1,720,993 research outputs found
Economic integration and public policies: a review of the empirical literature
No full textThis paper reviews the empirical literature on the impact of economic integration on the size and the composition of the public budget. From a theoretical perspective, a pessimistic view highlights that economic integration is a potential threat to the action of the public sector. An optimistic view, instead, emphasizes the beneficial effects of integration in stimulating efficiency-enhancing public policies. Despite some well established theoretical results, the empirical evidence on the topic is rather controversial.
Some studies support the hypothesis that taxes and public spending may increase to compensate losers from a more open economic environment. Other studies support the opposite idea that the public sector retrenches in reaction to increasing difficulties to tax and spend with mobile tax bases. Finally, a large set of studies is simply inconclusive
Economic openness, tax erosion and decentralisation
No full textThe aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of economic openness on the vertical
structure of the public sector within a country. To tackle this issue we set up a simple
theoretical model of fiscal federalism, where both central and local public spending enter
the objective functions of both a central government and an aggregate local public sector,
accommodating a wide range of behaviours. The degree of economic openness is
assumed to erode central tax revenues and through this channel to affect the size of
central spending, the size of grants paid to local governments and the optimal amount of local public spending. Consequences on the degree of decentralization are investigated.
The main findings are that for a large subset of parameters an increase in economic openness leads to: a) a lower level of central government expenditures; b) a lower level of general government expenditures; c) a higher level of local taxation; d) a higher degree of public sector decentralization
A Decomposition of the Personal Income Tax Changes in Italy: 1995-2000
No full textThe effects of personal income tax changes are usually analyzed by comparing the inequality of income distributions before and after the tax policy change on a fixed pretax income distribution. This constant-population methodology aims at isolating the "pure" redistributive effect of the tax legislation. On the basis of the OECD's 1987 analysis, this paper proposes a methodology to disentangle the pure effect of tax changes from the influence of other nontax factors when the pretax income distribution is not fixed. For the Italian case, it is shown that the additional redistributive outcome displayed by changes of tax laws between 1995 and 2000 is only one-fourth of the total change of the redistributive impact in the same period and is outweighed by the effect of inflationary fiscal drag
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
The distributional and welfare impact of inflation in Italy
No full textThe entrance of Italy in the Euro area in 2001 has given rise to a wide debate about the perception of inflation on households’ well-being. However, most of the debate has involved the measurement of the “correct” consumer price index at national level. Much less analysis has been carried out on the microeconomic consequences of inflation on every household and to the investigation of its distributional impact. This paper addresses this issue by performing a microsimulation analysis of the impact of inflation on Italian households in the period 1997-2007. The extension of the study allows to capture possible structural breaks in correspondence of the adoption of the euro currency in 2001, and to get insightful information on the persistence of either positive or negative impacts. All methods of investigation proposed in this paper show that the impact of inflation has an ambiguous path over the period, yet a large concentration of welfare losses is found in the period surrounding the introduction of the euro currency. In particular, poorer and larger households are found to be severely hurt by inflation and a closer inspection suggests that the prices of gas and gasoline are largely responsible in determining living conditions of Italian households in both the period around the introduction of the euro and over the decade
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
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