Why do municipalities cooperate to provide local public services? An empirical analysis

Intermunicipal cooperation is being increasingly adopted in various countries as a part of local service delivery reforms. This paper draws on survey data from Spain’s municipalities to examine the reasons underpinning the decisions of local governments to engage in intermunicipal cooperation and privatisation. Our empirical analysis indicates that small municipalities prefer to rely on cooperation for reducing costs, while their larger counterparts prefer to privatise the delivery of services. By cooperating, scale economies can be achieved with lower transaction costs and fewer concerns for competition than is the case via private production.

La transformació d'una administració local cap a una administració electrònica sense papers

Aquest treball analitza en què consisteix l'administració electrònica i quines són les adaptacions que ha de realitzar una administració local per transformar-s'hi. El present document també recull quins són els elements clau que cal adaptar dins de l'organització, detallant-los i veient els beneficis d'utilitzar-los. Atès que la inversió econòmica per fer la transformació cap a l'e-Administració pot ser elevada, s'analitzen els serveis que ofereix de forma gratuïta el consorci d'Administració Oberta de Catalunya (AOC), els quals poden ajudar a abaratir la despesa.

Vertical relations and local competition : an empirical approach

The analysis of vertical industry relations forms an essential element in the field of industrial organization. This paper tests hypotheses derived from transaction cost theory and the principal-agent problem in Chile’s petrol market. It shows that local competition plays an important role in the choice of a disintegrated vertical structure, and that low levels of service investment have the same effect. Conversely, the number of own-brand outlets and a high level of investment in services reduce the probability of disintegration. The paper demonstrates that vertical disintegration has a null effect on wholesale petrol prices and a positive effect on retail petrol prices of between 1.6 and 7 per cent, depending on fuel type.

Absence of flash-lag when judging global shape from local positions

When a flash is presented aligned with a moving stimulus, the former is perceived to lag behind the latter (the flash-lag effect). We study whether this mislocalization occurs when a positional judgment is not required, but a veridical spatial relationship between moving and flashed stimuli is needed to perceive a global shape. To do this, we used Glass patterns that are formed by pairs of correlated dots. One dot of each pair was presented moving and, at a given moment, the other dot of each pair was flashed in order to build the Glass pattern. If a flash-lag effect occurs between each pair of dots, we expect the best perception of the global shape to occur when the flashed dots are presented before the moving dots arrive at the position that physically builds the Glass pattern. Contrary to this, we found that the best detection of Glass patterns occurred for the situation of physical alignment. This result is not consistent with a low-level contribution to the flash-lag effect.

The Institutional, Economic and Social Determinants of Local Government Transparency

Interest in public accountability and government transparency is increasing worldwide. The literature on the determinants of transparency is evolving but is still in its early stages. So far, it has typically focused on national or regional governments while neglecting the local government level. This paper builds on the scarce knowledge available in order to examine the economic, social, and institutional determinants of local government transparency in Spain. We draw on a 2010 survey and the transparency indexes constructed by the NGO Transparency International (Spain) in order to move beyond the fiscal transparency addressed in previous work. In so doing, we broaden the analysis of transparency to the corporate, social, fiscal, contracting, and planning activities of governments. Our results on overall transparency indicate that large municipalities and left-wing local government leaders are associated with better transparency indexes; while the worst results are presented by provincial capitals, cities where tourist activity is particularly important and local governments that enjoy an absolute majority. The analysis of other transparency categories generally shows the consistent impact of these determinants and the need to consider a wider set of variables to capture their effect.

Comissaria local de policia a Salt

Award-winning

Generalization transitions in Hidden-Layer neural networks for third-order feature discrimination

Stochastic learning processes for a specific feature detector are studied. This technique is applied to nonsmooth multilayer neural networks requested to perform a discrimination task of order 3 based on the ssT-block¿ssC-block problem. Our system proves to be capable of achieving perfect generalization, after presenting finite numbers of examples, by undergoing a phase transition. The corresponding annealed theory, which involves the Ising model under external field, shows good agreement with Monte Carlo simulations.

Evaluation of a snow avalanche possibly triggered by a local earthquake at Vallée de la Sionne, Switzerland

Snow avalanches are moving sources of infrasonic and seismic energy. They can be triggered by many different mechanisms that include the shaking produced by earthquakes. The forces induced by an earthquake can cause an increase in the load down the slope and can also decrease the shear strength and both effects can cause the release of an avalanche. This phenomenon represents an important hazard associated with earthquakes in snow-covered mountain areas with high seismicity.

Resurrecting Disney: Tracing Walt Disney‘s ever-present spirit in feature animated films of the Michael Eisner era (1984-2004)

El treball Ressuscitant a Disney: Rastrejant el sempre present esperit de Walt Disney en els llargmetratges animats de l'era Michael Eisner (1984-2004) pretén definir i analitzar les característiques, tant respecte al procés creatiu com en la definició de contingut, integrades en els clàssics originals de Disney per, a continuació, demostrar que aquestes van ser recuperades i implementades de nou després de la mort de Walt Disney -amb lleus adaptacions- per donar lloc a una segona edat d'or de l'animació

Online and Offline Participation at the Local Level : A Quantitative Analysis of the Catalan Municipalities

This paper presents a first analysis on local electronic participatory experiences in Catalonia. The analysis is based on a database constructed and collected by the authors. The paper carries out an explanatory analysis of local initiatives in eparticipationand off line participation taking into account political variables (usually not considered in this kind of analysis) but also classical socio-economic variables that characterise municipalities. Hence, we add a quantitative analysis to the numerous case studies on local e-participation experiences. We have chosen Catalonia because is one of the European regions with more initiatives and one that has enjoyed considerable local governmental support to citizen participation initiatives since the 80s. The paper offers a characterisation of these experiences and a first explanatory analysis, considering: i) the institutional context in which these experiences are embedded, ii) the characteristics of the citizen participation processes and mechanisms on-line, and iii) a set of explanatory variables composed by the population size, thepolitical adscription of the mayor, the electoral abstention rate, age, income and level ofeducation in the municipality. The model that we present is explanatory for the municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants but it is not for the fewer than 20,000inhabitants. Actually, the number of participatory activities developed by these last municipalities is very low. Among all the variables, population size becomes the mostinfluential variable. Political variables such as political party of the mayor and the localabstention rate have a certain influence but that have to be controlled by population size.

Innovative milieu, micro firms and local development in Barcelona

Peer-reviewed

Shared feature extraction for nearest neighbor face recognition

In this paper, we propose a new supervised linearfeature extraction technique for multiclass classification problemsthat is specially suited to the nearest neighbor classifier (NN).The problem of finding the optimal linear projection matrix isdefined as a classification problem and the Adaboost algorithmis used to compute it in an iterative way. This strategy allowsthe introduction of a multitask learning (MTL) criterion in themethod and results in a solution that makes no assumptions aboutthe data distribution and that is specially appropriated to solvethe small sample size problem. The performance of the methodis illustrated by an application to the face recognition problem.The experiments show that the representation obtained followingthe multitask approach improves the classic feature extractionalgorithms when using the NN classifier, especially when we havea few examples from each class

Online and Offline Participation at the Local level: A Quantitative Analysis of the Catalan Municipalities

This article presents an analysis on local participatory experiences in Catalonia,both online and in-person. The analysis is based on a database set up by theauthors. The article carries out an explanatory analysis of local participatoryinitiatives (on- and offline) taking into account political variables (not usually con-sidered in this kind of analysis) and also classical socio-economic variables thatcharacterize municipalities. Hence, we add a quantitative analysis to the numerouscase studies on local e-participation experiences. We have chosen Catalonia becauseit is one of the European regions with more initiatives and a considerable localgovernment support for citizen participation initiatives since the 1980s. Thearticle offers a characterization of these experiences and an explanatory analysis,considering: (i) the institutional context in which these experiences are embedded,(ii) the citizen participation processes and mechanisms online and (iii) a set ofexplanatory variables composed of the population size and the province to whichthe municipality belongs, the political tendency of the mayor, the electoral absten-tion rate, age, income, level of education, broadband connection and users of theInternet in the municipality. The model that we present is explanatory for munici-palities with more than 20,000 inhabitants but it is not for fewer than 20,000inhabitants. Actually, the majority of these latter municipalities have not developedany participatory activities. Among all the variables, population size is the mostinfluential variable and affects the influence of other variables, such as the politicalparty of the mayor, the local abstention rate and the province.