The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between democracy and technological innovation. The primary findings are that most free countries, measured with liberal, participatory, and constitutional democracy index, have higher technological innovation than less free and more...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between public and private research funding. Data from Eurostat are used. The methodology applies econometric models based on regression analyses. The main results are: public R&D expenditure is a complement for private R&D one, but the...

In this paper we investigate the economic rationality of the bed downsizing process characterising the hospital industry worldwide in the last decades, providing new evidence on the factor substitutability in the production of hospital services. We consider a sample of Italian regional producers...

An essential part of any firm’s corporate strategy is the choice of the business portfolio through which to compete. When the portfolio’s decision involves more than one business, firms are said to implement a diversification strategy, which is put into action through the firms concomitant...

The aim of this work is to present a methodology useful to verify the impact of public interventions directed to support the technological innovation in local groups of SMEs. In the last decades, in several agglomerations of firms, some difficulties emerged, related to the small-medium...

In a short space of time the car styling supply chain has undergone deep changes, which are being amplified by the current economic-financial crisis. The digitalisation of production and the transformation of supply links have modified the competitive positioning of companies along the supply...

This paper provides a specific application of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) theory in order to explain the correlation between income and household waste generation. The model highlights an U-shaped path of income-refuse relationship that verifies the existence of EKC depending on the...