The legal framework of teleworking in local governments

The spread of teleworking, both in private companies and in the public administration, is one of the consequences of the struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic. However, teleworking is not really a new mode of carrying out public services. It was already a decade ago when teleworking was initially regulated in Spain and, since then, it is linked to the development of digital technologies in public administrations. In 2020 new basic state legislation on teleworking was passed for civil servants. This legislation was developed by regional and local regulations and agreements. This article presents a summary of the current legal framework on the matter. © 2022, Fundacion Democracia y Gobierno Local. All rights reserved.

Localizing the sustainable development goals: A multivariate analysis of Spanish regions

Based on the content analysis of the websites of 102 Spanish municipalities related to actions aligned with the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the X-STATIS technique was applied to analyze the status and dynamic evolution of commitment to the SDGs in regional and local governments over the period of 2016-2021. The results show a low but increasing level of SDG commitment, which also varies significantly across municipalities and regions, as well as by SDGs, which can be attributed to the influence of several sociodemographic factors, such as the number of inhabitants, dependent population and population density. SDG8 and SDG11 stand out as the main priorities of the municipalities, while initiatives related to SDG5, SDG6 and SDG 17 are the least prioritized. The COVID-19 pandemic has marked a turning point in this regard, with greater importance being given to the SDGs more related to people and prosperity. Our findings help citizens and public authorities to understand sustainable regions and municipalities, assess their performance in relation to different dimensions of sustainability and identify key challenges for future improvements. Specifically, the results suggest that public policies should promote actions related to gender equality, drinking water and sanitation and partnerships, as well as favor investment in the regions and municipalities that are lagging behind, in order to improve their level of commitment to the 2030 Agenda and reduce inequalities. From an academic point of view, our results open a door for the analysis of possible trajectories in the implementation of the SDGs at regional and local levels and the study of their determinants. © 2023 the Author(s), licensee AIMS Press.

Territorial Disparities in COVID-19 Vaccination in Romania

This paper explores relationships between vaccination coverage and indicators at the level oflocal administrative units for the case of rural localities of Romania. Positive correlations have been identified in relation to fiscal capacity, coverage of the population with general practitioners, COVID‐19 incidence rate and absence of a marginalized community within the locality. Regional differences are again highlighted in the analysis. This means that there is at least partially an overlap of the disadvantaged rural areas with the ones registering low vaccination uptakes against COVID‐19. Further on, it means that these territorial areas accumulate a series of structural disadvantages that can prove to increase the discrepancies between them and other rural or large urban areas. The paper contributes to enlarging the perspective on vaccination coverage by adding both conceptual and practical insights. From the point ofview of practitioners, the results of the study can be used to tailor intervention in communities with similar characteristics, to underscore public health inequalities across territories. Points for practitioners are relevant for a wide range of stakeholders from public health, public management, and social protection fields, placed in both local and central level decision‐making positions. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of NISPAcee Journal of Public Administration & Policy is the property of Sciendo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

What is the Future of Survey-Based Data Collection for Local Government Research? Trends, Strategies, and Recommendations

Surveys are an important vehicle for advancing research on urban policy and governance. The introduction of online tools eased survey-based data collection, making it cheaper and easier to obtain data from key informants like local elected officials or public administrators. However, the utility of web-based survey administration may be diminishing. To investigate this dynamic and search for strategies to support survey research in urban studies, we perform a systematic review of survey research in urban policy and administration scholarship and conduct an original survey follow-up experiment. Our findings identify a clear downward trend in survey response rates that was accentuated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from our survey experiment show distinctly different costs per solicitation and per completed survey, depending on administration mode. These findings stimulate discussion on how scholars may continue to use surveys to generate high-quality, empirically rigorous research on urban affairs in light of recent trends. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Urban Affairs Review is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Digital Education: Governments? Strategies, Teaching Tools in the European Union and a Case Study of Digital Transformation in Budapest

This article reviews some governments' strategies in the field of digital education especially during the recent pandemic period in the European Union. It includes some early lessons from the COVID-19 crisis. Besides, the authors cover various essential remote teaching tools for organizing effective virtual courses by evaluating and analyzing e-learning and distance education in terms of threats, challenges, opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses. Finally, this study presents a methodology with two hypotheses using SPSS statistics v26 to perform a survey on the effect of digital transformation. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Budapest, the participants' perceptions of the disease and the efficiency of the enforced restrictions to curb its spread were studied. The study methodology includes statistical data and analytical outcomes.

Conceptual Principles of Accounting and Control of the Local Budgets during the War and Post-War Periods

External threats (Russian-Ukrainian war, climate change on the planet, consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic) and internal factors (lack of funding, inefficient use of funds, inconsistency of powers of the executive power at different levels) lead to unbalanced adoption of budget decisions at the local level in Ukraine. A major role in overcoming such bottlenecks lies in rethinking the functions of accounting and control. The purpose of the article is to find new conceptual approaches that will improve the efficiency of municipalities based on providing the management of the territorial community with complete, accurate and operational data. The authors analyze the publications for 1946-2022 from SCOPUS by computer program VOSviewer, using methods of content analysis and clustering. In addition, the authors use a number of scientific methods: analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, the system method, analogies, etc. The study deals with a number of problems and solutions implemented by municipalities during wartime, related to local budgets. The influence of natural factors, sustainable development, accounting and control on ensuring the manageability of budgets of territorial communities has been clarified. The authors propose a new conceptual approach to the organization of the budgetary process of territorial communities, which is based on the concept of STEM. For its practical implementation, it is recommended to apply the smart city concept. The study identifies the main advantages and caveats regarding its implementation in Ukraine. The practical significance of the obtained results lies in the possibility of improving accounting and control of local budgets.

Multitask Learning Neural Networks for Pandemic Prediction with Public Stance Enhancement

State and local governments have imposed health policies to contain the spread of COVID-19 since it had a serious impact on human daily life. However, the public stance on these measures may be time-varying. It is likely to escalate the infection in the area where the public is negative or resistant. To take advantage of the correlation between public stance on health policies and the COVID-19 statistics, we propose a novel framework, Multitask Learning Neural Networks for Pandemic Prediction with Public Stance Enhancement (MP3), which is composed of three modules: (1) Stance awareness module to make stance detection on health policies from users' tweets in social media and convert them into a stance time series. (2) Temporal feature extraction module that applies Convolution Neural Network and Recurrent Neural Network to extract and fuse local patterns and long-term correlations from COVID-19 statistics. Moreover, a Stance Latency-aware Attention is proposed to capture dynamic social effects and fuse them with temporal features. (3) Multi-task prediction module to adopt Graph Convolution Network to model the spread of pandemic and employ multi-task learning to simultaneously predict COVID-19 statistics and the trend of public stance on health policies. The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both confirmed cases and deaths prediction tasks. © 2022 IEEE.

Metrics of Mobility: Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on Travel Behavior

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted typical travel behavior worldwide. In the United States (U.S.), government entities took action to limit its spread through public health messaging to encourage reduced mobility and thus reduce the spread of the virus. Within statewide responses to COVID-19, however, there were different responses locally. Likely some of these variations were a result of individual attitudes toward the government and health messaging, but there is also likely a portion of the effects that were because of the character of the communities. In this research, we summarize county-level characteristics that are known to affect travel behavior for 404 counties in the U.S., and we investigate correlates of mobility between April and September (2020). We do this through application of three metrics that are derived via changepoint analysis—initial post-disruption mobility index, changepoint on restoration of a ‘‘new normal,'' and recovered mobility index. We find that variables for employment sectors are significantly correlated and had large effects on mobility during the pandemic. The state dummy variables are significant, suggesting that counties within the same state behaved more similarly to one another than to counties in different states. Our findings indicate that few travel characteristics that typically correlate with travel behavior are related to pandemic mobility, and that the number of COVID-19 cases may not be correlated with mobility outcomes. © National Academy of Sciences: Transportation Research Board 2021.

The diversity of local political agendas during COVID-19: A comparison of Mexican states.

COVID-19, as an event that disrupted economic activities around the world, affected government policy agendas. In Latin America, most of the responses were centralized by national governments;however, in Mexico, the 32 states developed their own economic policies in response to the pandemic. The Mexican case allows us to analyze recent hypotheses of comparative studies on this issue, which propose that the size of the population and the scale and socioeconomic structure of the administrations may be factors that explain the scope and diversity of local agendas. A quantitative methodology based on the estimation of Shannon's entropy index and non-parametric tests is used. Contrary to expectations, we find that the scope and diversity of the responses are not significantly related to the factors proposed in the literature. At least for the case of COVID-19 in the short run, the size and diversity of local agendas in Mexico seem to be based on institutional factors, such as information processing according to bounded rationality, incremental solutions, and the functional labeling of local governments. Thus, the variety of agendas is based on the direct interests of communities. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR] La covid-19, en cuanto evento que interrumpió las actividades económicas en el mundo, afectó las agendas de las políticas gubernamentales. En Latinoamérica, la mayor parte de las respuestas fueron centralizadas por los Gobiernos nacionales, sin embargo, en México, las 32 entidades federativas desarrollaron políticas económicas propias frente a la pandemia. El caso mexicano nos permite analizar recientes hipótesis de los estudios comparados sobre esta temática en cuyas propuestas se plantea que el tamaño de la población y la escala y la estructura socioeconómica de las administraciones pueden ser factores que explican el alcance y la diversidad de las agendas locales. Se emplea una metodología cuantitativa con base en la estimación del índice de entropía de Shannon y la realización de pruebas no paramétricas. Contrario a lo esperado, encontramos que el alcance y la diversidad de las respuestas no se relaciona significativamente con los factores propuestos en la literatura. Al menos para el caso de la covid-19 en el corto plazo, el tamaño y la diversidad de las agendas locales en México parecen basarse en factores institucionales como el procesamiento de la información conforme a la racionalidad limitada, las soluciones incrementales y el etiquetado funcional de los Gobiernos locales. Así, la variedad de las agendas se sustenta en los intereses directos de las comunidades. (Spanish) [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Íconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales is the property of FLACSO Ecuador (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Crisis management and/or resilience of local self-governments A literature review

The article discusses the literature on resilience from the point of view of governance and decentralization. Although resilience is not a new term, an interdisciplinary approach has gained growing momentum during the last years producing a large number of scientific literature and public policy analyses. The COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened the position of resilience -based public policies, which is a serious challenge for the governments at the global and national and local levels. Based on the literature on COVID management in the Central and Eastern Europe, the review discusses the formation of the term of resilience, its implications for governance, dilemmas of centralization/decentralization, and changes in multi-level governance. The review indicates that centralization trends are strong, cutbacks affecting self-governments, and the lack of information undermined the cooperation of various governance levels. Similarly, the global level did not get a strong role in crisis management, since national governments were reluctant to engage in cooperation with international organisations.An important lesson is that the good quality of governance could contribute to the successful management of crises. Furthermore, in order to avoid the exclusive use of extreme measures in times of emergency, it is necessary to incorporate the preparation for crises into the functioning of governments at the systemic level. The incorporation of special knowledge, planning and processes into the governance model is a challenge for governance reforms, though it is necessary to avoid ad hoc, extraordinary governance measures. The literature review emphasises the advantages of decentralization and the necessity of resilient societal support as a general context of good governance.Our research results indicate that the management of the pandemic in Hungary was centralized and based on extraordinary improvisation. On the other hand, local governments were also unprepared, which contributes to the modest ranking of Hungarian governance performance in crisis management.

Deploying Artificial Intelligence to Combat Covid-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Technological and Ethical Considerations

This paper reports on AI research into online misinformation pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic within the Canadian context. This is part of our longer-term goal, i.e., development of a machine-learning tool to assist social media platforms, online service providers and government agencies in identifying and responding to misinformation on social media. We report on predictive accuracies accomplished by applying a combination of technologies, including a custom-designed web-crawler, The Dark Crawler, the Posit toolkit, and four different machine-learning models based on Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines, LibLinear and LibShortText. Overall, we found that Posit and LibShortText models showed higher levels of correlation to the pre-determined (manual and machine-driven) data classifications than the other machine-learning algorithms tested. We further argue that the harms associated with COVID-19 misinformation - e.g., the social and economic damage, and the deaths and severe illnesses - outweigh the right to personal privacy and freedom of speech considerations. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

The Impact of External Shocks on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Linking the COVID-19 Pandemic to SDG Implementation at the Local Government Level

Using data from a survey we conducted in collaboration with the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities (VVSG), this article sought to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the implementation of SDGs by Flemish local governments (cities and municipalities). Identifying such effects has usually been conducted on individuals and at a macro level and not at the organization and local government level. By using a counterfactual approach, we were able to disentangle various COVID-19 effects over time and learn how systems at the local level react to external shocks. The approach allowed us to single out the effects of the pandemic at the organizational level while looking into three distinct periods: before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and in its aftermath. Results showed that the COVID-19 pandemic slowed down the Flemish public sector's implementation of SDGs at the local level. At the same time, COVID-19 allowed local public institutions to accelerate the implementation of a few SDGs (e.g., SDG1, SDG3) and to postpone a few SDG-related activities which would be resumed once the pandemic is ‘over'. COVID-19 is not only a challenge;it acts as a wake-up call and an opportunity to commit more towards the implementation of (certain) SDGs. © 2023 by the authors.

The Impact of the Covid-19 Cases with Twitter Users in Their Perception of the Brazilian Government

During the COVID-19 pandemic, political discussions in Brazil revolved around the pandemic and the controversial leader Jair Bolsonaro. Twitter reflected these discussions, also bringing reports of user dramas that had family members victimized by Covid-19. This study investigates their perception of the federal government through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these users' tweets. We have identified 3,756 Twitter users who reported cases of family members with Covid-19 and collected their government-related tweets before and after those reports. We analyzed the feelings expressed in these tweets using automated techniques and extracted a sample of 650 tweets that had difficult-to-understand terms for a manual analysis of the feelings. The study found subtle changes in the perceptions of people who approve or disapprove of the federal government. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Digital Transformation and Local Government Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Assessment of Its Impact on the Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper analyzes how Digital Transformation (DT) processes have influenced the Attitude of local governments (LGs) toward the COVID-19 pandemic and their effect on achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The data were collected from LGs in Spain (n = 124) through a questionnaire in which the IT skills of their workers, the DT processes, budgets, degree of regulatory compliance, and implementation of trust seals were measured, together with the IT security measures adopted. The contrast between the proposed model and the results showed that the direct influence of IT security influences the government's attitude toward COVID-19 and DT implementing actions to achieve SDGs. The findings of this work are of great value both for the actors involved in the design and implementation of public policies and for those responsible for local governance in their objective to improve citizens' experience of the services provided and in exceptional situations such as the one experienced as a result, of-COVID-19.

Behind-the-Scenes: Challenges to Integrate Google Classroom in Teaching and Learning

Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Malaysian government has announced Movement Control Order (MCO) for the safety of the nation. Based on the latest data from UNESCO (2020), this measure has impacted over 7.9 million of learners in Malaysia. Subsequently, teachers in Malaysia are facing challenges to continue providing quality education to students due to the pandemic. Google Classroom was introduced after the termination of Frog VLE in Malaysia. However, the researcher found that implementing Google Classroom via online teaching and learning is ineffective compared to the face-to-face method. Hence, this study aimed to explore why Malaysian teachers face challenges in teaching and learning. The study employed a qualitative study using a semi-structured interview. The participants of this study were five teachers from different secondary schools in Selangor, Malaysia. Purposive sampling was adopted in this study with two criteria. The first criterion is that participants need to have experience in using Google Classroom in teaching and learning regardless of any subjects' while the second is that participants need at least five years of teaching experience in secondary school. As a result, a total of four themes were categorised. This research finding would offer insights to educational stakeholders and school administrators to improve the integration of Google Classroom in teaching and learning. Recommendations were generalisability and suggestions to the future researcher to explore ways to overcome the challenges faced by secondary school teachers. © ICCE 2022.All rights reserved.

Visualizing COVID-19 Vaccination Rate and Vaccination Centre in Malaysia using DBSCAN Clustering model

In February 2021, the Malaysian government launched a vaccination campaign against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, there is a problem in identifying suitable location for vaccination centre should be allocated. At the same time, there are population that living in the rural area and has difficulty to travel to the nearest vaccination centres. Therefore, based on the data of vaccination rate collected by Ministry of Health, the proposed project aims to classify and visualise the data based on number of COVID-19 vaccination rate and centre in Malaysia for the adult and adolescent populations. This project uses machine learning technique called Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN). The system is developed in Python language platform for back-end development, and PyCharm is utilised for front-end development in web-based platform. This project follows four phases in Waterfall model: requirement analysis, design, implementation, and testing. The system is evaluated for functionality and usability based on user satisfaction and the accuracy of the model. The results of the testing shows that all the functionality of the system have been implemented successfully in the system. The system also rated good according to SUS Questionnaire in usability testing with score of 88.5%. The model of machine learning also achieved a good accuracy score which is greater than 0.3. In conclusion, the data visualization web-based application helps the Malaysian government to identify location for additional vaccination centres in strategic locations and it helps Malaysian people to locate nearby vaccination centres in their area. © 2022 IEEE.

SPAIN AND ITS RELATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES: IN BRIEF *

The United States and Spain have extensive cultural ties and a mutually beneficial economic relationship, and the two countries cooperate closely on numerous diplomatic and security issues. Spain has been a member of NATO since 1982 and a member of the European Union (EU) since 1986. Given its role as a close U.S. ally and partner, Spain's internal situation and relations with the United States are of continuing interest to the U.S. Congress.

New (types of) parties and government: the Danish general election 2022

During the Covid-19 crisis, there was a high level of rallying around the flag for the Social Democratic government. However, support waned with the sense of crisis, and some ‘scandals' surfaced. The ‘mink scandal' caused an early election to be called. A high number of parties, 14, competed in the election, and after the election 12 parties are now represented in parliament–a new record number. When comparing the election results of 2019 and 2022, two overall results stand out. First, only one of the two traditional large parties has maintained this status and fragmentation is increased. Second, two new parties made it into the ‘top-5' in 2022, both formed by former prominent Liberals. The election yielded a narrow victory to the red bloc. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was able to stay in office after the election but exchanged her red bloc parliamentary majority for a coalition government with the Liberals and Moderates. Thus, a new type of coalition has emerged: a majority government spanning the usual two blocs, but challenged by opposition from both the right and left. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.