Sistema sociale

Il ruolo delle filiere nell’industria italiana: un legame stabile tra il Nord-Ovest e il Meridione

Lo studio si propone di esaminare la relazione dei distretti industriali, del ruolo delle medio-grandi imprese e dell’appartenenza alla macro-area territoriale della “virgola di ponente” con l’inefficienza tecnica attraverso la stima delle frontiere stocastiche di produzione a livello di settori produttivi manifatturieri e dei settori della meccanica nelle differenti regioni italiane nel periodo 2008-2010, utilizzando dati ISTAT. I distretti industriali e la loro evoluzione sono alla base delle considerazioni per un nuovo sistema produttivo. Il sistema basato sulle PMI ha mostrato la sua vulnerabilità e limitatezza in un mercato ormai globale. La trasformazione in impresa-rete per lo svilup…

Mines and quarries production: A driver analysis of withdrawals in Italy

Abstract The growing demand for non-energy mineral resources has determined relevant withdrawals as well as import-export flows. This paper aims to disentangle the drivers of raw non-energy mineral resources extraction in Italy. Using a new dataset of raw resources extracted from mines and quarries in the 21 Italian regions (19 regions and 2 autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano) for the period 2013–2016, our empirical analysis confirms the relevance of mining and quarrying producer price index as well as the manufacturing and construction sectors as main drivers. In line with the Hotelling (1931)'s theory, a positive relationship between m&q mineral resources extraction intensity and …

Irrigation water intensity and climate variability: an agricultural crops analysis of Italian regions

This paper examines the relationship between the requirement of water resources for irrigation and climate variability and analyses the ranking of the best and worst performance of irrigation water intensity for each Italian region. To measure water resources demanded by agriculture, the irrigation water intensity (IWI) indicator has been computed as the ratio between volumes of irrigation water and total crop harvested. By applying panel data methodologies to a regional dataset spanning from 2000 to 2009, we may address heterogeneity and omitted variable issues. By merging meteo-climatic with agricultural variables, we may confirm that water precipitations, maximum temperature, irrigation …

Sistema Produttivo ed Occupazionale

Climate variability, innovation and firm performance: evidence from the European agricultural sector

Abstract It is generally accepted that adaptation to climate variability requires a technological advancement strategy. However, the innovation process has received little explicit consideration in this framework. We employ a panel endogenous switching regression model to explore whether and to what extent climate variability affects firm performance through the ability to induce the development of adaptation innovations in key resource-based sectors in Europe during the period 2007–2017. Our findings confirm that the knowledge generation process at the heart of climate change adaptation technologies enhances firm performance, especially for firms in the aquaculture and fishing sub-sectors …

Efficiency in the use of natural non-renewable resources from mining and quarrying in Italy. Time series analysis and Economy-wide Material Flows Accounts

Political reasons have been pushing towards a process of decentralization of powers and responsibilities since last twenty years in Italy. The regional management of mining and quarrying (m&q) should be an interesting case study of this change. This process has begun in the ’70s with the Pres. Decree N. 616 of 1977. By examining administrative data and Regional Laws, this paper highlights how misleading is the awareness of policy makers of the real value of raw mineral resources domestically extracted: they seem closer to common goods rather than to public goods. By combining data on local governance with official statistics of Economy-wide Material Flow Accounts (EW-MFA), our econometric a…

Imposte e Governance Regionale in Materia di Cave e Miniere in Italia

Negli ultimi venti anni una crescente attenzione verso le problematiche ambientali ha generato un dibattito sul “green fiscal reform” sia a livello europeo che nei singoli stati membri. Anche in Italia si è assistito ad interventi normativi di natura centrale con la finalità di rivalutare alcuni strumenti a sostegno di politiche per la tutela dell’ambiente naturale. L’ambito delle imposte ambientali si caratterizza per lo stretto collegamento al contesto territoriale. Da un lato, infatti, le esternalità ricadono principalmente sugli abitanti delle aree interessate e dall’altro gli enti locali si trovano nella posizione migliore per valutarle e gestirle con gli strumenti di politica fiscale.…

The impact of climate change on the distribution of rural income in Ethiopia

Recent evidence suggests that global climate change is likely to increase the incidence of environmental disasters, as well as the frequency of extreme weather events. As a result, it is generally recognized that climate and weather variability has negative impacts on households’ welfare relying mainly on agriculture. In Ethiopia, 95% of the population depends on rain-fed agriculture and consequently the economic impact of climate change is crucial for small-scale farmers’ food security and welfare. The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of climate change on rural households’ welfare in Ethiopia by using a Quantile Regression (QR) analysis. The main…

Corporate governance and firm performance: A comparative analysis of auditing problems

The recent financial crises have created a new debate about comparison and convergence of different systems of corporate governance. In particular, they have underlined poor efficiency of rule structures to achieve a good relationship between different stakeholder’s rights. In line with many studies of corporate governance that emphasize the manager-stakeholders relationship as explained by agency theory, in this paper, I analyse the role of auditing as an incentive device to reduce contractual or transaction costs related to asymmetric information.Considering as a benchmark the recent US Sarbanes Oxley Act of July 2002. I describe a set of auditing principles by comparing common and civil …

Il contrasto al lavoro non dichiarato: un'analisi comparativa di policies (Tackling Undeclared Work: A Comparative Analysis of Policies)

La forte presenza del sommerso in molti paesi europei e l'evidenza dei suoi effetti negativi sul loro sviluppo rende rilevante l’analisi di quali siano gli strumenti piu efficaci per scoraggiare l'espansione di questo fenomeno negativo per lo sviluppo e la crescita di un paese. In questo quadro, l’articolo, utilizzando l'approccio delle frontiere stocastiche, esplora quanto possa essere efficace l'attuazione di politiche di contrasto al lavoro nero nel contesto dell’Unione Europea. I nostri risultati confermano sia l'analisi delle determinanti di Schneider et al (2010) sia l'importanza delle politiche di deterrenza e di incentivo per contrastare il lavoro non dichiarato.The strong presence …

Resilience, Smartness and sustainability. Towards a new paradigm?

The urbanization and the vulnerability of a city make challenging the ability of remaining along a sustainable development path. From a sustainability point of view, the smartness concept has been enlarged up to incorporate the definition of sustainable development with the so-called smart and sustainable cities. Another aspect is gaining importance in this debate: the growing challenges posed by climate change and by environmental issue at large. This issue has forced governments and in particular cities, which represent the main place for the prevention and the implementation of initiatives against negative environmental events, to develop flexible and resilient actions, initiatives and p…

Climate variability and agricultural production efficiency: evidence from Ethiopian farmers

It is known that climate and weather variability have negative impacts on agricultural production efficiency. The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of climatic variables on farms’ efficiency in Ethiopia making use of nationally representative datasets from Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) 2011/2012. By using the Stochastic Frontier Approach, we estimate simultaneously the farmers’ optimal production function and technical inefficiency equations, taking into account unobserved heterogeneity of farmers. Our main findings show that climate change variables have a positive effect on households’ efficiency but the impact depends on the diff…

DOMESTIC MATERIAL CONSUMPTION INDICATOR AND NATURAL RESOURCES: A EUROPEAN ANALYSIS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL KUZNETS CURVE

The study investigates the relation between per capita Domestic Material Consumption indicator (DMC) and per capita income. Economic literature focuses mainly on air, water and land pollution while we consider as environmental degradation the consumption on natural resources extracted from the environment. Using a cross– European panel of countries over the period 2000-2011, our results confirm the absence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) between per capita DMC and per capita GDP both for EU-27 vs. 30 European countries and for Western vs. Eastern European countries. The turning points are so high that it is present a monotonic increasing relation between DMC indicator and GDP.

Dalle politiche pubbliche alla valutazione dei progetti

Dai Bright Green Buildings alle Bright Cities

La crescente urbanizzazione e soprattutto la crescente richiesta di maggiore efficienza nel consumo energetico e nella gestione delle risorse naturali rende sempre più attuale affrontare in modo innovativo e sostenibile la costruzione degli edifici. In questa prospettiva, sono emerse alcune linee di ricerca che si riconducono ai concetti di smart, intelligent, e green/sustainable buildings. Partendo da questa analisi, l’articolo si propone di evidenziare come sia possibile sintetizzare gli aspetti di qualità ambientale e di controllo integrato di un edificio nel concetto di bright green buildings e come, sia quindi necessario delineare un quadro di riferimento concettuale più ampio. Questo …

How Does the Public Spending Affect Technical Efficiency? Some Evidence from 15 European Countries

The relationship between government size and economic growth has been widely debated. Departing from this issue, we provide an empirical analysis of the impact of government size on technical efficiency. The aim of this paper is to estimate by using a True Random Effect model the impact of public sector’s size and of public expenditure components on 15 European countries’ technical efficiency from 1996 to 2011. Using the total public expenditure as a proxy for the government size we estimate simultaneously national optimal production function and technical efficiency model by controlling for income distribution and institutional quality. Our main findings show that the effect of public sect…

Nota sui dati delle Tabelle

Smart Cities. Luci e ombre di una visione di futuro

L’epoca che stiamo attraversando è caratterizzata da grandi trasformazioni. I sistemi urbani permangono al centro del cambiamento, confrontandosi sempre più con sfide e minacce alla loro sostenibilità. Ormai circe metà della popolazione mondiale vive nelle città e il processo di inurbamento è inarrestabile. Agli inizi del ’900 si pensò che città con 8 o 10 milioni di abitanti fossero inimmaginabili e in ogni caso ingestibili. Sociologi e urbanisti dell’epoca ritennero che la crescita delle città dovesse essere bloccata e che dovessero essere offerte soluzioni alternative. Tesi del genere non hanno avuto, evidentemente, riscontro nella realtà e la crescita delle città è continuata. In Euro…

How does public spending affect technical efficiency? Some evidence from 15 European countries

The relationship between government size and economic growth has been widely debated. Revisiting the subject from a distinct angle with respect to the mainstream approach, we provide an empirical analysis of the impact of government size on technical efficiency. The aim of this paper is to estimate the impact of public sector's size and of public expenditure components on 15 European countries’ technical efficiency from 1996 to 2014 by using a True Random Effect model. Using the total public expenditure as a proxy for the government size we estimate simultaneously national optimal production function and technical efficiency by controlling for income distribution and institutional quality. …

Innovation for climate change adaptation and technical efficiency: an empirical analysis in the European agricultural sector

This paper analyses the effect of innovation on firms' technical efficiency. Using climate-related patent data to proxy for innovation activity in different technological fields, the paper employs a stochastic frontier approach to estimate the impact of innovative efforts on agricultural firms' technical efficiency taking account of both unobservable heterogeneity and double heteroscedasticity in the inefficiency and idiosyncratic terms. Our findings confirm that innovation has a positive impact on firms' productivity (technical efficiency). While agricultural firms located in Germany and Sweden are more efficient compared to those in southern countries, all the European countries considere…

Climate variability and agriculture in Italy: a stochastic frontier analysis at the regional level

In the next future, climate change effects will represent a challenge for Europe and the Mediterranean area. These will have to cope with a rapid increase in climate variability. Although many economic sectors may be affected, agriculture is the most susceptible as climate heavily affects crop production trends, yield variability and the availability of areas suitable for cultivation. Using the stochastic frontier approach, the aim of this work is to analyse the impacts of climate variability on Italian regional technical efficiency in the agricultural sector for a period spanning from 2000 to 2009. Considering that technical inefficiency could be influenced by two main annual meteorologica…

La misura delle smart cities e gli obiettivi della strategia EU 2020: una riflessione critica

Il dibattito sul concetto di smart city è stato ampliato in questi ultimi anni. Per identificare i fattori della smart city, alcuni studiosi sottolineano il ruolo di alcuni elementi, tra cui lo sviluppo economico, il contesto favorevole alle imprese, la sostenibilità ambientale, l’innovazione sociale, il processo di informazione e conoscenza e infine il capitale umano e sociale. Da questo punto di vista, il concetto di smart city è relazionato sia all’efficienza urbana che al benessere dei cittadini sotto l’ombrello comune dell’uso di tecnologie appropriate. Anche le imprese e le istituzioni hanno contribuito a questo dibattito. Queste ultime hanno unito il concetto di smartness con la capa…

The instability of the adjusted and unadjusted environmental Kuznets curves

We test the stability of the unadjusted and adjusted environmental Kuznets curves (EKCs). Our results provide evidence in favour of a theoretically funded "adjusted EKC hypothesis" in which the impact of per capita GDP on CO2 emissions is evaluated conditionally to the effects of the industry mix and of the energy-supply infrastructure. In this specification, the shape of the GDP-CO2 relationship appears quite sensitive to changes in the estimation period. In the final part of the paper, signs and dynamics of fixed effects of individual countries in different specifications are interpreted as measures of virtuous or vicious of environmental behaviour. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserve…

Institutional Entrepreneurship, Trust and Regulatory Capture in the Digital Economy

In regard to the problem of the new markets’ opening and their regulation, some scholars have introduced the concept of “institutional entrepreneur” in economic literature. This new definition of entrepreneur is important to highlight, albeit in informal and descriptive terms, the existence of functional relationships between activities typical of private market competition and those more specifically, of the public sector. Even if this new economic character can provide an interesting key to understanding what can really happen in the narrow zone that separates the public and private markets, it does not consider some conceptual components that are not minor for the purposes of complete ch…

Smart Cities and a Stochastic Frontier Analysis: A Comparison among European Cities

The level of interest in smart cities is growing, and the recent literature on this topic (Holland, 2008; Caragliu et al., 2009, Nijkamp et al., 2011 and Lombardi et al., 2012) identifies a number of factors that characterise a city as smart, such as economic development, environment, human capital, culture and leisure, and e-governance. Thus, the smartness concept is strictly linked to urban efficiency in a multifaceted way. A seminal research for European policy conducted by Giffinger et al. (2007) defines a smart city on the basis of several intangible indicators, such as a smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance. These authors’ …

A short survey on climate change and environmental innovations

Climate change is and will be in the coming years one of the major challenges facing the world. The best strategy to cope with climate anomalies seems to be fostering the ability to innovate and find tech-nological solutions. Therefore, understanding the relationship between the stimuli brought about by climate variability and the propensity to innovate is of paramount importance. To this end, this chapter provides some background on climate change and innovation economics and then focuses on climate-induced innovation in the context of mitigation technologies and adaptation strategies.

Pollution and economic growth: a maximum likelihood estimation of environmental Kuznets curve

As in Brock and Taylor (2011) in this paper we consider the importance of the relationship between the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) Literature and the Economic Growth Theories. To address this issue we construct country production functions that directly incorporate CO2 emissions as input and estimate them using Stochastic Frontiers. This approach differs from that of Brock and Taylor (2011) but is similar to the one followed by Koop (1998). By introducing the environmental “bads” directly in the production function, we can analyse their contribution to total output growth. We highlight an important contribution of CO2 emissions to growth and find out that the EKC seems not to hold, at…

The environmental Kuznets curve within European countries and sectors: greenhouse emission, production function and technology

Based on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis and the technological change and the environment literature, our original contribution consists in analysing within the decomposition model the direct and indirect influence of technological change as well as the energy mix on CO2 emissions. Focusing on the dirtiest sectors of 25 EU countries in the period 1997-2005 and considering the endogeneity issue, we estimate an adjusted EKC relationship comparing a single equation model (univariate model) with a simultaneous equations system (bivariate model). Following Lopez (J Environ Econ Manag 27:163-184, 1994), a second equation is introduced where per capita income is a positive functio…

Institutions and Innovation as Driving Forces Towards a Smart City and Sustainable Territorial Development

The aim of the chapter is the analysis of innovation and institution as key-elements for reaching a higher social welfare and for improving environmental quality. To determine a social optimum or a Pareto improvement, we consider the interaction between institution and firm in the short and in the medium/long run. Using a static comparative analysis, the interaction of these two agents, institution and market, is examined. Within the market an entrant and an incumbent firm are present, and the entrant firm radically innovates. Even if in the short run results show that the market alone is able to realize a Pareto improvement, an institution action through an innovation adoption is a prefera…

Smartness, City Efficiency, and Entrepreneurship Milieu

The definition of smart city and its measurement are not shared. Different characteristics define a city as smart, which is strictly linked to urban efficiency and to entrepreneurship spirit in a multifaceted way as well as to citizens' well-being. On the basis of the comparison between city and entrepreneur behaviour and on the definition of Giffinger et al. (2007) of smart city, this chapter verifies the efficiency of a sample of European cities using a stochastic frontier approach. Departing from this analysis, the chapter develops the relative smartness definition based on the efficient use of its own resources and related to the different context. Moreover, as a city becomes close to t…

Bright Cities and City Information Modeling

The increasing urbanization and above all the increasing demand for more efficiency in energy consumption and in the management of natural resources makes ever more urgent to tackle the construction of buildings and the planning of cities in an innovative and sustainable way. In this perspective, some research lines have emerged referring to the concepts of smart, intelligent, and green/sustainable buildings. Starting from this analysis, the article aims to highlight how it is possible to synthesize both the environmental quality aspects and the integrated control of a building in the concept of bright green buildings, and how thus a wider conceptual reference framework is necessary: identi…

Valutazione dei progetti

Smartness, Sustainability and Resilience: Are They Related?

In the imminent future, cities have to face not only an increasing urbanization but also the negative consequences of natural and human disasters. From this point of view, a city should be considered as vulnerable to climate change and other natural negative events. Thus, the challenge of a city consists in remaining on a sustainable development path. To reach this object the concepts of smartness, sustainability and resilience for a city should be intertwined. Starting from the analysis of a bright city as an integrated approach, the aim of this study consists in propose a first framework of an index which should include sustainable, smartness and resilient indicators. Integrating and meas…

Accessibilità

What are the factors driving the adoption and intensity of sustainable irrigation technologies in Italy?

This paper aims to analyse the determinants of Italian farmers’ adoption of sustainable irrigation technologies such as micro-irrigation (drip and sprinklers) and sub-irrigation technologies. To improve farmers’ water management, climate variability adaptive behaviour should be incentivized. Italy, like other Mediterranean countries, has suffered the most for an increase in frequency and intensity of droughts, higher temperatures and fewer precipitations. Applying innovative irrigation systems, water scarcity and water stress may be overcome. Water conservation and saving technologies may help in supporting water-saving behaviour, increasing water conservation in the natural environment and…

How Does the Public Spending Affect Technical Efficiency? Some Evidence from 15 European Countries

The relationship between government size and economic growth has been widely debated. Departing from this issue, we provide an empirical analysis of the impact of government size on technical efficiency. The aim of this paper is to estimate by using a True Random Effect model the impact of public sector’s size and of public expenditure components on 15 European countries’ technical efficiency from 1996 to 2011. Using the total public expenditure as a proxy for the government size we estimate simultaneously national optimal production function and technical efficiency model by controlling for income distribution and institutional quality. Our main findings show that the effect of public sect…