Quality & Quantity最新文献

Substantial research evidence have shown the benefits of foreign remittances and patriotism to national growth and human welfare. Also, many studies have established the importance of lower extent of deprivation on economic growth and better well-being. However, little or no research has examined the impact of foreign remittances on subjective personal relative deprivation and patriotism, and impact of deprivation on patriotism in a single study. This study, therefore examined the relationship between foreign remittances, personal relative deprivation and patriotism. Results generated through analysis of cross sectional data demonstrated that greater subjective feelings of personal relative deprivation were associated with higher foreign remittances from family members, friends and neighbours. Similarly, lower patriotic behaviours were found to associate with higher subjective feelings of personal relative deprivation. The results provide further evidence for theories on relative deprivation-patriotism nexus and calls for attention on public policy to reduce economic inequality through provision of gainful employment, standardised salary/wage structure and make regular review of such salary/wages according to the prevailing economic condition.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of COVID-19 on multidimensional well-being in the European population aged 50 and over by measuring changes in individual well-being before and after the pandemic outbreak. To capture the multidimensional nature of well-being, we consider different dimensions: economic well-being, health status, social connections and work status. We introduce new indices of change in individual well-being that measure non-directional, downward and upward movements. Individual indices are then aggregated by country and subgroup for comparison. The properties satisfied by the indices are also discussed. The empirical application is based on micro-data from waves 8 and 9 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), carried out for 24 European countries before the pandemic outbreak (regular survey) and in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic (June-August 2020 and June-August 2021). The findings suggest that employed and richer individuals suffered greater losses in well-being, while differences based on gender and education diverge from country to country. It also emerges that while the main driver of well-being changes in the first year of the pandemic was economics, the health dimension also strongly contributed to upward and downward well-being changes in the second year.

Social soft skills are crucial for workers to perform their tasks, yet it is hard to train people on them and to readapt their skill set when needed. In the present work, we analyze the possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on social soft skills in the context of Italian occupations related to 88 economic sectors and 14 age groups. We leverage detailed information coming from ICP (i.e. the Italian equivalent of O*Net), provided by the Italian National Institute for the Analysis of Public Policy, from the microdata for research on the continuous detection of labor force, provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), and from ISTAT data on the Italian population. Based on these data, we simulate the impact of COVID-19 on workplace characteristics and working styles that were more severely affected by the lockdown measures and the sanitary dispositions during the pandemic (e.g. physical proximity, face-to-face discussions, working remotely). We then apply matrix completion-a machine-learning technique often used in the context of recommender systems-to predict the average variation in the social soft skills importance levels required for each occupation when working conditions change, as some changes might be persistent in the near future. Professions, sectors, and age groups showing negative average variations are exposed to a deficit in their social soft-skills endowment, which might ultimately lead to lower productivity.

The participation of women in digital society is essential to achieving the objectives of Agenda 2030 and an essential component in the EU strategy for the digital transition. This article applies a poset-based approach to the European Women in Digital (WiD) Scoreboard, to examine the digital inclusion of women in EU Member States and in the UK. The poset methodology enables us to identify the most significant indicators for each of the dimensions of the Scoreboard, considering the EU-28 as well as different clusters of countries, and to construct a new ranking that deals with the shortcomings of the aggregative approaches, the pre-treatment of data and the full compensability effect generated by arithmetic means. Our results show that two indicators, STEM graduates and the unadjusted pay gap, are the most significant for achieving the digital inclusion of women. Our research contributes to better understanding the dynamics and the factors facilitating the digital inclusion of women in the EU-28 Member States, providing a clustering of EU countries into four performance groups depending on the digital inclusion of women. It also contributes to the design of more targeted and effective policies for integrating gender equality into the EU digital transition strategy.

The most effective structure in designing the participation process is local government units. It is much easier for local governments to establish closer dialogue with citizens, create negotiation environments for them and identify appropriate needs for participation. The intense feeling of centralization in terms of the duties and responsibilities of local governments in Turkey leads to the inability to transfer the negotiation processes in participation practices to realistic/realizable practices. As a result, permanent institutional practices do not carry on sustainably; they turn into structures established to fulfill legal obligations only. The transition from government to governance, with the winds of change began after 1990 in Turkey, revealed the necessity of reorganizing the duties and responsibilities of executives at both local and national levels regarding active citizenship; the necessity of activating local participation mechanisms was emphasized. For this reason, the application of the Headmen's (Headman means "Muhtar" in Turkish. Sometimes "Mukhtar" uses instead of Headman in some studies. But in this study Headman used to descripe partipatory process. In Turkey, there two types of "Headman". One of them is village headman. Villages are legal entities, so village headmen have much more authority. The second one is neigborhood headmen. Neigborhoods are not legal entities. So that, neigborhood headman is responsible to City Mayor.). Workshop, designed by the Tekirdağ Metropolitan Municipality, was periodically subject to the research as an ongoing method, and its effectiveness for citizen participation was analyzed using the qualitative research method in the study. The reason why Tekirdağ was chosen in the study is that it has the only metropolitan municipality in the Thrace Region, periodic meetings and participatory democracy discourses on the sharing of duties and powers with new regulations increase. The practice was examined through 6 meetings held until 2020 since there were disruptions in the planned meetings of the practice on account of the fact that the study coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic process.

This paper proposes a new method to combine choice- and text data to infer moral motivations from people's actions. To do this, we rely on moral rhetoric, in other words, extracting moral values from verbal expressions with Natural Language Processing techniques. We use moral rhetoric based on a well-established moral, psychological theory called Moral Foundations Theory. We use moral rhetoric as input in Discrete Choice Models to gain insights into moral behaviour based on people's words and actions. We test our method in a case study of voting and party defection in the European Parliament. Our results indicate that moral rhetoric have significant explanatory power in modelling voting behaviour. We interpret the results in the light of political science literature and propose ways for future investigations.