Recent major spills on European coasts have highlighted the primary policy relevance for the EU of oil spills. This paper assesses the risks related to carrying oil to the EU along the route from the Russian Black Sea coast to Sicily, Italy (one of the most congested and strategically relevant...

In this paper we explore how firms' productivity is affected by agglomeration of firms, clustering of innovation and localisation of FDI in Turkey, Italy and Tunisia. We also control for the impact of firm characteristics on firm productivity (specifically the role of size, ownership and firm...

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is the most commonly used measure for assessing international competitiveness. We develop a methodology to estimate the REER that incorporates two distinctive elements that are not considered in the current literature and apply it to the Mediterranean...

Italy’s role in the Libyan-US clash caused by Muammar Gaddafi’s support for international terrorism in the mid-1980s is a controversial issue whose treatment by Italian historians and scholars has been made difficult by the lack of relevant and reliable sources. This paper, based on...

The gold standard was a monetary system based on fixed exchange rates, whereby domestic prices were pegged to the international price level and a high level of control had to be exercised over the money supply. This meant that fiscal discipline also had to be maintained for a country to remain...