Over the last few years a growing number of contributions have shown that the presence of business groups, i.e. sets of firms legally distinct but belonging to the same owner(s), is significant. From a theoretical point of view, this presence poses the question of whether the group or the single...

This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...

In this study we analyze the effects of corruption on income inequality and poverty. Our analysis advances the existing literature in four ways. First, instead of using corruption indices assembled by various investment risk services, we use an objective measure of corruption: the number of...

The present research has been developed within the EU FP7 VECTORS project (http://www.marine-vectors.eu/). The main scope of the project (2011-2015) has been to evaluate, from a multilateral perspective, drivers, pressures and vectors of changes in marine life of three main European seas...

This paper discusses a methodology to assess the performances of tourism management of local governments when economic and environmental aspects are considered as equally relevant. In particular, the focus is on the comparison and efficiency assessment of Italian municipalities located on the...

In this paper an alternative Tourism oriented Data Warehousing architecture is proposed which makes use of the most recent free and open source technologies like Java, Postgresql and XML. Such architecture's aim will be to support the decision making process and giving an integrated view of the...

International tourism is increasingly viewed as one of the best opportunities for a sustainable economic and social development of developing countries. There is also an increasing concern from public policy makers as to whether mass tourism coastal resorts can play a catalytic role in the...

We present a theoretical model in tourism economics, assuming that the market for tourism is an oligopoly with differentiated products. Destinations (i.e., countries, regions, sites or even firms) can invest in order to improve their carrying capacity that can be interpreted as the stock of...

In this paper we try to build a bridge between the traditional analysis of the evolution of tourism destinations and economic growth theory. With such an aim we develop an environmental growth model for an economy specialized in tourism and we derive the pattern of tourism development with...

We present a new, global data base on tourist destinations. The data base differs from other data bases in that it includes both domestic and international tourists; and it contains data, for the most important destinations, data at national level as well as at lower administrative levels....