Do Economic Recovery Packages Open a Window of Opportunity for Corruption and Mismanagement? The Case of Italy in the Aftermath of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Public Organization Review - This paper explores the effects of the pandemic on corruption and mismanagement in Italy, a country where the Covid-19 crisis is supposed to have significantly...     

新兴中等收入群体的崛起：互联网消费特征及其经济社会价值

当前,我国约有4亿中等收入人口,中等收入群体对经济社会发展的作用日益凸显。在新一轮科技和产业革命背景下,从事新经济新技术、具有较高文化资本和较年轻的新兴中等收入群体逐渐崛起。互联网消费是新兴中等收入群体最具普遍性和典型性的生活方式,他们在积极拥抱互联网消费的同时,也展现出作为消费者的能动性和反思性并付诸实践。新兴中等收入群体的消费特征所蕴含的积极的经济和社会价值,有助于扩大内需并建构一种良性的消费文化,有助于增强社会参与、推动改善社会治理。因此,应从收入分配、职业结构转型和业态创新等多个角度探索扩大中等收入群体,尤其是扩大新兴中等收入群体的路径。扩大新兴中等收入群体规模,既是创新民生建设、逐步实现共同富裕的重要途径,也是扩大消费、实现经济社会平稳健康发展的重要手段。     

我国战略性产业发展重点选择与推进策略

到2035年,基本实现现代化从推动产业结构转型、促进自主创新、助力实现“双碳目标”、加快抢占全球产业制高点、支撑构建新发展格局等多个方面对培育发展战略性产业提出新要求。未来十五年,我国应重点发展机械、电子信息、汽车、化工、房地产、轻纺等转型升级后的现有支柱产业,新一代信息技术、生物技术、新能源、新材料、高端装备、新能源汽车、绿色环保等新兴支柱产业与类脑智能、量子信息、基因技术、未来网络、深海空天开发、氢能与储能等未来支柱产业,形成“6+7+6”战略性产业格局。要瞄准制约战略性产业发展的主要障碍和难点问题,优化顶层设计、深化重点领域改革、加强产业政策支撑、提高产业创新能力、完善体制机制,多措并举助力战略性产业加快发展。     

Alien plant species do have a clear preference for different land uses within urban environments

Since neophytes can become invasive in the future, untangling their ecological preferences is of paramount importance, especially in urban areas where they represent a substantial proportion of the local flora. Studies exploring alien species assemblages in urban environments are however scarce. This study aims to unravel alien plant species preferences for five urban land uses (densely built-up areas, open built-up areas, industrial areas, broadleaved urban forests, and agricultural areas and small landscape elements). We took the city of Brussels as a model, in which we recorded all vascular species growing spontaneously in grid cells of 1 km². We tested two different ways of classifying the 1-km² cells: (1) We simply associated each cell with its dominant land cover; (2) We used a fuzzy approach for which the degree of association of a given cell to a given land cover depended on the proportion of that land cover within the cell. For both classification methods, we calculated the indicator species of the resulting land cover types based on alien species only. The crisp and fuzzy classifications identified 33 and 49 species, respectively, with a clear preference for some urban land use types (from a total of 129 alien plant species analyzed). Results showed that urban land use types having apparently similar environmental conditions can actually harbor different neophyte assemblages. Fine-tuning the categorization of urban environments in future ecological studies is therefore important for understanding spatial patterns of alien species occurrence.     

Impulsivity and Gambling Type Among Treatment-Seeking Disordered Gamblers: An Explorative Study

Several studies have found that certain traits of impulsivity are associated with gambling disorder, and influence its severity. Furthermore, it has been suggested that some forms of gambling, particularly electronic gambling machines, are particularly widespread among pathological gamblers. In the present, exploratory study, we aim to clarify the role played by impulsivity in influencing the choice of specific gambling activities, by examining the relation between individual dimensions of impulsivity, and the choice of specific gambling activities in a clinical population. 100 consecutively admitted pathological gamblers at the National Problem Gambling Clinic in London (UK) in 2014 were administered the UPPS-P and BIS-11 impulsivity questionnaires, the Problem Gambling Severity Index, and underwent a structured interview concerning their gambling activities in the month and year prior to assessment. The correlation between individual gambling activities and impulsivity dimensions was analyzed both at a bivariate level, and using logistic regression. We found a significant correlation between Negative Urgency, Motor impulsivity and low-stakes machine gambling on multivariate analysis. Negative urgency (i.e. the tendency to act impulsively in response to negative affect), and Motor impulsivity (a tendency to rash action and restlessness) might be mediating factors in the choice of electronic gambling machines, particularly among patients whose gambling is escape-oriented. Structural and situational characteristics of gambling machines, particularly the widespread availability of low-stakes—rather than high-stakes—gaming machines, might concur to the choice of this form of gambling among individuals who present higher negative urgency and restlessness.     

Leaving your mamma: why so late in Italy?

In Italy, young adults tend to postpone their transition to adulthood and live with their parents until very late compared with other countries. A dynamic discrete choice model is proposed in which agents choose residential arrangements, together with labor supply and marital status, conditional on the economic and institutional framework and on other agents’ choices. The model is structurally estimated with the Simulated Method of Moments for non-student high-school graduate males and then used to assess, through a variety of counterfactual experiments, the relative importance of factors that are claimed to influence the choice to leave home in the existing literature: labor market conditions, parental resources, housing market conditions and social interaction. Results suggest that Italians choose to remain with their parents due to a combination of poor labor market conditions and high housing costs. The relatively high income of parents could contribute to the patterns observed by acting as an insurance against unemployment. Finally, estimates indicate that individuals tend to conform to a social norm, especially in the South of the country were family ties and the costs in terms of utility from not complying with expected behaviors appear to be stronger.

     

Environmental Sustainability and Tourism in European Policy-making

The paper analyses decision-making in the field of European environmental regulation and examines the implications for tourist policy. It is argued that European Union (EU) environmental policy is influenced by three factors: (1) the EU bureaucracy is interested in expanding its influence and power vis-à-vis national bureaucracies and polities; (2) Northern European countries have selectively recruited regulators with environmentally sympathetic ideologies; and (3) a pro-environmental attitude contributes to the societal legitimation of business. These considerations give a unique character to environmental policy-making, which over time has tended to spill over to thematically connected areas, including to tourism policy.     

Precarity in the Nonprofit Employment Services Sector

Drawing on interview and focus group data, this article explores research undertaken as part of a larger research project exploring precarity in the nonprofit employment services sector in a mid‐sized Canadian city. We critically survey major legislative changes to Canadian employment and income security policies and programs, including the restructuring of work and labor relations, growth of performance‐based contracting‐out, erosion of intergovernmental transfers, worker stress, and emotional tolls. Our study's results demonstrate how employment precarity in the nonprofit employment services sector is amplified by top‐down and centralized relationships with funding partners and policymaking divorced from the employment experiences of frontline staff. We make the case that it is important to work against rising workplace precarity to strengthen organizational and workplace conditions, as well as build environments more supportive of optimal employment support services. En se fondant sur des entretiens et des données découlant de groupes témoins, cet article présente des explorations entreprises dans une recherche plus large étudiant la précarité dans le secteur des emplois de service dans une ville canadienne de taille moyenne. Nous faisons une revue critique de changements importants intervenus dans la législation portant sur l'emploi au Canada et les politiques et programmes de la sécurité du revenu, incluant la restructuration du travail et des relations de travail, l'augmentation de la privatisation se fondant sur la performance, la diminution des transferts intergouvernementaux, le stress au travail et les conséquences émotionnelles. Les résultats de notre recherche démontrent comment la précarité de l'emploi dans les secteurs des services à but non lucratif est amplifiée par des relations allant du haut vers le bas et centralisée avec des partenaires et des politiques séparés de l'expérience des travailleurs sur le terrain. Nous démontrons qu'il est important de travailler contre la précarisation en renforçant les conditions organisationnelles et de travail, tout en construisant des environnements favorisant une offre de services de l'emploi optimaux.     

Is the majority always right? Young children's normative interpretations of majority and dissenting peer behavior

The present study investigates the social-cognitive underpinnings of young children's bias to follow the majority. More specifically, we focus on the question of whether children not only copy the behavior of a majority of peers, but whether they also understand this majority behavior as a social norm that everyone needs to follow. Additionally, we investigated whether seeing a unanimous majority or a majority and dissenting peer makes a difference for children's normative understanding. Participants included 180 preschool-age children (4-to-5 years old) who engaged in a conformity paradigm, where they either saw the behavior of a unanimous majority of peers, or additionally the behavior of a single dissenting peer, or only the behavior of two individual peers behaving differently (Control). Afterward, children mostly copied the unanimous majority and protested against others, when they deviated from this majority, thus indeed interpreting the behavior of a unanimous majority as a norm that others need to follow. However, when they had seen a majority as well as a dissenter, children's protest and copying in favor of the majority dropped. Overall, our findings show that preschool children interpret the behavior of a unanimous majority as normative. However, when children additionally see a dissenter's behavior, this normative interpretation is weakened.     

从传播学看信息社会中的高质量图书出版

在信息社会,高质量出版并非仅限于图书产品的质量,而应该是整个出版活动的高质高量.从传播学的角度来看,当社会进入信息阶段,大众文化的崛起使传统的传播模式发生了改变,出版业应该敏锐抓住这一契机,深刻把握大众文化的特点,以此来提高整个出版活动的质量.