Suchergebnisse

Libraries, through services, activities, professionals and citizens, can be made active places of the dialectic between politics and history, memory and history, local reality and global reality, institutional and personal experience, and past and present, thus educating the society to history and citizenship. A fruitful way is to study and enhance the cultural heritage that the libraries own and the one they have access to, deconstructing it, redefining it and redistributing it in new forms; in this regard, it may be useful to rely on practices and opportunities concerning a public engagement and derived from the disciplinary and civil context of public history. ; Le biblioteche, attraverso i servizi, le attività, i professionisti e i cittadini, si possono fare luoghi attivi della dialettica tra politica e storia, memoria e storia, realtà locale e globale, esperienza istituzionale e personale, passato e presente, educando così il pubblico alla storia e alla cittadinanza. Una strada fruttuosa è quella di studiare e valorizzare il patrimonio che possiedono e a cui hanno accesso, decostruendolo, ridefinendolo e ridistribuendolo in nuove forme; a questo proposito può essere utile appoggiarsi alle pratiche e alle opportunità di public engagement che derivano dal contesto disciplinare e civile della public history.

This paper outlines the EU regulatory framework and analyses current practice in four European countries in respect of public procurement and tendering of ferry services. Tender management for major ferry services resides with national government agencies, while tenders for smaller volume regional and/or inter-isles services are generally managed by local authorities and/or regional transport authorities. Operator selection criteria increasingly emphasises service quality aspects, and environmental impacts, as well as price (i.e. amount of subsidy required). There is a continued trend towards privately-owned operators providing and investing in essential ferry services, with an increasing role played by larger international integrated transport organisations. For transport authorities, ferry service procurement involves a continuous evolutionary process of specifying, offering, selecting, monitoring and reviewing services supplied. Based on the information collected and analysed, the authors have developed a 'tender route map' which explains the different stages and key issues concerning public procurement of ferry services.

During the 1990s, attention pivoted on Reform in the Public Administration (PA) relative both to the functional and organizational capacity of the Institutions and Administrations and to wider citizen participation in the diffusion of new technologies. At the same time, the Institutions began to privilege principles of efficiency, efficacy and economicity in public action. In particular, reduction in management costs were highlighted while the foundations were laid for processes of administrative simplification and the development of the "digital State ". At European and national scale, the notion of e-Government was far-reaching and inclusive of a series of policies linked to the introduction of ICT (organizational, technological, formative/performative, infrastructural and information technology solutions), in order to collect, conserve, process and transmit (textual, visual or audio) digital information. The focus of the e-Government concept targeted four objectives: 1) collecting and storing massive quantities of information within a confined space; 2) processing and transmitting information more speedily; 3) the exchange of information (interoperability) using diverse techniques and language; 4) the conservation and security of information, content and the impact of digitising modes and processes. Notwithstanding, a decade later e-Government policies of the latest generation still pivot on the delicate issue of interoperability which goes far beyond technical problems of connectivity and language. The impact of the economic recession in Italy (still ongoing) as can be envisaged, has had disastrous results on the productive and social fabric of the country. Planning to resolve governance issues in the Italian Public Administration through innovative policies and strategies of global development such as Structural Funds – Europe 2020 Strategy is vital to support the Digital Agenda, innovation and private sector industrial research while the diffusion of tecnological enterprise is necessary to boost competitiveness and a new culture of systemic actions to foster structural impact. Within this strategic vision, one of the core issues concerns a more virtuous alignment with European policies, well defined in the Strategy Horizon 2020, the main European Union funding tool for Research Europa envisaged for the period 2014-2020.

The debate over the question of the sustainability of development has been for some time underway in relation to the environment and to public health. More recently attention has turned to other aspects of sustainability as well, now that a generally accepted meaning of the term has been reached which defines it as the sum total of policies for satisfying the needs of the present generation without compromising the capacity of future generations to satisfy their own needs. Within this broader context the role of public administration is obvious. One of the key questions that this volume has attempted to provide an answer is: can the European vision hold true in the same terms for Italy as well? - The debate over the question of the sustainability of development has been for some time underway in relation to the environment and to public health. More recently attention has turned to other aspects of sustainability as well, now that a generally accepted meaning of the term has been reached which defines it as the sum total of policies for satisfying the needs of the present generation without compromising the capacity of future generations to satisfy their own needs. Within this broader context the role of public administration is obvious. One of the key questions that this volume has attempted to provide an answer is: can the European vision hold true in the same terms for Italy as well?

Public good provision has always been a central role of government, but it is also an important element in political competition. The recent financial difficulties of public authorities have undermined their capacity to invest in public goods, requiring politicians to search for new ways to finance those investments. A solution widely adopted is the Public-Private Partnership, an instrument designed to provide more valuable public goods thanks to efficiency gains coming from bundling building and operating phases in a single contract, but that has often resulted in resounding failures. The most common explanation for this lack of results is that PPP are often adopted not for efficiency purposes but to avoid financial constraints. We build a model to analyze the incentives for politicians to use PPP for pork barrel politics in presence of a binding budget constraint, when they have a better ability to look forward than their voters, and are limited in their possibility to stay in charge. We then release the assumption of homogeneous income among voters, and analyze how this modifies politician's incentives to pander.

International audience ; The term e-procurement indicates a set of technologies, procedures, operations and organizational methods that allow the acquisition of goods or services online, thanks to the possibilities offered by the Internet and electronic commerce. Originally widespread in the private business sector, following the adaptation of the Italian PA to the prospects of e-government, this form of procurement of goods and services has entered the public sector. In the perspective of modernization of the Italian public administration, new technologies represent the key to the new public governance strategy for post-pandemic recovery. But this only if Italy will be able, in the next few years, to align itself with the digital reorganization of the public sector.

The aim of this thesis is the study of public expenditure efficiency of Tuscan municipalities, with particular attention on the effect of the municipal size. The interest in this topic is undoubtedly linked to its highly topical feature: in a so difficult period of crisis, the national legislator has enacted laws on the public spending containment that has also modified the structure of local governments. As a consequence, the Tuscan regional legislator has enacted measures to increase efficiency and to reduce costs and these measures regard also the municipalities, in particular their size. In a context of increasingly limited resources, the study of efficiency in the public expenditure municipalities is worthy of investigation. In particular, in the scientific literature there is a more and more attention to this issue: even if there are different approaches to face this topic, the most common way to do an efficiency analysis is through the estimation of the Efficiency Frontier. In this field there are two alternative techniques: parametric and non-parametric techniques. In this thesis, DEA approach is used, since it's suitable to an efficiency analysis of the public sector: in fact, DEA avoids assuming specific functional forms of the production frontier, gives intuitive ideas to correct the found inefficiencies and its results can be explained by econometric analysis (in particular, by Tobit regression). In addition, Tobit regression is used to explain municipal inefficiencies.

The empirical analysis of the effects of government policies on the incentives of economic agents is the leitmotif of the present thesis, with two distinct fields of application. While the first essay mostly contributes to the empirical banking literature, with a focus on the link between implicit guarantees for bank debt and political connections in Europe, the second one contributes to the field of education economics and is devoted to an analysis of the effects of bibliometric-based hiring and promotion schemes in Italian public universities on scholars' productivity. The two essays also share some methodological affinities. First, the two projects exploit two different identification strategies that have the common ambition of isolating and estimating a causal effect of public policies on the outcomes of interest. Second, the two works are characterized by the use of two original datasets, that have been obtained merging multiple sources of data, some of them pre-existing and others that have been hand-collected. Finally, the two essays share the novelty of the research questions they aim to answer, which are relatively unexplored by the existing literature.

Austerity policies embraced after 2009 in the European union have been very controversial both in political and academical debate. While its supporters claim that fiscal adjustment is necessary to restore the sustainability of public finances, critics argue that the negative effect of austerity on economic growth is so large that it may even be counterproductive. Indeed, the improvement of fiscal position and the debt to GDP ratio has been much slower and fiscal multipliers considerably larger than expected , suggesting that self-defeating austerity might be a realistic possibility. This work will examine various aspects that determine the effectiveness of fiscal policy in reducing the debt to GDP ratio, such as the initial level of debt, tax and expenditure levels, size and timing of consolidation, long run effect on economic growth. The focus will be on the sensitivity of debt to GDP projections to the underlying assumptions, to highlight the complex trade-offs of different policy options. This thesis is organized as follows: chapter 2 is devoted to the development of the general analytical framework used and its relations with previous works; in chapter 3 we will study the properties of the model through a simulation exercise under different parametrizations; in chapter 4 we will compare these results with the European countries in the period after the financial crisis. Some conclusive remarks (chapter 5) follow.

Citizen science (CS), "citizen science" or "participatory science", refers to the participation and active involvement of citizens in scientific research activities. While CS includes natural sciences, such as biology, chemistry and physics, and citizen social science deals with societies, citizen humanities apply to historical, literary, linguistic and philosophical disciplines. Digital public history, due to its public, participatory and collaborative vocation in a digital context, presents itself as one of the privileged fields of application of citizen humanities. The added value of citizen humanities depends primarily on two conditions underlying the digital public history: the participation of historians who do not come from the academy in the creation of collaborative projects and the communication of the results of historical research to the public on the network. The article intends to reflect on how collaborative writing, made possible by wiki tools, can be an excellent starting point for a participatory democracy that is located in the wake of citizen humanities. ; La citizen science (CS), "scienza dei cittadini" o "scienza partecipata", indica la partecipazione e il coinvolgimento attivo dei cittadini in attività di ricerca scientifica. Mentre la CS include le scienze naturali, come la biologia, la chimica e la fisica e la citizen social science si occupa delle società, le citizen humanities si applicano alle discipline storiche, letterarie, linguistiche e filosofiche. La digital public history, per la sua vocazione pubblica, partecipativa e collaborativa in un contesto digitale, si presenta come uno dei campi di applicazione privilegiata dalle citizen humanities . Il valore aggiunto delle citizen humanities dipende primariamente da due condizioni alla base della digital public history: la partecipazione degli storici che non provengono dall'accademia alla creazione di progetti collaborativi e la comunicazione dei risultati della ricerca storica al pubblico della rete. L'articolo intende riflettere su come la scrittura collaborativa, resa possibile dagli strumenti wiki, possa costituire un ottimo punto di partenza per una democrazia partecipata che si situi nel solco delle citizen humanities.