Assessing the spread of Keynesian ideas in the economic policy debate: a Text Mining approach on Twitter

[EN] This paper proposes a methodology for examining the presence of Keynesian ideas in the economic debate. To this aim we use Twitter as a source of data to monitor the debate in real time. We quantify the presence of Keynesian and anti-Keynesian thought in tweets about the economy and we qualify the emotional tone of these tweets. Our preliminary results show that the 20 per-cent of total English tweets about #economy contain words related to Keynes while about 8 per- cent contain words referring to anti-Keynesian policies. The monthly analysis of the tweets shows a certain heterogeneity. The distribution of Keynes-related tweets is much more uneven than the distribution of anti-keynesian tweets. Our evidence suggests that the methodology we applied to understand how much of the Keynesian thought is still around in the economic debate can be promising. The next step will be to focus on georeferenced tweets to detect heterogenity across countries and to understand how country-level trends reflect the economy cycle. This study still has some limitations that will be faced in future research such as the classification of topics and the focus on English texts for the moment.Perfetto, C.; Rancan, A.; Resce, G. (2023). Assessing the spread of Keynesian ideas in the economic policy debate: a Text Mining approach on Twitter. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 129-137. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2023.2023.1643212913

Newspapers, Images and Income Support Policy

[EN] To what extent do different newspapers have different kinds of images associated with articles on the same topic? We investigate this research question by considering one of the most important Income Support Policies implemented in Italy in recent times (‘Reddito di cittadinanza’ - RdC) which generated a strong debate in public opinion. Focussing on the national wide media, we downloaded images associated with articles about RdC and by means of Image Captioning algorithms, we generate the description of them. Results show that different newspapers have images containing different objects. Some topics emerging from images published by newspapers are very exclusive and the sentiment associated with the text extracted from the images has a wide heterogeneity. Furthermore, right-hand newspapers show a lower sentiment compared with left-hand newspapers. Overall, the results confirm that the ideological stance associated with different media outlets is reflected also in the images associated with articles and that the integration of Image Captioning algorithms and Natural Language Processes is very promising in this research area.Cruciata, P.; Perfetto, C.; Resce, G. (2023). Newspapers, Images and Income Support Policy. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 161-169. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2023.2023.1645616116

Visual management of performance with PROMETHEE productivity analysis

Multi-criteria decision analysis has been used to solve many problems. Here we describe an adaptation of PROMETHEE for measuring productivity. The results of PROMETHEE productivity analysis are displayed graphically, permitting the user to distinguish easily between four types of action: efficient, effective, frugal and inefficient actions. The productivity graph can be used for visual management and provides a simple, effective means of improving information communication within an organisation. It enhances transparency and promotes continuous improvement. Steps can be taken to improve ineffective actions using peer(s) on the frontier as example. To illustrate the use of the method we analysed the productivity of British universities. Only two old and two of the most recent universities were found to be on the frontier. Almost all of the most recent universities were classed as frugal and post-92 universities tended to be inefficient. Large old universities were generally classed as effective.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

The Cost of Well-being

Since measures of well-being are meant to be an exercise in documentation, but also a tool for policies and priorities, we suggest an operative way to use them. We evaluate both technical and social efficiency of countries in producing the Better Life Index (BLI) objectives. To assess the efficiency test, we use Data Envelopment Analysis integrated with Principal Component Analysis. Our analysis shows that BLI increases with GDP only for poor countries, extending the Easterlin Paradox to the quality of life measurement; that good performances in BLI are not necessarily due to a high efficiency of the whole system; and that social efficiency is the best predictor of development

The probability of multidimensional poverty in the European Union

This paper evaluates multidimensional poverty in European countries introducing two main novelties compared with the previous literature: first, the dimensions of poverty are selected on the basis of the shared values included in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union; second, the whole space of feasible weights is used to summarise the multidimensional information, in order to remain agnostic about the importance given to the different deprivations. Using data from four waves of EU-SILC, the methodological innovations introduced here have allowed to produce a family of measures that capture the individual probability of being multidimensionally poor. Individual probabilities are then used to analyse the within and between distribution of multidimensional poverty in ten countries. Finally, they get combined with the generalised Lorenz dominance techniques in order to derive socially preferred distributions with the minimum load of value judgments. The novel methods proposed in this analysis allow to move from a dual definition of poverty, where poor and non-poor individuals are classified in a mutually exclusive context, to a continuous measure of deprivation, which allows to capture both the extensive and intensive margin of multidimensional poverty

Mapping Policymaker Narratives of the Climate Security Nexus on Social Media: A Case Study from Kenya

[EN] Despite increasing awareness of the nexus between climate change and human security, especially in fragile contexts, this complex relationship has yet to be reflected in the policy arena. To investigate this potential policy gap, we apply an online issue mapping approach to assess representations of climate security within the public discourse of policymakers on social media, using Kenya as a case study. Considering Twitter as a proxy for public debate, text mining and network analysis techniques were employed to a corpus of almost 50 thousand tweets from selected national-level state actors, aiming to identify the evolution of thematic trends and actor dynamics. Results show a disassociation between climate, socioeconomic insecurities, and conflict in the public communications of national policymakers. These findings can have useful implications for the policy cycle, indicating where policy attention around climate security-related topics has been and what are the entry points for enhancing sensitivity on the issue.Silveira Carneiro, B.; Resce, G.; Ruscica, G.; Tucci, G. (2023). Mapping Policymaker Narratives of the Climate Security Nexus on Social Media: A Case Study from Kenya. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 103-110. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2023.2023.1645710311

Fiscal decentralization and income (re)distribution in OECD countries’ regions

Cross-country income inequality has declined in the last decades, but this trend has been paralleled by an increase in within-countries inequality. At the same time, many governments have implemented fiscal decentralization policies, devolving increasing decision-making powers on fiscal matters to sub-national levels of government. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and intra-regional income redistribution, based on regional level data on inequality and local government revenues for 183 regions of 14 OECD countries. Our results show that within region income redistribution is negatively associated with fiscal decentralization, especially when it takes the form of revenue decentralization