Financing framework for local governments: diagnosis and change proposals

Motivation: The best way to widen access to public services at the local level is to increase efficiency of local government spending. However, an increase in efficiency may refer to output or inputs. In the latter case it does not widen access to public services. Moreover, factors conducive to spending efficiency may be detrimental to local cohesion. Finding a way so that the financing framework for local governments would reconcile the efficiency condition with the conditions of access to public services and local cohesion respectively, is an issue of great importance for economic policy. It seems to be so especially in a country like Poland, where there are large differences in the level of development between regions for historical reasons. These differences, if left accumulating, could easily jeopardize efficiency due to distorted capital flows, not to mention political tensions they may cause. Aim: The article aims at identifying basic features of the financing framework for local governments in Poland that hinder efficiency of their spending and at proposing feasible changes to that framework that would improve the efficiency but not at the expense of local cohesion or access to public services. Results: The article argues that the financing framework of local governments in Poland would better meet conditions of both efficiency and access to public services, if local governments relied mostly on revenues from income taxes instead of transfers from the central government, and some elements of tax competition between local authorities, although restricted to PIT-free allowance, were introduced. Such a shift in local governments revenue composition would not weaken local cohesion, if it was accompanied by an appropriate solidarity subvention financed by the richest voivodeship and the central government, and non-recurring central government revenues were allocated to investments exceeding financial capacity of local governments.

Cohesion in the Narrative Writing of Young EFL Learners: Correct and Incorrect Use of Local Cohesive Ties

This study examines the correct and incorrect use of local cohesive ties and local cohesion errors in the written narratives of eleven- to twelve-year-old Spanish learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at different proficiency levels. The study was carried out with pairs who collaboratively wrote a narrative text in response to a picture prompt. The young learners’ written texts were examined to identify their correct and incorrect use of four categories: lexical, referential, conjunctive and temporal cohesion. The results show that higher and lower proficiency learners are significantly different in their use of the causal conjunction because, personal pronouns and noun phrases containing possessive, definite, indefinite and zero determiners. The two groups also differ in their incorrect use of pronouns, simple verb forms and noun phrases containing definite, indefinite and zero determiners. Attention is drawn to the need to explore the diversity in young learners’ use of cohesion and some pedagogical implications are drawn.

‘We are still here’: The impacts of street music and street art during the 2020 London lockdowns

This article summarises the impacts of a spontaneous arts initiative involving the residents of eight London streets during the 2020 lockdowns. A local arts organization devised small-scale, informal street music projects that were evaluated by the residents themselves. Responses suggested that such events had a strong positive impact on the feelings of community. Common responses included reaffirming the importance of local cohesion, recognizing music as an accessible means of developing new connections in ‘distanced’ conditions and a new appreciation of family togetherness. Those involved suggested that researchers could learn much about the characteristics of cohesive, supportive communities from similar initiatives. The project confirmed that more research was needed on the role schools could play in bringing communities together and how music can be used to build bridges between school and community. Feedback raised questions about the absence of children’s voices in post-COVID-19 planning for ‘the recovery curriculum’.

Community Engagement as a Strategy to Facilitate the Immigrant-Local Cohesion

The hostility directed towards immigrants has been studied and reported through various forms of media and literature. Similarly, mitigating factors have been explored to establish and restore peace and immigrant-local cohesion. The chapter explored different community engagement strategies implemented to enhance immigrant-local cohesion. The chapter is anchored on Ubuntu philosophy. The philosophy has been integrated with the evolution of immigration and different policies and guidelines to promote and protect immigrants' lives globally. Data have been analyzed through critical discourse analysis. Critical discourse analyses assisted in deconstructing hegemonic social practices such as social practices, language, texts, and constructs as social-cohesion facilitators. Conclusions are that social constructs can create and perpetuate acceptance, integration, and formation of networks to enhance positive relationships between migrants and locals.

Ego-network stability and exploratory innovation: the moderating role of knowledge networks

PurposePrevious studies examined the effect of inter-organizational collaboration relationships on organizational innovation. However, most focused on the configuration of the network from the static network perspective, and few examined the influence of network structure stability on an organization's exploratory innovation from the ego-network perspective. This study addresses this research gap by focusing on ego-network stability and its effect on an organization's exploratory innovation.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical setting is the smartphone collaboration network from 2004 to 2017. We selected one-site schemes and panel data of patents from the Derwent Innovation Database. A negative binomial model with fixed effects was used to test our hypotheses.FindingsThe regression results show that an organization's ego-network stability has an inverted-U-shaped relationship with its exploratory innovation. Global cohesion of the focal organization's knowledge network moderates the process in such a way that when it is at a high level, an organization's exploratory innovation can benefit more from a moderate level of ego-network stability. However, local cohesion moderates in such a way that, at a low level, an organization's exploratory innovation can benefit more from a moderate level of ego-network stability.Originality/valueThis study highlights the importance of ego-network stability and its effect on the focal organization's exploratory innovation. It contributes to the literature on the relationship between ego-network stability and exploratory innovation by investigating the moderating role of global cohesion and local cohesion in knowledge networks.

Gutenberg Goes Neural: Comparing Features of Dutch Human Translations with Raw Neural Machine Translation Outputs in a Corpus of English Literary Classics

Due to the growing success of neural machine translation (NMT), many have started to question its applicability within the field of literary translation. In order to grasp the possibilities of NMT, we studied the output of the neural machine system of Google Translate (GNMT) and DeepL when applied to four classic novels translated from English into Dutch. The quality of the NMT systems is discussed by focusing on manual annotations, and we also employed various metrics in order to get an insight into lexical richness, local cohesion, syntactic, and stylistic difference. Firstly, we discovered that a large proportion of the translated sentences contained errors. We also observed a lower level of lexical richness and local cohesion in the NMTs compared to the human translations. In addition, NMTs are more likely to follow the syntactic structure of a source sentence, whereas human translations can differ. Lastly, the human translations deviate from the machine translations in style.

Optimal modularity and memory capacity of neural reservoirs

The neural network is a powerful computing framework that has been exploited by biological evolution and by humans for solving diverse problems. Although the computational capabilities of neural networks are determined by their structure, the current understanding of the relationships between a neural network’s architecture and function is still primitive. Here we reveal that a neural network’s modular architecture plays a vital role in determining the neural dynamics and memory performance of the network of threshold neurons. In particular, we demonstrate that there exists an optimal modularity for memory performance, where a balance between local cohesion and global connectivity is established, allowing optimally modular networks to remember longer. Our results suggest that insights from dynamical analysis of neural networks and information-spreading processes can be leveraged to better design neural networks and may shed light on the brain’s modular organization.

‘WHEN THE CHIEF TAKES AN INTEREST’: DEVELOPMENT AND THE REINVENTION OF ‘COMMUNAL’ LABOR IN NORTHERN GHANA, 1935–60

As colonial and nationalist governments pursued small-scale development in mid-century northern Ghana, so-called ‘voluntary’, ‘communal’, or ‘self-help’ labor became a key determinant of funding. District records and oral histories show how colonial officials, chiefs, and party politicians alternately cast unpaid labor as a way to cut costs, a catalyst for new forms of politics, and an expression of local cohesion. This article extends analysis of ‘self-help’ beyond articulations of and debates about national policy, examining daily negotiations over budgeting and building. It follows two chiefs who used their ability to raise labor to navigate a rapidly changing political landscape. The line between coercion and voluntarism was rarely clear, nor were the meanings of labor fixed for administrators, chiefs, or their constituents. These local actors created the circumstances for successive governments to frame unpaid labor as a legitimate demand on rural citizens.