1,720,959 research outputs found
The Italian welfare reform trajectory in turbulent times. Income support, family and pension policy during the XVIII parliamentary term
No full textAbsolutely exceptional under many respects, the XVIII parliamentary term has represented a peculiar terrain for welfare reform. On the one side, over the past five years, three highly heterogeneous governments have alternated in power, supported by different coalitions, each resulting from demanding negotiations and alliances between parties, within a moving political landscape. On the other side, the legislature has been heavily affected by the unprecedented challenges posed by the Covid-19 health emergency and its harsh social and economic consequences. Despite the complexity of the overall scenario and the internal frictions experienced by the three short-lived cabinets, since 2018, important reforms were enacted in key welfare sectors, marking in some cases a break with the previous institutional legacy. The paper aims at critically examining the trajectory of welfare reforms during the last parliamentary term, shedding light on how they have been shaped through time by a combination of external turbulences and political constraints. Adopting an historical institutionalist approach, the analysis focuses on the transformations occurred in key social policy areas - anti-poverty policy and income support, family policy and pensions - in order to examine the major innovations and shifts occurred under the three cabinets, featuring such diverse electoral bases and ideological stances
Pensions and the EU: Beyond the Divide between Economic and Social Europe
Full text linkThis paper aims to shed light on the complex map of pensions policy across the EU. One focus will be on the growing role played by European integration in the field (whether through legislation or through other forms of hard and soft coordination), while attention will also be paid to the status quo of the European pension markets. In many countries, occupational funds represent a key institution in social protection, and their role is expected to increase, given the demographic and financial difficulties that elicited considerable public pension retrenchment in Europe. The EU, meanwhile, has intervened to foster completion of the single market for private insurance with a specific reference to pension funds. We aim at assessing the potential impact of the recent economic and financial crisis on the way the EU has framed the main challenges to pensions, and the way single policy dimensions have gained momentum in the EU political and institutional debate
The EU and supplementary pensions
No full textReliance on private retirement pensions is on the increase both at Member State level, via the spread of quasi-mandatory occupational plans, and at EU level, as a result of initiatives including the IORP Directive. This Working Paper analyses the legislative and market trends that underpin this development, assessing the impact of the global financial crisis, presenting the regulatory improvements required, and delineating the future prospects of the market for supplementary pensions
The cross-border portability of supplementary pensions: Lessons from the European Union
No full textOver the past 40 years, the European Union (EU) has developed the most advanced system of coordination of social security rights in the world, as a corollary to the free movement of workers. Notwithstanding, problems with the acquisition, transfer and fruition of supplementary pension rights still undermine labour mobility across the member states. This article aims to describe EU pension regulation in the field and illustrates how the EU has employed two different approaches to tackle the problem. The first approach is to directly facilitate the portability of supplementary pension rights – which deeply affects national social policy. The second is to develop transnational schemes leading to a single market for occupational pensions – an exercise in market-making integration. This article explores the main problems in implementing the portability principle and puts forward tangible solutions to unblocking the situation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
The Political Economy of Pension Reforms in Croatia 1991-2006
Full text linkAfter the collapse of ex-Yugoslavia, Croatia inherited a ‘premature’ socialist pay-asyou-go pension system. During the early 1990s, it was used more extensively than elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe to ease the pains of the country’s transition to a market economy, thereby leaving Croatian pensions in dire need of reforms. This article will try to meticulously describe the reform process during the period 1991-2006, which was characterised by three relatively independent phases: the first, a retrenchment phase, which condemned a majority of pensioners to old-age poverty; the second, a restructuring phase, which led, under the aegis of international financial institutions, to the legislation of radical reforms; and the third, a populist phase, which undid most of the previous efforts. The article will conclude that this concoction of poverty, agency capture and crony capitalism had a common denominator, that is the struggle for power during the country’s democratic consolidation.Croatia, institutional change, multipillar pension systems, pension reforms, populist measures
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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