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SUMMARYThe management of the welfare state in a heterogeneous society is a growing challenge in Europe. This paper investigates the relationship between diversity and the welfare state by studying the citizens' satisfaction about public services across European regions; it also establishes a link between research on diversity and the welfare state, and fiscal federalism theory, by focusing on the provision of local public services. We employ region level indicators of the citizens' perception of local public services, regional autonomy, and regional diversity based on nationalities. We find that i) diversity is negatively correlated with the quality of local public services; and ii) regional autonomy partially improves the quality in the presence of diversity. When using objective measures of public services, the results are less robust; this raises an issue about the citizens' perception about the functioning of the welfare state in heterogeneous communities which deserves attention from policy makers.

"Provides a state-of-the-art overview of science, technology, and innovation in the context of globalization and global policy"--

The recent financial and economic crisis has spurred a lot of interest among scholars and public audience. Strangely enough, the impact of the crisis on innovation has been largely underestimated. This books can be regarded as a complementary reading for those interested in the effect of the crisis with a particular focus on Europe.

Covid-19 is the first emergency that affected Italy in its regional institutional set-up. Through a qualitative-quantitative analysis of the regional resolutions in 2020, the article proposes a first analysis of the regional system. Drawing from their own resources, the regions have deployed 7.3 billion euros, of which two billion is intended for interventions to support families and 5.3 to support the production system. The regions that have implemented the most significant interventions per capita are the Autonomous Provinces, the regions with special statute and the large southern regions, the latter largely drawing on the resources of the structural funds. We observe an evolution in the allocation of resources from general and emergency aspects to specific characteristics of the regional production sectors. The regional system has shown a certain ability to mobilize financial resources and a significant degree of differentiation.

Does it matter whether research is conducted by the private business rather than in universities or government research centres? While most of the attention of science and innovation policy in the last decades has explored the relevance of the interconnections between public and business players in enhancing knowledge-based societies, a major trend has been ignored: both the quota of public R&D and its share over the total R&D investment has shrunk in the majority of OECD countries. As a result, a larger fraction of knowledge is today generated in the business sector. We argue that this is a major problem since public research and private research differ along a number of characteristics, e.g. public access, potential for future technological innovations, criteria of resource allocation. This trend can have adverse implications for long-term innovation and economic welfare in our societies. Through the lens of the public goods theory and of the sector of funding and execution of R&D for the period 1981–2013 we try to explain why.

Most of the empirical analysis explores the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth within an institutional void. This paper investigates the connection between fiscal decentralization and economic growth in different institutional settings in 21 OECD countries over the period 1970–2010. We find that the pro-growth effects of fiscal decentralization depend critically on the authority of sub-national governments: tax decentralization leads to higher (lower) rates of economic growth when coupled with high (low) administrative and political decentralization. Tax decentralization is more conducive for growth if sub-national taxes accrue mostly from autonomous revenues such as property taxes. Overall, this provides evidence of institutional complementarities at work among decentralization dimensions leading to relevant insights for policy implications.