1,720,967 research outputs found
Rural resilience
No full textThis comprehensive Dictionary brings together an extensive range of definitive terms in ecological economics. Assembling contributions from distinguished scholars, it provides an intellectual map to this evolving subject ranging from the practical to the philosophical
The Italian Geography of Discontent
No full textAlthough widespread, the recent populist wave in Western countries is a heterogeneous phenomenon in terms of individual features of populist voters – the ste-reotype is «older, working-class, white, poorly educated, who live on low incomes» – as well as geographical characteristics of populist hotspots – «lagging-behind, stagnating and low-productivity regions». This study leverages nonlinear statistical learning techniques to detect recurrent individual and geographical patterns of populist voting across Italy. Using the Chapel Hill expert survey classification, we analyse the most prominent voting patterns during the 2019 European elections in all Italian local labour markets. We map the Italian geography of discontent, highlighting how it seems to be shaped by the interaction between individual-and territorial-level predictors. Our study promotes the adoption of flexible and nonparametric predictive algorithms to «diagnose» the main factors linked to the spatial distribution and evolution of populist hotspots
Recovering the counterfactual as part of ex-ante impact assessments: An application to the PASIDP-II project in Ethiopia
No full textReal-world ex-ante impact assessments are far from the ideal experimental design, where the eligible population is supposed to be randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Often, many surveys in developing contexts do not even collect data from a comparison group. We propose a methodology that recovers the counterfactual for ex-ante impact assessments of policy interventions under the conditions of distance decay in the exposure to continuous treatments and lack of control groups. We test this approach on data from a large-scale irrigation project in Ethiopia
Plant different, eat different? Insights from participatory agricultural research
No full textWe examine the association between on-farm production diversity on household dietary diversity in Malawi using microdata collected as part of an environmentally sustainable agricultural intensification program. The program primarily focuses on the integration of legumes into the cropping system through maize-legume intercropping and legume-legume intercropping. Relative to staple cereals such as maize, legumes are rich in micronutrients, contain better-quality protein, and lead to nitrogen fixation. Given the systematic difference we document between program beneficiaries and randomly sampled non-beneficiary (control) households, we employ causal instrumental variables mediation analysis to account for non-random selection and possible simultaneity between production and consumption decisions. We find a significant positive treatment effect on dietary diversity, led by an increase in production diversity. Analysis of potential pathways show that effects on dietary diversity stem mostly from consumption of diverse food items purchased from the market made possible through higher agricultural income. These findings highlight that, while increasing production for markets can enhance dietary diversity through higher income that would make affordable an expanded set of food items, the production of more nutritious crops such as pulses may not necessarily translate into greater own consumption. This may be due to the persistence of dietary habits, tastes, or other local factors that favor consumption of staples such as maize and encourage sales of more profitable and nutritious food items such as pulses. Pulses are a more affordable and environmentally sustainable source of protein than animal source food, and efforts should be made to enhance their nutritional awareness and contribution to sustainable food systems and healthier diets
Local inequalities of the COVID-19 crisis
No full textThis paper assesses the pandemic's impact on Italian local economies with the newly developed machine learning control method for counterfactual building. Our results document that the economic effects of the COVID-19 shock vary dramatically across the Italian territory and are spatially uncorrelated with the epidemiological pattern of the first wave. The largest employment losses occurred in areas characterized by high exposure to social aggregation risks and pre-existing labor market fragilities. Lastly, we show that the hotspots of the COVID-19 crisis do not overlap with those of the Great Recession. These findings call for a place-based policy response to address the uneven economic geography of the pandemic
Evaluating Program Impact on Resilience: Evidence from Lesotho’s Child Grants Programme
No full textSocial protection programmes can play a crucial role in enhancing household resilience. Although there is vast evidence on the impact of cash transfer projects on many welfare outcomes, no study examines the impact of cash transfers on a composite measure of resilience. This paper fills this important gap by employing a difference-in-difference estimator in the context of a randomised control trial in Lesotho to explore the causal effect of a Child Grant Programme on resilience capacity. Results show a positive and significant short-term impact, largely driven by the beneficial effects for less resilient households. The main transmission channels are increases in household expenditure and food security. Strong stimulus of the Programme on expenditure in education, a key resilience determinant, anticipates longer-run virtuous intergenerational dynamics in resilience building. The policy implication of this work is that social protection interventions should be embedded within the larger framework of resilience-enhancing programmes
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
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
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