We aim at contributing to the debate on the mechanisms and properties of economic fluctuations. We consider a crucial aspect among many thought to influence this ubiquitous and extremely relevant phenomenon: the interaction structure that characterises the organisation of production, that is,...

The paper presents a new framework to assess firm level heterogeneity and to study the rate and direction of technical change. Building on the analysis of revealed short-run production functions by Hildenbrand (1981), we propose the (normalized) volume of the zonotope composed by vectors-firms...

There are some specific features of the non-radial DEA (data envelopment analysis) models which cause some problems under the returns to scale measurement. In the scientific literature on DEA, some methods were suggested to deal with the returns to scale measurement in the non-radial DEA models....

Applications of the DEA models show that inadequate results may arise in some cases, two of these inadequacies being: a) too many efficient units may appear in some DEA models; b) a DEA model may show an inefficient unit from the point of view of experts as an efficient one. The purpose of this...

We rank the participant nations in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games according to their technical efficiency. Usually they are ranked in accordance with the number of medals they have won and no resources available are considered. In order to evaluate the relative performance of the countries, we...

This paper investigates the sources of structural change in the Brazilian economy in the 2000s. On that purpose, it uses the input-output structural decomposition analysis and introduces a method to correct the influence of prices on the time behavior of the technical coefficients, making them...

'Desert Power 2050' is probably the world's most ambitious strategy report towards the decarbonization of the power sector in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (EUMENA). The report inspired by the Desertec vision aims at providing clean energy from MENA's desert regions to the entire MENA...

The present paper on the now partly well known Russian mathematician and amateur economist v. Charasoff was originally written in 1987 together with H. Duffner three years after Charasoff's remarkable contribution of 1910 Das System des Marxismus (The system of Marxism) had been rediscovered by...

GINFORS (Global INterindustry FORecasting System) represents a state-of-the-art tool for integrated quantitative policy assessments of long run economic developments and associated pressures on the environment. Its empirical modelling framework rests on national input-output accounts which are...

Using a long-run series of I-O tables, some simple facts are explored with respect to the Italian trade balance in the period 1960-2000. The analysis confirms that the Italian economy underwent a de-specialisation process before the Euro era. This phenomenon weakened our export capacity, and in...