Eveline van Leeuwen (p), Fabio Tejedor, Arnout Sabbe

Ana Claudia Laprovitera Arruda

The authors of the paper explore the difficulties cities face in assessing and evaluating sustainable development. To communicate future goals, national and city governments generally employ abstract concepts. Meanwhile, city governments develop monitoring systems to track a multitude of metrics and indicators. By using 'Ideals', actors can collaborate towards important objectives and share a unified understanding of the concepts employed. However, the absence of an overarching strategy in the city's collection of monitoring frameworks and the incompatibility between various datasets and indicators can result in fragmented approaches. The authors propose using Ideals to bridge different disciplines and achieve more comprehensive insights through indicator-based monitoring systems. The city of Amsterdam is used as a case study to demonstrate how a domain ontology that combines the examination of coalition agreements, urban datasets, and monitoring systems can determine whether the city is effectively monitoring the Ideals it aims to achieve.
The creation of a shared classification and taxonomy is imperative for urban sustainability monitoring. It facilitates a common language that links diverse models, frameworks, and definitions. Therefore, our study has created an ontology encompassing over 1140 indicators drawn from 11 monitoring frameworks of Amsterdam, classifying them into dimensions, themes, subthemes, types of impact, and the city's seven Ideals. The establishment of a repository, including both the data and the applied methods behind the monitoring, would enhance transparency and reproducibility for citizens and academia. This paper marks the initial step towards developing a robust and reproducible urban sustainability monitoring system. The model developed for Amsterdam will be made open-source, promoting the democratisation of urban data and insights through the lens of each city's unique Ideals.

Paolo Di Caro, Paolo Lorenzo Ferrara (p)

Eveline van Leeuwen

The capability of entities to withstand crises and bounce back to normality, known as resilience, is a common concept in the global economic discussions, indicating the power and suitability of countries and regions to cope with shocks and recover the previous condition. This study conducts a scientometric analysis exploring literature on economic resilience, focusing on regional (NUTS-2) level, identifying its changes and developments, the countries that are more academically interested, the most suitable authors, main journals, and future research directions. To this aim, toward the study of previous literature, bibliometric records has been selected based on the criteria of matching five keywords that are relevant to our topic of interest and allowed to outline the boundaries of the investigation (regional economic resilience, territorial, local, crises, shock impact) and with the application of specific search query. The analysis considers various aspects such as publication trend, citations, words co-occurrence, co-authorship and, co-citation, to find out the main characters of the field and changes over time. Bibliometric data was collected from Dimensions database and the VOSviewer software was used to conduct the scientometric. Following the growing trend and the international connections founded, this paper can assist researchers and policymakers in enhancing their understanding of this primary research area in the global economic panorama.

Elena Cigu (p), Anca Vatamanu

Paolo Ferrara

Fiscal decentralization can play a significant role in reducing CO2 emissions and lead to environmental sustainability by empowering local governments with the necessary autonomy and resources to implement targeted policies that address unique environmental challenges within their jurisdictions and foster sustainable practices. The study aims to identify the role of fiscal decentralization in reducing CO2 emissions based firstly on a literature review and secondly, using econometric modeling. The results show that local governments are committed to environmental stewardship and have the necessary capacity to implement effective policies.

Ana Claudia Laprovitera Arruda (p)

Elena Cigu

In the Latin American region, according to a study by ECLAC-Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, a large part of the resources destined to social expenses are allocated in the social security matter, with the main beneficiaries being high-income groups. In some Latin American countries, such as Brazil, some sectors of society benefit from the so-called aristocratic welfare state, these are civil service retirees with privileges, to the detriment of the social security system of the other workers, ensuing a high degree of intergenerational and distributive conflict, with an impact on the future social security system. On the other hand, in many countries of the region, such as Mexico, half of the population over 65 years of age is excluded from the retirement system, explaining the very high poverty rate among the elderly. With the exception of Uruguay, all Latin American countries are characterized by an extreme pattern of inequality in access to education, health, water, basic sanitation and social security. This article seeks to better understand the effects of social expenditures and the distribution pattern of resource allocation among different social classes, indicating how these groups have appropriated each of the strategic sectors throughout history (health, education and social security), creating barriers for the poorest to enter. On the other hand, the model presented by economic neoliberalism, implemented in Latin American countries, shows strong signs of exhaustion and rupture due to the high structural, economic and social heterogeneity of these economies. The great challenge for national governments in developing countries is to create a set of active social intervention policies to manage employment and fight poverty because of market breakdowns and labor market deregulations (in Latin America 50% of the workers are informal) as well as social security systems. The article points to possible alternatives for building a development agenda for the future with social and fiscal responsibility.