Determinants of life expectancy at birth: a longitudinal study on OECD countries.

This paper analyses the influence of several determinants on life expectancy at birth in 36 OECD countries over the 1999-2018 period. We utilized a cross-country fixed-effects multiple regression analysis with year and country dummies and used dynamic models, backward stepwise selection, and Arellano-Bond estimators to treat potential endogeneity issues. The results show the influence of per capita health-care expenditure, incidence of out-of-pocket expenditure, physician density, hospital bed density, social spending, GDP level, participation ratio to labour, prevalence of chronic respiratory diseases, temperature, and total size of the population on life expectancy at birth. In line with previous studies, this analysis confirms the relevance of both health care expenditure and health care system (physicians and hospital beds in our analysis) in influencing a country's population life expectancy. It also outlines the importance of other factors related to population behaviour and social spending jointly considered on this outcome. Policy makers should carefully consider these mutual influences when allocating public funds, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic period.

Is COVID-19 enough? Which underestimated conditions characterise the adoption of complex information infrastructures in small and medium-sized enterprises.

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has forced firms to leverage information and digital technologies to resist its disruptive effects. The shift to digital, however, requires the availability of information infrastructure, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), that can enable effective digitisation of processes and practices. This paper investigates the role of the pandemic crisis on boosting intentions to adopt ERP systems in SMEs by mitigating the barrier factors that hinder their adoption. To investigate the impact of the pandemic on ERP adoption decisions, we ran a quantitative study among 147 SMEs in the Veneto region in Italy and applied a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis model to study them. Our results show that the pandemic crisis has boosted this adoption, shaping the configuration of conditions that characterise ERP adoption.