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The spread of the new Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus marked the start of a long phase of health emergency and quickly led to the adoption of an articulated strategy to contain the contagion. Starting from March 2020, this had important effects on the main areas of individual and collective life also in our country. Priorities of intervention and unprecedented challenges have therefore been imposed on organizations and institutions first of all in the health sector but no less in the economic and social sphere. The aim of the article is to outline an updated profile of the rhythms and professional strategies of social work in Tuscany. Taking advantage of some key concepts and giving voice to the operators through some recent research results, the article analyzes the paths of reorganization of the times and working methods of those who work with the most fragile and vulnerable and question the adequacy of spaces for individual planning and sustainability, with a dedicated attention to the intertwining of individual time and social time.

There are substantial differences in the spread of the covid-19 pandemic and policy responses to it between high- and low-income countries. While evidence on the former is growing, there remain more unanswered questions on the latter. This paper addresses this gap by providing insights on the impact of the pandemic in Rwanda, based on firm-level administrative data from Value Added Tax (VAT) returns. We find that VAT sales in 2020 declined by 11.4 % compared to 2019. These losses are particularly associated with a lockdown imposed around April 2020, after which sales quickly rebounded to pre-crisis levels once restrictions were lifted. In absolute terms, the economic cost is concentrated among the largest firms. However, small firms have been most affected in proportional terms. Disaggregating our results further, we show that firms in accommodation and food, transport services, wholesale and retail trade, as well as those registered in the capital, have been particularly affected by the crisis. Overall, the decline in sales translated to a similarly large percentage loss in VAT revenue for the government.

This article explores the fiscal effects of aid in Ethiopia using the Cointegrated Vector AutoRegressive (CVAR) methodology to model complex long-run and short-run dynamics. We use national data for 1961–2010, including a measure of aid capturing flows through the budget as measured by the recipient. The data suggests three main conclusions on the long-run equilibrium. First, government long-term spending plans are based on domestic sources, treating aid as an additional source of revenue. Second, both grants and loans are positively related to tax revenue. Third, aid is positively associated with spending, with a particularly strong relation between capital expenditure and grants. Overall, our results show that aid in Ethiopia had beneficial fiscal effects.