greatly underestimated when using SDSS (relative to Sersic)
magnitudes. This implies that many FGs may be actually missed when using SDSS
data, a fact that should be carefully taken into account when comparing the
observed number densities of FGs to the expectations from cosmological
simulations. The similarity in the properties of seed--FG and non-fossil
ellipticals, found in our previous study, extends to the sample of X-ray
confirmed FGs, indicating that bright ellipticals in FGs do not represent a
distinct population of galaxies. For one system, we also find that the velocity
distribution of faint galaxies is bimodal, possibly showing that the system
formed through the merging of two groups. This undermines the idea that all
selected FGs form a population of true fossils.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. Submitted 01/12/2011 to MNRAS, referee report
received 21/02/2012, accepted 22/02/201
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