Greenhouse tomato cultivation plays an important role in Sicily, being the primary production area in Italy, due to its favorable pedo-climatic conditions that permit extra-seasonal productions. In Sicily, more than half of greenhouse tomato production is derived from the Province of Ragusa on...

China is the largest non-metallic mineral producer in the world and one of the key consumers of four major non-metallic mineral products, including cement, refractories, plate glass and ceramics. The non-metallic mineral products industry’s rapid growth has brought about a large demand for...

The paper considers the transition of an economy from non-renewable to renewable energy. The Hotelling theorem suggests to extract a non-renewable resource in an optimal way such that the resource tends to be depleted when optimally extracted. Yet,it might not be reasonable to deplete...

In the period from 1975 to 2010, the development model of Chilean agriculture has been a paradigm of growth based on a significant change of farming, which produces a shift towards non-traditional productions for export as the basis of economic growth. Economic restructuring in the mid-seventies...

This paper investigates whether political competition plays an important role in determining the level of agricultural protection. In order to do so, we exploit variation in political and economic data from 74 developing and developed countries for the post-war period. Our results robustly show...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a signi.cant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion...

We investigate the resource impact on economic growth using matching. Using a nonparametric minimum-distance matching method, we match the countries according to their observable characteristics, and estimate the relative growth rates of each matched pair. This way we are able to analyze the...

Social capital has been proved to be related to economic growth, financial development and economic performance in general. The purpose of the present article is suggesting a link between social capital and climate. The paper serves as a first statistical test on whether climatic differences...

This study explains the emergence of the Sicilian mafia in the XIX century as the product of the interaction between natural resource abundance and weak institutions. We advance the hypothesis that the mafia emerged after the collapse of the Bourbon Kingdom in a context characterized by a severe...