3,243 research outputs found

    The public sector in the Caribbean : issues and reform options

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    The public sector's performance in the Caribbean varies, in reducing poverty and in creating an enabling environment for growth. Barbados and the Bahamas have been the high performers, Guyana and the Dominican Republic have been sluggish, and the other Caribbean countries fall in between. In the Caribbean region, the public sector is now the predominant provider of tertiary education and health services (university education and hospital-based curative care), which mainly benefit the nonpoor. Attempts must be made to recover costs from high-income users and use that revenue to improve the quality and quantity (as appropriate) of basic services. Lessons from experience suggest that most Caribbean countries need to encourage the private sector to participate more in providing infrastructure and need to provide a better regulatory framework. The good news: this is already taking place in many countries.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Public Health Promotion,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Poverty Assessment,National Governance,Inequality

    Structural adjustment, ownership transformation, and size in Polish industry

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    The authors argue that significant adjustment took place in Polish industry after Poland's 1990 reforms. They analyze data on two- and three-digit manufacturing industries, disaggregated by firm ownership and size. By applying a statistical model to labor productivity growth, they try to disentangle structural determinants of the recovery from cyclical determinants. They contend that structural determinants outweigh cyclical ones. They find that the productive response of state enterprises was markedly different from that of private firms--private firms outperformed state enterprises (just as anecdotal evidence suggested). Size also matters, at least among private firms. Generally, there seem to be increasing returns to scale for private firms, except for very large enterprises (many of which were previously state-owned and may need further restructuring). The fact that size does not appear to matter among public enterprises suggests that several of them have not yet adopted optimal technologies and production processes.Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Labor Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Economic Theory&Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

    Labour migration from the eastern partnership countries: Evolution and policy options for better outcomes

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    This study is part of the project entitled Costs and Benefits of Labour Mobility between the EU and the Eastern Partnership Countries for the European Commission1. The study was written by Luca Barbone (CASE) Mikhail Bonch- Osmolovskiy (CASE) and Matthias Luecke (Kiel). It is based on the six country studies for the Eastern Partnership countries commissioned under this project and prepared by Mihran Galstyan and Gagik Makaryan (Armenia), Azer Allahveranov and Emin Huseynov (Azerbaijan), Aleksander Chubrik and Aliaksei Kazlou (Belarus), Lasha Labadze and Mirjan Tukhashvili (Georgia), Vasile Cantarji and Georgeta Mincu (Moldova), Tom Coupé and Hanna Vakhitova (Ukraine). The authors would like to thank for their comments and suggestions Kathryn Anderson, Martin Kahanec, Costanza Biavaschi, Lucia Kurekova, Monica Bucurenciu, Borbala Szegeli, Giovanni Cremonini and Ummuhan Bardak, as well as the dbaretailed review provided by IOM. The views in this study are those of the authors' only, and should not be interpreted as representing the official position of the European Commission and its institutions

    An assessment of the impact of possible CAP reform scenarios on Romanian agriculture

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    Using a simplified model, with key-variable the prices of two different possible scenarios of CAP reform after 2013 (moderate and radical), this paper present a comparison between the price effects of implementation of each reform scenario at 2015 horizon on Romanian agriculture. This short analysis shows that, under the presented hypotheses, the net welfare effect, due to the price changes, for the selected products, is positive in both reform scenarios, yet greater in the case of the radical reform. Integrated in the large context of Romanian development, it seems that the influence of CAP reform upon agriculture and rural areas will be most likely a gradual one: an interpenetration between the two scenarios is foreseeable, starting with the moderate reform that will dominate the period around 2013, the reform measures acquiring a more radical character afterwards.CAP reform, Romania, welfare effects, Agricultural and Food Policy,

    Foreign aid's impact on public spending

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    Using a model of aid fungibility, the authors examine the relationship between foreign aid and public spending. Based on a panel of cross-country and time-series data, their results show that roughly 75 cents of every dollar given in net development assistance goes to current spending and 25 cents to capital spending in the recipient countries. But concessionary loans - a component of development assistance - stimulate far more government spending. Their results also show that aid increases both public and private investment. To test aid fungibility across both public spending categories, they use a newly constructed data series on the net disbursement of concessionary loans. They find that concessionary loans given to the transport and communication sector are fully nonfungible. But loans to the energy sector are converted into fungible monies and part of the funds leak into transport and communications. Loans to agriculture and education are also fungible. There is no evidence of concessionary funds being diverted for military purposes. Their results show that total public spending in the health sector has no impact on reducing infant mortality, but concessionary loans to the health sector do. This finding leads the authors to conclude that linking foreign aid to an agreed-upon public spending program in areas critical to development might be an effective way to transfer resources to developing countries.Decentralization,Gender and Development,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Inequality,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Public Sector Economics&Finance,National Governance,Economic Stabilization

    Rich, Sturmian, and trapezoidal words

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    In this paper we explore various interconnections between rich words, Sturmian words, and trapezoidal words. Rich words, first introduced by the second and third authors together with J. Justin and S. Widmer, constitute a new class of finite and infinite words characterized by having the maximal number of palindromic factors. Every finite Sturmian word is rich, but not conversely. Trapezoidal words were first introduced by the first author in studying the behavior of the subword complexity of finite Sturmian words. Unfortunately this property does not characterize finite Sturmian words. In this note we show that the only trapezoidal palindromes are Sturmian. More generally we show that Sturmian palindromes can be characterized either in terms of their subword complexity (the trapezoidal property) or in terms of their palindromic complexity. We also obtain a similar characterization of rich palindromes in terms of a relation between palindromic complexity and subword complexity

    Incidence and estimated prevalence of endometriosis and adenomyosis in Northeast Italy: A data linkage study

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    Despite being quite frequent and having serious implications in terms of symptomatology and fertility, data on incidence and prevalence of endometriosis and adenomyosis following gold standard definitions are dramatically lacking. The average time from onset of symptoms to diagnosis in industrialized countries still ranges from five to ten years. Using the regional centralized data linkage system, we calculated incidence and prevalence of endometriosis and adenomyosis in the female population of Friuli Venezia Giulia region, Italy, for the years 2011-2013. Cases were defined as new diagnoses from hospital discharge records, following procedures allowing direct visualization for endometriosis and hysterectomy for adenomyosis, with or without histological confirmation. Diagnoses were considered "new" after verifying women had not been diagnosed in the previous ten years. Incidence of endometriosis and adenomyosis in women aged 15-50 years is 0.14%. Prevalence, estimated from incidence, is 2.00%. Adenomyosis, representing 28% of all diagnoses, becomes increasingly prevalent after the age of 50 years. Our results shows how the study of both endometriosis and adenomyosis should not be limited to women of premenopausal age. Further efforts are needed to sensitize women and health professional, and to find new data linkage possibilities to identify undiagnosed cases

    Characterization Results for the Poset Based Representation of Topological Relations - I: Introduction and Models

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    @article{DBLP:journals/informaticaSI/ForlizziN99, author = {Luca Forlizzi and Enrico Nardelli}, title = {Characterization Results for the Poset Based Representation of Topological Relations - I: Introduction and Models.}, journal = {Informatica (Slovenia)}, volume = {23}, number = {2}, year = {1999}, bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
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