Quality & Quantity最新文献

A short-term issue that has been occasionally investigated in the current literature is if (and, eventually, how) population dynamics (directly or indirectly) driven by COVID-19 pandemic have contributed to enlarge regional divides in specific demographic processes and dimensions. To verify this assumption, our study run an exploratory multivariate analysis of ten indicators representative of different demographic phenomena (fertility, mortality, nuptiality, internal and international migration) and the related population outcomes (natural balance, migration balance, total growth). We developed a descriptive analysis of the statistical distribution of the ten demographic indicators using eight metrics that assess formation (and consolidation) of spatial divides, controlling for shifts over time in both central tendency, dispersion, and distributional shape regimes. All indicators were made available over 20 years (2002-2021) at a relatively detailed spatial scale (107 NUTS-3 provinces) in Italy. COVID-19 pandemic exerted an impact on Italian population because of intrinsic (e.g. a particularly older population age structure compared with other advanced economies) and extrinsic (e.g. the early start of the pandemic spread compared with the neighboring European countries) factors. For such reasons, Italy may represent a sort of 'worst' demographic scenario for other countries affected by COVID-19 and the results of this empirical study can be informative when delineating policy measures (with both economic and social impact) able to mitigate the effect of pandemics on demographic balance and improve the adaptation capacity of local societies to future pandemic's crises.

In this paper we estimate monetary and non-monetary poverty measures at two sub-regional levels in the region of Tuscany (Italy) using data from the ad-hoc Survey on Vulnerability and Poverty held by Regional Institute from Economic Planning of Tuscany (IRPET). We estimate the percentage of households living in poverty conditions and three supplementary fuzzy measures of poverty regarding deprivation in basic needs and lifestyle, children deprivation, and financial insecurity. The key feature of the survey is that it was carried out after the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, some of the items collected focus on the subjective perception of poverty eighteen months after the beginning of the pandemic. We assess the quality of these estimates either with initial direct estimates along with their sampling variance, and with a secondary small area estimation when the formers are not sufficiently accurate.

Developments in factor analysis (Spearman in Am J Psychol 15:201-292, 1904); Thurstone in Multiple factor analysis, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1947), multidimensional scaling (Torgerson in Theory and methods of scaling, Wiley Hoboken, New Jersey, 1958; Young and Householder in Psychometrika, 3:19-22, 1938), the Galileo model (Woelfel and Fink in The measurement of communication processes: galileo theory and method, Academic Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980), and, more recently, in computer science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, network analysis and other disciplines (Woelfel in Qual Quant 54:263-278, 2020) have shown that human cognitive and cultural beliefs and attitudes can be modeled as movement through a high-dimensional non-Euclidean space. This article demonstrates the theoretical and methodological contribution that multidimensional scaling makes to understand attitude change associated with the COVID-19 vaccine.

The study investigates the effect of fiscal policy on the inflation rate in a panel of 44 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 2003-2020 using a non-linear system generalized method of moments (system GMM) and the dynamic panel threshold estimation techniques. The results show that the recent increase in inflation rate has a fiscal nature and that monetary policy alone may not provide an effective response. Specifically, the results indicate that a positive shock to fiscal policy (captured by public debts) has a positive and statistically significant effect on inflation, while a negative shock to public debt has a statistically non-significant impact on the inflation rate. Also, money supply exerted a positive and insignificant impact on inflation, indicating that the current inflation rate in the region may not be induced by money supply. However, the joint effect of public debts and money supply shows that public debts aid the effect of money supply on the inflation rate, albeit, not in the proportion predicted by the quantity theory of money. Further, the results also found a public debt threshold point of 60.59% of GDP. This implies the current inflationary pressure may be rooted in fiscal policy and that further accumulation of public debts beyond the benchmark established in the study would worsen the inflationary pressure in SSA. Importantly, the study found that for fiscal policy to spur growth and reduce inflationary pressure in SSA, the inflation rate should be managed and brought within a single-digit framework of 4%. The research and policy implications are discussed.