Some dangerous short- and long-term ambiguities of fiscal policies arise from the belief that Laffer effects may be generated from deficit-financed tax cuts able to stimulate aggregate demand. ...However, even in a supply-side framework, fiscal illusion prevents a rational perception of the effectiveness of Laffer-oriented fiscal measures. The ambiguity of the Laffer effect led to an important series of studies of Francesco Forte, designed to disclose and empirically test its interactions with short- and long-term fiscal policies on gross domestic product (GDP) growth and on other relevant macroeconomic variables. We discuss, under the Laffer perspective, some of Francesco Forte’s studies related to fiscal policy effects on the labour market and GDP growth.
The digital transition is a challenge that developed countries are currently facing. The transition process is associated with different degrees of uncertainty, which are particularly relevant for ...changes that have to do with the provision of goods and services produced by public administrations. Our paper uses a partial equilibrium model to study the effects of uncertainty on the public provision of goods and services produced by bureaucratic agencies, including the incentive of the government to consolidate production. We assume that bureaucratic agencies may play either a cooperative game with each other and a non-cooperative game against the government (i.e., a consolidated bureaucracy) or a non-cooperative game with each other and against the government (i.e., competing bureaus). Both the government and the bureaus face tradeoffs between maximizing the electorate preferences and extracting some political and/or bureaucratic rents. We find that a cooperative (competitive) bureaucratic solution depends on the nature of the goods produced. We find that costs’ uncertainty affects the level of public production and the way the policymakers extract their rents.
This volume collects some contributions in honor of Francesco Forte, presented by colleagues and friends at a conference held to celebrate him at the Department of Economics and Law of Sapienza ...University of Rome in December 2017. The selected contributions follow a logical order that is consistent with the main research interests of Francesco Forte, briefly summarized in the next pages after a short biographical introduction.
Governments often support their preferences for decentralised (centralised) bureaucracies on the grounds of efficiency considerations (production side). Here, we consider the demand side, i.e., ...whether the government perception of citizens’ demand for differentiated goods/services might increase efficiency by simply reshuffling bureaucratic production activities. We represent the budgetary process—between an incumbent governing party and n-competing bureaus producing differentiated goods/services—as a simultaneous Nash-compliance game with complete information. On these grounds, we analyse—in terms of public production, players’ rents and payoffs—the effects of increasing competition (as for the number of bureaus) in the political–bureaucratic market. Moreover, we evaluate, ceteris paribus, the effects of bureaucratic reshuffling from the point of view of society, assumed to prefer those policies that approximate social efficiency by minimising bureaucratic and political rents.
Italian health care expenditure (HCE) has been basically explained with two main groups of theories. (1) Those explaining the peculiarity of the HCE growth as depending on demand and supply factors, ...such as aging population, number of practising physicians per capita, mix of public and private hospitals, number of hospital beds,... (2) Those explaining the growth of total public expenditure as a common feature among industrialized countries, with a huge empirical literature emphasising the role of GDP and/or other structural/institutional variables as the main determinants of HCE across countries. In order to reassess previous findings, we exploit recent results on panel cointegration analysis and test the regional Italian data on HCE and GDP, also taking into account cross-section correlation. The results show that HCE and GDP are cointegrated. The long- and short-term dynamics of HCE are estimated. Our results, providing an empirical support for the existence of Wagner's law, have important policy implications in terms of fiscal sustainability: as income rises, people will choose relatively more HCE. Given the level of the public debt in Italy, any further increases would imply that future government spending may be mainly directed toward debt servicing, likely at the expense of public expenditure on basic infrastructure.
We examine value added tax (VAT) non‐compliance in the European Union (EU) car market. This issue is of paramount importance because of the loss of VAT revenue, the profound distortion of market ...mechanisms, and the dangerous variety of fraudulent schemes employed. In addition to the usual VAT fraudulent schemes on intra‐community trade, the special regimes, and the different regulations for the sale of motor vehicles in the EU member states per se, favour non‐compliance in the car market. Non‐compliance also takes advantage of the lack of adequate and prompt information exchange among the tax administrations of different countries and, within each country, between the tax administrations and their departments responsible for motor vehicles. We highlight the fact that the current measures are insufficient to fight VAT non‐compliance and that the new rules proposed in the ‘definitive VAT system’ are inadequate to control the proliferation of scams in the car market. Accordingly, we suggest more substantial measures: well‐targeted and prompt cross‐checks through archives and databases, and the monitoring of their effectiveness; electronic invoices; real‐time exchanges of information between the different tax and transport authorities; and increased harmonisation of the special VAT schemes that aim to eliminate one of the most exploited opportunities for illicit gain, to the detriment of the EU member states.
Considering self-inflicted critical events (suicides, attempted suicides, self-harm acts, hunger strikes) in Italian prisons as indicators of the respect of inmates' human rights, this study examines ...their relationship with the characteristics of the Italian prison system between 2016 and 2021, using a unique prison-level dataset covering the 188 national prisons. Both individual panel regressions and seemingly unrelated regressions show that reducing prison overcrowding reduces critical events. The same result is achieved by increasing mandatory treatments (restraint acts) performed discretionally by prison staff. Because the former policy is politically sensitive and difficult/costly to implement, policymakers may prefer to rely on the latter as a “death-avoidance strategy”, despite the greater likelihood of violating inmates’ human rights. These findings may help explain the increasing use of acts of restraint in Italian prisons in recent times.
•We study the determinants of self-inflicted critical events in Italian prisons.•We use a unique dataset of the universe of Italian prisons between 2016 and 2021.•Empirical analysis shows the role of prison policies.•Reduction in prison overcrowding lowers self-inflicted critical events.•Acts of restraint are an effective “death avoiding strategy” in prison.
We investigated the role of histone deacetylase 4 (HDAC4) using RNA interference (RNAi) and knockout cells to specifically address its role in cell cycle progression in tumor and normal cells. ...Ablation of HDAC4 led to growth inhibition in human tumor cells but not to detectable effects in normal human dermal fibroblasts (NHDF) or myelopoietic progenitors. HDAC4-/+ or HDAC4-/- murine embryonic fibroblasts showed no detectable growth defects. On the other hand, HDAC4 RNAi in HeLa cells produced mitotic arrest followed by caspase-dependent apoptosis. Mitotically arrested cells showed chromosome segregation defects. Even though the growth of both p53-wild-type and p53-null tumor cells were affected by HDAC4 ablation, segregation defects were observed only in p53-null cells. HDAC4 associates with the PP2A-B56 regulatory subunit, which is known to be involved in chromosome segregation, and RNAi of either the structural subunit A or the regulatory subunit B56 of PP2A also caused chromosome segregation defects. We conclude that HDAC4 is required for cell cycle progression of tumor cells by multiple mechanisms, one of which seems to be specific to p53-deficient cells through chromosome segregation defects. On the contrary, HDAC4 is not required for the progression of NHDF. We therefore suggest that systemic selective interference with the expression or function of HDAC4 is expected to have a significant therapeutic window, in particular, for p53-deficient tumors.
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