Competition in public utility sectors has been encouraged in recent years throughout Europe. In this paper we try and analyse the welfare effects of these reforms in Italy, with particular attention to water and energy goods. The first step is to introduce a sensible measure of affordability of...

In this paper, we develop a simple model of social dynamics governing the evolution of strategic self-protection choices of boundedly rational potential victims facing the threat of prospective offenders in a large population with random matching. We prove that individual (and socially...

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...

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....

In this paper we analyse the Local Tourist System (LTS) as a particular case of Marshallian Industrial District. The LTS allows the identification of more effective policy tools for managing tourism. First, through the concept of LTS, the policy maker can take into account the complexity of...