The Two Poverties

There are at least two distinct and inconsistent views of poverty. These views, which can be called “poverty as desperation” and “poverty as vulnerability”, have different implications about anti-poverty policy. It is important to confront this conflict and to try to devise empirical stategies which will help us distinguish between these views.

Bureaucratization in Public Research Institutions

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature of bureaucratization within public research bodies and its relationship to scientific performance, focusing on an Italian case-study. The main finding is that the bureaucratization of the research sector has two dimensions: public research labs have academic bureaucratization since researchers spend an increasing part of their time in administrative matters (i.e., preparing grant applications, managing grants/projects, and so on); whereas universities mainly have administrative bureaucratization generated by the increase over time of administrative staff in comparison with researchers and faculty. In addition, I show that research units with higher bureaucratization have lower scientific performance