In this new video, Italian Lead Authors Carlo Carraro, Alessandro Lanza and Massimo Tavoni summarise the main issues tackled by the third volume of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, dedicated to the mitigation of climate change.

A feature of policy-making today is its dependence on scientific advice to deliver public policies that are robust, credible, and effective. This paper discusses how policy-making profits from scientific advice in areas where science and technology are significant. Particular attention is given...

This paper provides an overview of research evaluation practices across countries. The main aim is to investigate whether research assessment is implemented and to see to what extent its results are used to revise policy strategies, identify new research priorities, allocate financial resources...

This paper presents an estimation of the cost of reducing CO2 emissions as agreed in Kyoto by Annex I countries. Unlike most of the existing literature, this paper focuses on European Union countries abatement costs and, using a simple model, estimates the role of each EU country within a EU...

We analyze the empirical relationship between growth, country size and tourism specialization by using a dataset covering the period 1980-2003. We find that tourism countries grow significantly faster than all the other sub-groups considered in our analysis. Tourism appears to be an independent...

In this paper we investigate crude oil and products price dynamics. We present a comparison among ten prices series of crude oils and fourteen price series of petroleum products, considering four distinct market areas (Mediterranean, North Western Europe, Latin America and North America) over...

This paper re-examines the issue of asymmetries in the transmission of shocks to crude oil prices onto the retail price of gasoline. Relative to the previous literature, the distinguishing features of the present paper are - i) use of updated and comparable data to carry out an international...

The number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced-form relationship between a country economic growth and the quantity of various pollutants produced has recently increased significantly. In several cases researchers have found evidence in favor of an inverted-U...

Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 “tourism countries” within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period...

International tourism is today one of the most important tradable sectors, with expenditure on tourist goods and services representing some 8% of total world export receipts and 5% of world GDP. Cross-country data for 1985-95 on tourism specialisation and economic growth reveal the following...