In the last years a central issue in regional economic growth debate is represented by the convergence problem. Many empirical economists have noticed that per-worker GDP of poor regions tend to converge to those of richer regions. However more recently it has been observed that the economic...

Isotropic processes form an inadequate basis in modelling many spatially distributed data. In particular environmental phenomena often have strong anisotropic spatial variation, especially when the regions monitored are very large. We extend a recently proposed optimal sampling strategy by...

This paper proposes a local stationarity approach in EBLUP estimation with the aim to improve the reliability of relative poverty estimates in small areas. The results of the experimentations, performed in the framework of the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey (EU-SILC),...

A multiple imputation technique is proposed to measure sustainable development using models of structural equations (LISREL) for the treatment of missing data. The reliability of such technique is verified comparing the estimation model with missing data to the estimation model with imputed...

Small area estimators are often based on linear mixed models under the assumption that relationships among variables are stationary across the area of interest (Fay–Herriot models). This hypothesis is patently violated when the population is divided into heterogeneous latent subgroups. In this...