34 research outputs found
Infrastructure finance : issues, institutions, and policies
No full textThe author analyzes the distinctive features of formal and informal financing of infrastructure and the principal issues policymakers must address in dealing with infrastructure finance: its adequacy in competitive financial systems, its budgetary vulnerability, the rationale for foreign finance, the role of user charges and taxes, the pros and cons of earmarking taxes, the institutional framework for infrastructure finance, the role of municipal finance, different approaches to the private financing of infrastructure (such as franchises, leases, management contracts, and consumer cooperatives), the critical role of contractor finance, and informal financing of infrastructure.The author concludes the following points. Not only the amount of funds but the regularity of their flow is central to maintaining infrastructure. But infrastructure must compete on a level playing field with other sectors. Any essential (but not open-ended) subsidies for maintaining universal minimum standards of service are best carried on the government budget, subject to periodic review. Institutional reform is needed to rationalize the division of resources and responsibilities among all layers of government and to provide mechanisms for insulating infrastructure finance from budgetary and other pressures. Such mechanisms include earmarking, privatization, and objective criteria for sharing value-added tax and other national tax revenue. Most developing countries do not have a national infrastructure agency to fund and coordinate technical assistance for infrastructure projects. The author makes a case for an apex financial entity in charge of municipal financial intermediaries for infrastructure, pointing to the instructive experience of intermediaries in Colombia and Jordan. One responsibility of such an agency would be to determine the necessary import content (for equipment, technical, and managerial expertise) of infrastructure finance, to prevent overborrowing. Privatization of infrastructure should be viewed as implicit earmarking, but official regulation of public utility prices should allow private utilities to generate retained earnings (to encourage self-financing) and should allow adjustments for inflation and exchange rate fluctuations. Infrastructure policy should allow for cost recovery through user charges as well as for tax revenues, especially through municipal taxes, since even the viability of loan finance depends on an efficient tax effort. While infrastructure finance is important, it is not always the decisive constraint, judging from the operating losses of even adequately funded infrastructure projects.Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Housing Finance,Urban Economics,Public&Municipal Finance
Nurse author & editor : NA&E : the official publication of the International Academy of Nursing Editors (INANE)
No full textNurse author & editor : NA&E : the official publication of the International Academy of Nursing Editors (INANE)
No full textNurse author & editor : NA&E : the official publication of the International Academy of Nursing Editors (INANE)
No full textNurse author & editor : NA&E : the official publication of the International Academy of Nursing Editors (INANE)
No full textThe Wall
No full textThe most inane obstacle that undocumented immigrants face upon reaching U.S. soil is the 670-mile border wall that Congress erected after passing the 2006 Secure Border Fence Act. The author meditates on its architecture through her meetings with half a dozen visual artists. Conceptual artist Susan Harbage Page photographs and collects the objects immigrants leave behind during their border crossing. Artist and curator Mark Clark organizes “Art Against The Wall” exhibitions in which artists festoon the border wall with brilliantly colored canvases (until the Border Patrol takes them down). Rigoberto Gonzalez is an oil painter who recreates life-size images of narco-violence in the style of seventeenth-century Baroque masters. Santa Barraza paints a Virgen de Guadalupe in Kingsville every December. At the end of the chapter, the author witnesses the arrest of two undocumented immigrants less than a mile from the Rio Grande.</p
Nurse author & editor : NA&E : the official publication of the International Academy of Nursing Editors (INANE)
No full text“At tu nomen inane es”. Baumgarten and Kant on the Legislator: Moral Theology and Justice
No full textStudies, although not abundant, on the influence of Baumgarten’s practical philosophy on Kantian moral philosophy have clearly demonstrated two points so far. The first is Baumgarten’s undeniable “positive” influence on the foundation of Kantian morality, concerning both terminology and some central topics, like obligation. The second deals with those features on which Baumgarten’s influence upon Kant can be defined as per oppositionem (Bacin 2015). Among these topics, paradigmatic is Kant’s rejection of the role that Baumgarten, quite in contrast with the Wolffian school, assigns to God in the foundation of morality. The concept of “Legislator” keeps these trends together. Indeed, in the section of the Initia devoted to the obligantia, Baumgarten identifies the Legislator with God as the author of natural laws, as well as of the obligations linked to them. Recent studies have pointed out the relevance of Kant’s distinction between the “author of the law,” who cannot be God, and God as the “lawgiver”—namely, the “author of the obligation”—for the autonomy of Kant’s morality (Kain 2004; Reath 2006; Irwin 2004, 2009). Although excluded from the foundation of morality and with many nuances, the recourse to moral theology, at least as a strengthening or postulate of morality, remains however constant in Kant’s moral philosophy. This is due to the structural need for morality to be accompanied by justice. In fact, this need is not always explicitly thematized, but it is nonetheless pervasive in the development of Kant’s practical philosophy (Brandt 1993). Hence, by looking in particular at the final settlement of the Metaphysics of Morals, the present contribution aims to reconstruct and evaluate the weight of the recourse to the figure of a supreme lawgiver as a heuristic means for making moral legislation effective in both the ethical and legal dimensions
Di Dante, Pellico, Petito e Francesca da Rimini. Qualche divagazione
No full textRiflettendo sulla parodia della Francesca da Rimini di Silvio Pellico (1815), cult play delle scene ottocentesche italiane, che Antonio Petito compose nel 1866, il lavoro suggerisce di considerare l'attore-autore napoletano non solo una voce caustica nei confronti di tanto (vacuo) teatro del suo tempo, ma anche - per questa sottile vis polemica - un "interprete" inconsapevole ma lucido dello spirito militante dantesco.Reflecting on the parody of Silvio Pellico's Francesca da Rimini (1815), cult play of the nineteenth Century Italian scenes, that Antonio Petito composed in 1866, the work suggests to consider the neapoletan actor-author not just as a caustic voice towards so (inane) theatre of his time, but also - for this fine polemic vis - an unaware but polished "interpreter" of dante's militant spirit
Di Dante, Pellico, Petito e Francesca da Rimini. Qualche divagazione
No full textReflecting on the parody of Silvio Pellico’s Francesca da Rimini (1815), cult play of the nineteenth Century Italian scenes, that Antonio Petito composed in 1866, the work suggests to consider the neapoletan actor-author not just as a caustic voice towards so (inane) theatre of his time, but also – for this fine polemic vis – an unaware but polished “interpreter” of dante’s militant spirit.Riflettendo sulla parodia della Francesca da Rimini di Silvio Pellico (1815), cult play delle scene ottocentesche italiane, che Antonio Petito compose nel 1866, il lavoro suggerisce di considerare l’attore-autore napoletano non solo una voce caustica nei confronti di tanto (vacuo) teatro del suo tempo, ma anche – per questa sottile vis polemica – un “interprete” inconsapevole ma lucido dello spirito militante dantesco
