Interactions between food demand, biomass energy and forest preservation are driving both food prices and land-use changes, regionally and globally. This study presents a new model called Nexus Land-Use which describes these interactions through a generic representation of agricultural...

In the domain of desertification and climate change an important amount of new knowledge and research material has been obtained from the many projects carried out in the EU-DG12 Environment and Climate programme. However, so far little effort has gone into making this scientific material...

This paper aims to verify the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) or inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation in the context of endogenous growth. An important feature of this study is that the EKC is examined in the presence of...

Climate change is a phenomenon beset with major uncertainties and researchers should include them in Integrated Assessment Models. However, including further dimensions in IAM models comes at a cost. In particular, it makes most of these models suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In this...

We estimate the relationship between urban spatial expansion and its socio-economic determinants in Lombardy, the most urbanised region of Italy (and one of the most urbanized of the European Union), at the municipality level. Test results suggest that this relationship varies significantly...

It is a largely accepted idea that complexity and recent global phenomena have generated a multi-layered diversification process in Western societies. Migration phenomena are largely responsible for this process both in receiving European societies as well as in original sending countries....

Information on the presence of Chinese and Ukrainian communities in Portugal, and namely in Greater Porto (northern Portugal) will be presented to then investigate how recent work on evolving networks might be a helpful tool in analysing the integration of migrant communities in urban systems,...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and the quality of economic development in Italy. The analysis draws on a dataset collected by the author including about two hundred variables representing different aspects of economic development and...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and labour productivity in small and medium enterprises in Italy. By means of structural equations models, the analysis investigates the effect of different aspects of the multifaceted concept of social...

In a continuous-time framework we study the technology and investment choice problem of a continuous co-digestion biogas plant dealing with randomly fluctuating relative convenience of input factor costs. Input factors enter into the productive process together mixed according to a given initial...