Search results

The European H2020 Families_Share project aims at offering a grass-root approach and a co-designed platform supporting families for sharing time and tasks related to childcare, parenting, after-school and leisure activities and other household tasks. To achieve this objective, the Families_Share project has been built on current practices which are already leveraging on mutual help and support among families, such as Time Banks, Social Streets and self-organizing networks of parents active at the neighbourhood level and seek to harness the potential of ICT networks and mobile technologies to increase the effectiveness of participatory innovation. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss the Families_Share methodology and platform, as well as the results obtained by several partecipating communities in different European countries.

This paper discusses how the Families Share approach (CAPS project, Horizon 2020) is bringing the sharing economy to childcare. Families Share developed a co-caring approach and a co-designed digital welfare platform to support parents with sharing time and tasks related to childcare, after-school and leisure activities. Families Share conducted two iterative pilot experiments and related socio-economic evaluations in six European cities. More than 3,000 citizens were engaged in the co-design process through their local community organizations and more than 1,700 parents and children actively experimented with the approach by organizing collaborative childcare activities. The authors discuss the challenges and solutions of co-designing a socio-technical approach aimed at facilitating socially innovative childcare models, and how the Families Share approach, based on technology-supported co-production of childcare, may provide a new sustainable welfare model for municipalities and companies with respect to life––work balance.

The authors discuss the challenges and solutions of co-designing a technological tool aimed at facilitating socially innovative childcare models, and how the Families Share approach may provide a new sustainable welfare model for municipalities and companies with respect to work–life balance.

As a main difference with state-of-the-art proposals, Families_Share is aimed to provide support to networks of parents in the organization of self-managed activities, this way being orthogonal with respect either to social-network functionalities or to supply and demand services. Furthermore, Families_Share has been based on a participative approach for both the ICT platform and the overall structure.

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the relationship between capital structure and technical efficiency (TE) for Italian cereal farms during the 2008–2014 period. Emphasis is given in the understanding of the relationship between the level of financial leverage for cereal farms and their production performance.

The methods employed in this research article are based on non-parametric techniques in order to derive TE estimates for a sample of Italian cereal farms based on available Farm Accountancy Data Network data to explore in depth the relationship amongst the financial exposure of the sector and the capacity to utilise an efficient and effective production technology. Furthermore, subsidies are considered in the model as a non-discretionary variable and therefore, as an input that farmers cannot directly influence within the production function. Hence, the non-discretionary Data Envelopment Analysis model is a more appropriate framework since it is not penalising farms at a lower level of Pillar I payments when benchmarked with farms that receive a higher level of payments.

The results show that significant improvements could be achieved for most of the farms in the sample by improving production and management practices. Furthermore, results provide an empirical support of the adjustment theory by showing a negative impact of debt to asset ratio to TE.

This research article provides a first insight on the evolution of the Italian cereal farms debt-TE relationship in periods where high price instability has been observed.