1,721,005 research outputs found
Distributional effects of gambling taxes: empirical evidence from Italy
No full textDeep changes have taken place in the regulation of Italy’s gambling market during the last decade, making it by far the largest in Europe. Tax revenues from the gambling sector raised by the State have grown sharply, reaching more than € 10 billion, corresponding to more than 2% of total tax revenues. Concurrently with these developments, concerns have arisen over the distributional effects of taxes applied to gambling, given that it is internationally recognized that poorer individuals are more attracted to gambling. At present very little is known in Italy about the economic effects of gambling taxes and about their potential regressivity also in comparison with other sin taxes. The aim of this study is to increase our understanding of the incidence of these taxes, comparing the results with those obtained for a selection of other sin and consumption goods. After thoroughly investigating the gambling taxation scheme applied in Italy, we exploit two-part models to study the relationship between gambling tax paid by households and their socio-economic status, measured, alternatively, in terms of income and expenditure. The analysis shows that gambling taxes are highly regressive and opens important questions on possible reforms of the current system. Despite its focus on the Italian context, the analysis offers new insights also for those European countries that in last years have been involved in a process of progressive deregulation of the gambling sector
The Challenge of Organizing Elderly Care Programmes: Optimal Policy Design under Complete and Asymmetric Information
No full textThe increasing life expectancy poses challenges on the future sustainability of long-term care services that today strongly depend on informal care provided within the family by working age children. Ongoing social changes are likely to weaken the informal provision of care. The paper derives optimal policies to help the policy-maker to choose innovative and sustainable solutions to support home care, taking into account the severity of health condition and the different opportunity costs of carers. Drawing inspiration from real world policies, the suitable policy combines lump-sum transfers, paid permissions from work and in-kind provisions. In some circumstances, benefits can favour higher rather than lower income individuals. In the context of information asymmetry, the implementation of the second-best outcome requires the level of care of the most subsidized households’ to be forced towards certain targets to avoid adverse selection
Complex role of individual digital skills and eHealth policies in shaping health policy
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted individuals’ physical and mental health worldwide. Using data from the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and a comparative approach across European countries, this study investigates the potential protective effect of individual digital skills and eHealth policies in mitigating the pandemic health effects. Our analysis exploits a within-between random effects approach and shows that individuals with null or poor digital skills have a 2.4 % higher likelihood of experiencing a worsening health status and a 4 % higher probability of experiencing mental health issues. At the same time, living in countries characterized by high levels of digitalization minimizes the probability of worsening health status in a range between 1 % and 2.7 %. The protective effect of eHealth policies on mental health status is much stronger. The impact of having poor digital skills is more substantial if one lives in a country where eHealth is widespread. These results show that the rapid advancement of healthcare digitalization could exacerbate healthcare inequality unless accompanied by the development of digital skills among the population
Big Data and Social Indicators: Actual Trends and New Perspectives
No full textBig Data are a top subject in international research articles and a vast debate is taking place on their actual capability of being used to complement or even substitute official statistics surveys and social indicators in particular. In this paper we analyse the metadata of the Scopus database of academic articles on Big Data and we show that most of the existing and intensively growing literature is focused on software and computational issues whilst articles that are specifically focused on statistical issues and on the procedures to build social indicators from Big Data are a much smaller share of this vast production. Nevertheless the works that focus on these topics show promising results because in developed countries Big Data seem to be a good information base to create reliable proxies of social indicators, whereas in developing countries their use (for instance using satellite images) may be a viable alternative to traditional surveys. However, Big Data based social indicators deeply suffer of a number of open issues that affect their actual use: they do not correspond to any sampling scheme and they are often representative of particular segments of the population; they generally are private process-produced data whose access by national statistical offices is rarely possible although the intrinsic value of the information contained in Big Data has a social importance that should be shared with the whole community; Big Data lack the socio-economic background on which social indicators have been founded and their help to policy makers in their decision process is a fully open point. Therefore Big Data may be a big opportunity for the definition of traditional or new social indicators but their statistical reliability should be further investigated and their availability and use should be internationally coordinated
The impact of Gambling on Government Budget: A European Comparison with a Focus on Italy
No full textDuring the last decade most of the European countries started a process of liberalization of gambling with the aim of fighting against illegal gambling and collecting an increasing amount of tax revenues. In this paper, after
providing a comparison on main gambling institutional and tax differences across a selection of European countries, we evaluate the impact of gambling on government budget in order to understand if gambling consumption cannibalizes other forms of consumption, making doubtful the net effect for the government revenues. Results of our empirical analysis show that the effect of gambling on state balance is very small and, in some cases, not significant. Considering also the relevant social costs connected to pathological gambling, this result is interesting for policy makers who often consider gambling revenues as a possible alternative source of tax revenues
Big data and social indicators: actual trends and new perspectives
Full text linkBig Data are a top subject in international research articles and a vast debate is taking place on their actual capability of being used to complement or even substitute official statistics surveys and social indicators in particular. In this paper we analyse the metadata of the Scopus database of academic articles on Big Data and we show that most of the existing and intensively growing literature is focused on software and computational issues whilst articles that are specifically focused on statistical issues and on the procedures to build social indicators from Big Data are a much smaller share of this vast production. Nevertheless the works that focus on these topics show promising results because in developed countries Big Data seem to be a good information base to create reliable proxies of social indicators, whereas in developing countries their use (for instance using satellite images) may be a viable alternative to traditional surveys. However, Big Data based social indicators deeply suffer of a number of open issues that affect their actual use: they do not correspond to any sampling scheme and they are often representative of particular segments of the population; they generally are private process-produced data whose access by national statistical offices is rarely possible although the intrinsic value of the information contained in Big Data has a social importance that should be shared with the whole community; Big Data lack the socio-economic background on which social indicators have been founded and their help to policy makers in their decision process is a fully open point. Therefore Big Data may be a big opportunity for the definition of traditional or new social indicators but their statistical reliability should be further investigated and their availability and use should be internationally coordinated
The Statistical Analysis of Crime Data at Street Level: Models Comparison.
No full textThe main techniques used for the spatial analysis of Urban Crime can generally be traced to crime mapping techniques, which are mere representations of crime dispersion over a specific urban area without any statistical modeling of its correlation with the urban structure of the city or any group of sociodemographic and economic variables. In this work, as a proposal to overcome the aforesaid limitation, we analyze the crime occurrences, recorded at street level, in a highly populated district of the City of Genoa, and we use different statistical models to study crime events in relationship with the context in which they happened, interpreting the urban layout of the roads network as a lattice
Lattice Models for the analysis of Urban Crime
No full textThe spatial analysis of Urban Crime is generally made using crime mapping techniques, which are mainly representations of crime dispersion over a specific urban area without any statistical modelling of its dependence from the urban structure of the city or any group of socio-demographic variables. Using a set of measurements (called Space Syntax) based on a segmentation of all the roads of the topographic map of a city into axes and a set of socio-demographic variables, in this work a highly populated district of the City of Genoa has been analyzed, studying crime in the context in which it happens, interpreting the roads network as a graph or a lattice
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