Spesa pubblica in Sanità, Istruzione e Ricerca: efficienza, efficacia e determinanti

La ricerca intende analizzare l’efficacia della spesa pubblica, l’efficienza e le loro determinanti nei settori della Sanità, dell’Istruzione e della Ricerca per 33 paesi dell’area OCSE. L’analisi ha un duplice obiettivo: da un lato un confronto cross country e dall’altro un confronto temporale, prendendo in considerazione il periodo che va dal 1992 al 2011. Il tema della valutazione dell’efficacia e dell’efficienza della spesa pubblica è molto attuale, soprattutto in Europa, sia perché essa incide di quasi il 50% sul PIL, sia a causa della crisi finanziaria del 2008 che ha spinto i governi ad una riduzione dei bugdet e ad un loro uso più oculato. La scelta di concentrare il lavoro di analisi nei settori della Sanità, dell’Istruzione e della Ricerca e Sviluppo deriva da un lato dalla loro peculiarità di attività orientate al cliente (scuole, ospedali, tribunali) dall’altro dal ruolo strategico che essi rappresentano per lo sviluppo economico di un paese. Il lavoro è articolato in tre sezioni: 1. Rassegna dei principali strumenti metodologici utilizzati in letteratura per la misurazione della performance e dell’efficienza della spesa pubblica nei tre settori. 2. Valutazione e confronto dell’efficienza e della performance della spesa pubblica dal punto di vista sia temporale sia cross-country attraverso la costruzione di indicatori di performance e di efficienza della spesa pubblica (per approfondire l'indice dell'efficienza ho applicato la tecnica DEA "bootstrap output oriented" con indicatori di output ed input non simultanei mentre l’evoluzione dell’efficienza tra i periodi 2011-2002 e 2001-1992 è stata analizzata attraverso il calcolo dell’indice di Malmquist). 3. Analisi delle variabili esogene che influenzano l’efficienza della spesa pubblica nei settori Salute, Istruzione e Ricerca e Sviluppo attraverso una regressione Tobit avente come variabile dipendente i punteggi di efficienza DEA output oriented e come variabili esogene alcuni indicatori scelti tra quelli presenti in letteratura: l’Indicatore delle condizioni socioeconomiche delle famiglie (costruito e applicato da OCSE PISA per valutare l’impatto del background familiare nelle performance dell’apprendimento), l’Indicatore di fiducia nel sistema legislativo del paese, l’Indicatore di tutela dei diritti di proprietà, l’Indicatore delle azioni di controllo della corruzione, l’Indicatore di efficacia delle azioni di governo, l’Indicatore della qualità dei regolamenti, il PIL pro-capite. Da questo lavoro emergono risultati interessanti: non sempre alla quantità di risorse impiegate corrisponde il livello massimo di performance raggiungibile. I risultati della DEA evidenziano la media dei punteggi di efficienza corretti di 0,712 e quindi, impiegando la stessa quantità di risorse, si produrrebbe un potenziale miglioramento dell’output generato di circa il 29%. Svezia, Giappone, Finlandia e Germania risultano i paesi più efficienti, più vicini alla frontiera, mentre Slovacchia, Portogallo e Ungheria sono più distanti dalla frontiera con una misura di inefficienza di circa il 40%. Per quanto riguarda il confronto tra l’efficienza della spesa pubblica nei tre settori tra i periodi 1992-2001 e 2002-2011, l’indice di Malmquist mostra risultati interessanti: i paesi che hanno migliorato il loro livello di efficienza sono quelli dell’Est come l’Estonia, la Slovacchia, la Lituania mentre Paesi Bassi, Belgio e Stati Uniti hanno peggiorato la loro posizione. I paesi che risultano efficienti nella DEA come Finlandia, Germania e Svezia sono rimasti sostanzialmente fermi con un indice di Malmquist vicino al valore uno. In conclusione, i risultati della Tobit contengono indicazioni importanti per orientare le scelte dei Governi. Dall’analisi effettuata emerge che la fiducia nelle leggi, la lotta di contrasto alla corruzione, l’efficacia del governo, la tutela dei diritti di proprietà, le condizioni socioeconomiche delle famiglie degli studenti OECD PISA, influenzano positivamente l’efficienza della spesa pubblica nei tre settori indagati. Oltre alla spending review, per aumentare l’efficienza e migliorare la performance della spesa pubblica nei tre settori, è indispensabile per gli Stati la capacità di realizzare delle riforme che siano in grado di garantire il corretto funzionamento delle istituzioni.

The effects of varying forms and degrees of government intervention upon the effective competitiveness of UK small businesses

This doctoral thesis responds to the need for greater understanding of small businesses and their inherent unique problem-types. Integral to the investigation is the theme that for governments to effectively influence small business, a sound understanding of the factors they are seeking to influence is essential. Moreover, the study, in its recognition of the many shortcomings in management research and, in particular that the research methods and approaches adopted often fail to give adequate understanding of issues under study, attempts to develop an innovative and creative research approach. The aim thus being to produce, not only advances in small business management knowledge from the standpoints of government policy makers and `lq recipient small business, but also insights into future potential research method for the continued development of that knowledge. The origins of the methodology lay in the non-acceptance of traditional philosophical positions in epistemology and ontology, with a philosophical standpoint of internal realism underpinning the research. Internal realism presents the basis for the potential co-existence of qualitative and quantitative research strategy and underlines the crucial contributory role of research method in provision of ultimate factual status of the assertions of research findings. The concept of epistemological bootstrapping is thus used to develop a `lq partial research framework to foothold case study research, thereby avoiding limitations of objectivism and brute inductivism. The major insights and issues highlighted by the `lq bootstrap, guide the researcher around the participant case studies. A novel attempt at contextualist (linked multi-level and processual) analysis was attempted in the major in-depth case study, with two further cases playing a support role and contributing to a balanced emphasis of empirical research within the context of time constraints inherent within part-time research.

Statistical guidelines for clinical studies of human vision

Citation information: Armstrong RA, Davies LN, Dunne MCM & Gilmartin B. Statistical guidelines for clinical studies of human vision. Ophthalmic Physiol Opt 2011, 31, 123-136. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-1313.2010.00815.x ABSTRACT: Statistical analysis of data can be complex and different statisticians may disagree as to the correct approach leading to conflict between authors, editors, and reviewers. The objective of this article is to provide some statistical advice for contributors to optometric and ophthalmic journals, to provide advice specifically relevant to clinical studies of human vision, and to recommend statistical analyses that could be used in a variety of circumstances. In submitting an article, in which quantitative data are reported, authors should describe clearly the statistical procedures that they have used and to justify each stage of the analysis. This is especially important if more complex or 'non-standard' analyses have been carried out. The article begins with some general comments relating to data analysis concerning sample size and 'power', hypothesis testing, parametric and non-parametric variables, 'bootstrap methods', one and two-tail testing, and the Bonferroni correction. More specific advice is then given with reference to particular statistical procedures that can be used on a variety of types of data. Where relevant, examples of correct statistical practice are given with reference to recently published articles in the optometric and ophthalmic literature.

Brain connectivity in positive and negative syndrome schizophrenia

If, as is widely believed, schizophrenia is characterized by abnormalities of brain functional connectivity, then it seems reasonable to expect that different subtypes of schizophrenia could be discriminated in the same way. However, evidence for differences in functional connectivity between the subtypes of schizophrenia is largely lacking and, where it exists, it could be accounted for by clinical differences between the patients (e.g. medication) or by the limitations of the measures used. In this study, we measured EEG functional connectivity in unmedicated male patients diagnosed with either positive or negative syndrome schizophrenia and compared them with age and sex matched healthy controls. Using new methodology (Medkour et al., 2009) based on partial coherence, brain connectivity plots were constructed for positive and negative syndrome patients and controls. Reliable differences in the pattern of functional connectivity were found with both syndromes showing not only an absence of some of the connections that were seen in controls but also the presence of connections that the controls did not show. Comparing connectivity graphs using the Hamming distance, the negative-syndrome patients were found to be more distant from the controls than were the positive syndrome patients. Bootstrap distributions of these distances were created which showed a significant difference in the mean distances that was consistent with the observation that negative-syndrome diagnosis is associated with a more severe form of schizophrenia. We conclude that schizophrenia is characterized by widespread changes in functional connectivity with negative syndrome patients showing a more extreme pattern of abnormality than positive syndrome patients.

Derivation of marginal effects of determinants of technical inefficiency

In efficiency studies using the stochastic frontier approach, the main focus is to explain inefficiency in terms of some exogenous variables and computation of marginal effects of each of these determinants. Although inefficiency is estimated by its mean conditional on the composed error term (the Jondrow et al., 1982 estimator), the marginal effects are computed from the unconditional mean of inefficiency (Wang, 2002). In this paper we derive the marginal effects based on the Jondrow et al. estimator and use the bootstrap method to compute confidence intervals of the marginal effects.

Semiparametric smooth-coefficient stochastic frontier model

This paper proposes a semiparametric smooth-coefficient (SPSC) stochastic production frontier model where regression coefficients are unknown smooth functions of environmental factors (ZZ). Technical inefficiency is specified in the form of a parametric scaling function which also depends on the ZZ variables. Thus, in our SPSC model the ZZ variables affect productivity directly via the technology parameters as well as through inefficiency. A residual-based bootstrap test of the relevance of the environmental factors in the SPSC model is suggested. An empirical application is also used to illustrate the technique.

Estimating the efficiency of healthcare facilities providing HIV/AIDS treatment in Zambia:a data envelopment approach

Zambia and many other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa face a key challenge of sustaining high levels of coverage of AIDS treatment under prospects of dwindling global resources for HIV/AIDS treatment. Policy debate in HIV/AIDS is increasingly paying more focus to efficiency in the use of available resources. In this chapter, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate short term technical efficiency of 34 HIV/AIDS treatment facilities in Zambia. The data consists of input variables such as human resources, medical equipment, building space, drugs, medical supplies, and other materials used in providing HIV/AIDS treatment. Two main outputs namely, numbers of ART-years (Anti-Retroviral Therapy-years) and pre-ART-years are included in the model. Results show the mean technical efficiency score to be 83%, with great variability in efficiency scores across the facilities. Scale inefficiency is also shown to be significant. About half of the facilities were on the efficiency frontier. We also construct bootstrap confidence intervals around the efficiency scores.

Hospital performance:efficiency or quality? Can we have both with IT?

The influence of IT investment on hospital efficiency and quality are of great interest to healthcare executives as well as insurers. Few studies have examined how IT investments influence both efficiency and quality or whether there is an optimal IT investment level that influences both in the desired direction. Decision makers in healthcare wonder if there are tradeoffs between their pursuit of hospital operational efficiency and quality. Our study involving a 2-stage double bootstrap DEA analysis of 187 US hospitals over 2. years found direct effects of IT investment upon service quality and a moderating effect of quality upon operational efficiency. Further, our findings indicate a U-shaped relationship between IT investments and operational efficiency suggesting that IT investments have diminishing returns beyond a certain point.

Pre-adoption market reaction to IFRS 9:a cross-country event-study

We are the first to examine the market reaction to 13 announcement dates related to IFRS 9 for over 5400 European listed firms. We find an overall positive reaction to the introduction of IFRS 9. The regulation is particularly beneficial to shareholders of firms in countries with weaker rule of law and a smaller divergence between local GAAP and IAS 39. Bootstrap simulations rule out the possibility that sampling error or data mining are driving our findings. Our main findings are also robust to confounding events and the extent of the media coverage for each event. These results suggest that investors perceive the new regulation as shareholder-wealth enhancing and support the view that stronger comparability across accounting standards of European firms is beneficial to international investors and outweighs the costs of poorer firm-specific information.

Are European equity markets efficient? New evidence from fractal analysis

We report an empirical analysis of long-range dependence in the returns of eight stock market indices, using the Rescaled Range Analysis (RRA) to estimate the Hurst exponent. Monte Carlo and bootstrap simulations are used to construct critical values for the null hypothesis of no long-range dependence. The issue of disentangling short-range and long-range dependence is examined. Pre-filtering by fitting a (short-range) autoregressive model eliminates part of the long-range dependence when the latter is present, while failure to pre-filter leaves open the possibility of conflating short-range and long-range dependence. There is a strong evidence of long-range dependence for the small central European Czech stock market index PX-glob, and a weaker evidence for two smaller western European stock market indices, MSE (Spain) and SWX (Switzerland). There is little or no evidence of long-range dependence for the other five indices, including those with the largest capitalizations among those considered, DJIA (US) and FTSE350 (UK). These results are generally consistent with prior expectations concerning the relative efficiency of the stock markets examined. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.

Оптимизация Оценки Вероятности Ошибочной Классификации в Дискретном Случае

* Работа выполнена при поддержке РФФИ, гранты 07-01-00331-a и 08-01-00944-a

Credibility theory-based available transfer capability assessment

Since the development of large scale power grid interconnections and power markets, research on available transfer capability (ATC) has attracted great attention. The challenges for accurate assessment of ATC originate from the numerous uncertainties in electricity generation, transmission, distribution and utilization sectors. Power system uncertainties can be mainly described as two types: randomness and fuzziness. However, the traditional transmission reliability margin (TRM) approach only considers randomness. Based on credibility theory, this paper firstly built models of generators, transmission lines and loads according to their features of both randomness and fuzziness. Then a random fuzzy simulation is applied, along with a novel method proposed for ATC assessment, in which both randomness and fuzziness are considered. The bootstrap method and multi-core parallel computing technique are introduced to enhance the processing speed. By implementing simulation for the IEEE-30-bus system and a real-life system located in Northwest China, the viability of the models and the proposed method is verified.

An Estimate of the Probability Pr(X

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 33C90, 62E99

Implementation of the EM Algorithm for Maximum Likelihood Estimation of a Random Effects Model for One Longitudinal Ordinal Outcome

2010 Mathematics Subject Classification: 62J99.

Assessing productive efficiency of banks using integrated Fuzzy-DEA and bootstrapping:a case of Mozambican banks

Performance analysis has become a vital part of the management practices in the banking industry. There are numerous applications using DEA models to estimate efficiency in banking, and most of them assume that inputs and outputs are known with absolute precision. Here, we propose new Fuzzy-DEA α-level models to assess underlying uncertainty. Further, bootstrap truncated regressions with fixed factors are used to measure the impact of each model on the efficiency scores and to identify the most relevant contextual variables on efficiency. The proposed models have been demonstrated using an application in Mozambican banks to handle the underlying uncertainty. Findings reveal that fuzziness is predominant over randomness in interpreting the results. In addition, fuzziness can be used by decision-makers to identify missing variables to help in interpreting the results. Price of labor, price of capital, and market-share were found to be the significant factors in measuring bank efficiency. Managerial implications are addressed.