Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons^™

Public Healthcare: Changes Introduced When Implementing E-Procurement, Tommaso Federici

Federici Tommaso

The large and growing size of the healthcare public spending for goods and services worries the institutions of many European countries, including Italy, and asks for rationalization initiatives. In parallel, e-procurement solutions spread into Public Administrations (PA's) and introduce innovative processes, primarily in the purchasing phase.

In this scenario, e-procurement has the potential to enable significant efficiency improvements in the public healthcare sector, with the reduction of purchasing and administrative costs. However, most e-procurement initiatives met difficulties and did not fully delivered the expected benefits so far. This is mainly due to the healthcare procurement complexity, specific characteristics and peculiar …

Harnessing Growth Spillovers For Rural Development: The Effects Of Regional Spatial Structure, Edward Feser, Andrew Isserman

Edward J Feser

Many rural development strategies seek to leverage urban to-rural growth spillovers. This paper concludes that their success depends on the spatial structure surrounding the target rural counties. We develop a county-level spatial growth model to identify the positive spread and negative backwash effects of urban to rural spillovers in the lower 48 states over the 1990-2000 period. Instead of the conventional, fallacious substitution of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan for urban and rural, we consider the urban and rural character of each county. Mostcounties have both urban and rural populations, and we classify each as urban, mixed urban, or rural depending on …