Italian Urban Plans: Diversified Approaches and Methods for Assessing Their Quality

This article poses the difficult task of providing a brief overview of Italian urban planning, difficult to understand for foreign observers because each Region has different legislation and urban planning tools. The paper describes an original methodology that evaluates the quality of the approach differentiated as (1) ‘of the plan’ (reformist, participative, from the territory); (2) ‘in the plan’ (integrated strategic, sustainable); (3) ‘with the plan’ (conformative, methodological, recompositional, systemic-infrastructural); and (4) ‘beyond the plan’ (beyond governance methodologies). The paper also compares aspects of quality present in plans for large, medium and small Italian cities. The conclusions review factors of excellence that may be used in other international scenarios.     

Methodological Choices and Data Quality Issues for Official Poverty Measures: Evidences from Italy

Social Indicators Research - The application of new technologies and the implementation of e-government have profoundly modified management systems in public administrations. In this article we...     

How do macro- and micro-level changes interact in the emergence of educational outcomes?

This article uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) to examine how the composition of tertiary degree holders by social origin has changed across cohorts during a period of massive educational expansion. It also investigates how changes in the composition of social origins affect the proportion of downward mobility of children from academic families. The results of the empirical analysis reveal a surprising paradox: On the one hand, the rising share of children from academic families across cohorts has contributed to an increasing share of children from academic families among tertiary graduates. This is because of both the macro-level proportion of children from academic families and the micro-level probability of these children to obtain a tertiary degree have increased across cohorts. Thus, these macro-level and micro-level changes have reinforced each other. On the other hand, this change in the composition of social origin has also contributed to an increasing proportion of children from academic families who are downward mobile in successive cohorts. This is because the macro-level share of children from academic families has increased more across cohorts than their downward mobility risk has decreased at the micro level. Thus, macro-level changes were stronger and went in opposite direction to micro-level changes.