Operational and financial performance of Italian airport companies: A dynamic graphical model

Abstract This paper provides evidence on the relationship within a set of financial and operational indicators for Italian airports over 2008–2014. The limited sample size of national and regional airports suggests to apply the penalised RCON ( V , E ) model, which falls within the class of Gaussian graphical models. It provides both estimate and easy way to visualise conditional independence structures of the variables. Moreover, it is particularly suitable for handling longitudinal data where small number of units and huge number of variables have been collected. Findings highlight that a qualified concept of size matters in determining good financial performance. Specifically, increasing…

Persistency and convergence among EMP countries: a semi parametric approach

Harmonic growth: a new approach to the measurement of countries development

The paper defines harmonic growth as a situation of diffuse well-being associated to an increase of GDP, and proposes a measures of time series similarity between GDP and each one from a set of social and economic indicators of development. Such indexes are then synthesized in order to provide the global degree of harmony in growth inside a country. A first Harmonic Growth Index is based on comparisons between couples of polynomials fitting the series. The second version of the index is obtained from cubic B-splines estimates. With an accurate selection of social indicators, both indexes can also be used to rank countries according to their level of development, offering effective complemen…

SULL'INFLUENZA DEGLI INVESTIMENTI DIRETTI ESTERI NELLA CRESCITA ECONOMICA DELLE REGIONI ITALIANE: UN'ANALISI NON PARAMETRICA

The IPAT model: an empirical evidence

INTRODUZIONE ALL'ANALISI DELLE SERIE STORICHE ECONOMICHE

Scad-elastic net and the estimation of individual tourism expenditure determinants

This paper introduces the use of scad-elastic net in the assessment of the determinants of individual tourist spending. This technique approaches two main estimation-related issues of primary importance. So far studies of tourism literature have made a wide use of classic regressions, whose results might be affected by multicollinearity. In addition, because of the absence of robust economic theory on tourism behavior, regressor selection is often left to researcher's choice when not driven by non-optimal automatic criteria. Scad-elastic net is an OLS model that accounts for both these problems by including two types of parameters constraints, namely the smoothly clipped absolute deviation …

Comportamento di spesa del turista: un approccio micro-econometrico.

Assessing the Beneficial Effects of Economic Growth: The Harmonic Growth Index

In this paper we introduce the multidimensional notion of harmonic growth as a situation of diffused well-being associated to an increase of per capita GDP. We say that a country experienced a harmonic growth if during the observed period all the key indicators, proxies of the endogenous and exogenous forces driving population well-being, show a significantly common pattern with the income dynamics. The notion is operationalized via an index of time series harmony which follows the functional data analysis approach. This Harmonic Growth Index (HGI) is based on comparisons between the coefficients from cubic B-splines interpolation. Such indices are then synthesized in order to provide the g…

A Measure of Polarization for Tourism: Evidence from Italian Destinations

This paper proposes an index of polarization for tourism which links the axiomatic theory of Esteban and Ray with the classical hierarchical agglomerative clustering techniques. The index is aimed at analyzing the dynamics of the average length of stay across Italian destinations, and more specifically to detect whether the polarization within the set of clusters of places with similar values of the indicator has varied over time.

AGRICULTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT: A STUDY ABOUT POLARIZATION AND DISTRIBUTION DYNAMICS

LA VICENDA DEL PARTENARIATO EUROMEDITERRANEO: PROSPETTIVE E PERCORSI DI INTEGRAZIONE

Countries agreeing to Euro-Mediterranean Partnership show different levels of development, so that they are far from converging in per capita GDP growth rates. As shown by literature, an important role in growth can be played by foreign direct investment (FDI). Beta and Sigma approaches to convergence are applied to prove the absence of gaps reduction in the area, and the importance of FDI in a context where less developed countries do not attract FDI as much as other developing countries, Persistency matrix and fuzzy clustering methods are then applied to verify the composition and stability in time of ''convergence club''

On rural development of NUTS 2 and 3: a non parametric approach of distribution dynamics analysis

This work presents a study about dynamics of territorial gaps in agriculture between EU NUTS 2 and 3 from three perspectives: agricultural production model, rural development and productivity. Our choice of methodology is driven by two considerations. First of all, different performances in agriculture of EU areas may lead to multimodal distributions of indicators, and this implies that no significant average behaviour a parametric estimates refers to can be identified. Secondly, even if one wants to highlight multimodality within distributions, techniques like univariate density estimates can not catch intra-distribution dynamics which lead to the formation of "poles" of units showing a "s…

The polarization of European agriculture: spatial and dynamic features within a non parametric framework

We present a study of the polarization of European agriculture at NUTS2 regional level. The analysis of selected indicators focuses on spatial and dynamic features of distributions. We make use of the non parametric technique of stochastic kernel which allows to explore the features of a whole distribution and to point out the clustering of statistical units.

Stochastic kernel and conditioning schemes: a study about the influence of spatial factor on agriculture of EU NUTS2

Besides to be an useful methodology for the detection of distribution dynamics of indicators, stochastic kernel has been generalized to a regression-like rationale (Quah, 1997). The latter allows to determine how a distribution is influenced by a "factor", through a "conditioning scheme" which is a set of rules stating how the original distribution is altered in order to obtain its "conditioned" version. This paper aims to study the influence of the "spatial factor" on distributions of selected agriculture impact indicators across EU NUTS2. The present work offers an empirical analysis of dynamics of selected indicators of agriculture across NUTS2. Our scope is to give an overlook of EU ter…

ON THE INFLUENCE OF FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT ON ECONOMIC GROWTH: EVIDENCE FROM ITALIAN REGIONS

GROWTH, FDI AND CONVERGENCE IN THE EMP: AN EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

POLARIZATION AND DYNAMIC CLUSTERING: A REVIEW

CLUB CONVERGENCE AND CLUSTER PERSISTENCE: A NOVEL APPROACH TO MULTIVARIATE CONVERGENCE ANALYSIS

Defining and measuring the development of a country over time

This paper introduces the concept of harmonic growth as an extended acceptation of the notion of development, and discusses its measurement via the Harmonic Growth Index (HGI). The growth is seen as harmonic when the behaviour of a benchmark time series, which here is a measure of wealth, such as per capita GDP, is followed by a similar pattern in socio-economic series. Unlike most widely used indicators in the literature, which take into account the measurement of development over a single time, HGI measures the degree to which a social indicator’s time series pattern matches with the GDP’s. The index is a function, ranging in [0, 1], of the coefficients of the uniform B-splines fitted to …

Modelli statistici per la rilevazione e l’analisi della spesa turistica

An Examination of Tourist Arrivals Dynamics Using Short-Term Time Series Data: A Space—Time Cluster Approach

The purpose of this study is to examine the development of Italian tourist areas ( circoscrizioni turistiche) through a cluster analysis of short time series. The technique is an adaptation of the functional data analysis approach developed by Abraham et al (2003), which combines spline interpolation with k-means clustering. The findings indicate the presence of two patterns (increasing and stable) averagely characterizing groups of territories. Moreover, tests of spatial contiguity suggest the presence of ‘space–time clusters’; that is, areas in the same ‘time cluster’ are also spatially contiguous. These findings appear to be more robust in particular for those series characterized by an…

Short Term Dynamics of Tourist Arrivals: What Do Italian Destinations Have in Common?

This work aims to detect the common short term dynamics to yearly time series of 413 Italian tourist areas. We adopt the clustering technique of Abraham et al. (Scand J Stat. 30:581–595, 2003) who propose a two-stage method which fits the data by B-splines and partitions the estimated model coefficients using a k-means algorithm. The description of each cluster, which identifies a specific kind of dynamics, is made through simple descriptive cross tabulations in order to study how the location of the areas across the regions or their prevailing typology of tourism characterize each group.