The Stability of the Adjusted and Unadjusted Environmental Kuznets Curve

In our paper, we test the stability of the unadjusted and adjusted Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Our results provide evidence in favour of the significance of the adjusted EKC hypothesis in which the impact of per capita GDP on the intensity of CO2 emissions is evaluated conditionally to the effects of the energy-supply infrastructure and of additional socio-demographic variables. In this framework, the GDP-CO2 relationship appears robust to the inclusion of additional regressors and to changes in the estimation period and intervalSustainable development, Kuznets curve, CO2 emissions

DOMESTIC MATERIAL CONSUMPTION INDICATOR AND NATURAL RESOURCES: A EUROPEAN ANALYSIS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL KUZNETS CURVE

The study investigates the relation between per capita Domestic Material Consumption indicator (DMC) and per capita income. Economic literature focuses mainly on air, water and land pollution while we consider as environmental degradation the consumption on natural resources extracted from the environment. Using a cross– European panel of countries over the period 2000-2011, our results confirm the absence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) between per capita DMC and per capita GDP both for EU-27 vs. 30 European countries and for Western vs. Eastern European countries. The turning points are so high that it is present a monotonic increasing relation between DMC indicator and GDP

Public Choices and Decision-Making Processes: a Case Study on Sustainable Mobility

The definition of a decision process, which implies the capacity to implement and realize an action involving all the actors interested, is crucial not only for taking adequate political decisions but even mainly for getting a democratic control of the decisions themselves. From a strategic planning point of view, decision process on public issues should be essentially considered as a process of participation, which involves political decision-makers as well as all the administrative organizations which have to realize the decisions taken and citizens and more generally all the stakeholders who will be impacted in a positive or negative way by such decisions. If this is the case, important issues arise: which is the methodology that should be followed to assess all the alternative solutions to adopt? How are analyzed the effects and the impacts of political decisions? How are evaluated the consequences of a set of actions? To answer to all these questions, Decision Support Systems (DSSs) have been developed. They include measurement tools such as cost-benefit analysis as well as relational methods of “rational analysis” such as multicriteria analysis. DSSs’ allow decision makers to implement the best choices and decisions with the aim of reaching a Pareto improvement for the territory considered. Though these tools may be implemented to any socio-political decisions, in these last years the democratic and, therefore, political pressure has led to adopt DSSs’ mainly for two specific themes: the environment and the sustainable mobility. Moreover, in the agenda of European institutions and local and national administrative governments, sustainable mobility is become a high priority. In this framework, the methodology1 proposed combines two different approaches. On the one hand, the “classic” or top-down approach based on statistical data analysis is considered where the main target is the definition of some synthetic indicators, while on the other hand, the bottom-up approach is adopted, which is based on the Strategic Environment Assessment (SEA) framework and on citizens’ participation. This decision process as defined, should be followed for implementing specific and appropriate solutions at local level and for taking into consideration the peculiarities of the territory considered. Finally, a case-study regarding the ex-13th District of the Municipality of Rome is presented

Smart cities: a policy tool for city efficiency?

The level of interest in smart cities has been growing during these last years. The academic literature (Hollands, 2008; Caragliu et al., 2009, Nijkamp et al., 2011 and Lombardi et al., 2012) has identified a number of factors that characterise a city as smart, such as economic development, business-friendly, environmental sustainability, social innovation, information and knowledge process, and human and social capital. Thus, the smartness concept is strictly linked to urban efficiency in a multifaceted way as well as to citizens’ wellbeing through the use of appropriate technologies. Instead, from a “political perspective” smartness is mainly related to the ability of using ICT as instrument to strengthen economic growth. A research by Giffinger et al. (2007) to support European policy has defined the concept of smart city on the basis of several intangible indicators (such as a smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance) and has become a benchmark for European policy makers (European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, 2014). Following this influential research, the aim of our paper is to verify how much that smartness definition can influence the efficiency and indirectly the growth of the cities. Using the concept of output maximising, we built a stochastic frontier function in terms of urban productivity and/or urban efficiency by assessing the economic distance that separates cities from that frontier. Our conclusions highlight that not all the six indicators defined in the Giffinger et al. (2007)’ analysis contribute to strength the city efficiency

Bright Cities and City Information Modeling

The increasing urbanization and above all the increasing demand for more efficiency in energy consumption and in the management of natural resources makes ever more urgent to tackle the construction of buildings and the planning of cities in an innovative and sustainable way. In this perspective, some research lines have emerged referring to the concepts of smart, intelligent, and green/sustainable buildings. Starting from this analysis, the article aims to highlight how it is possible to synthesize both the environmental quality aspects and the integrated control of a building in the concept of bright green buildings, and how thus a wider conceptual reference framework is necessary: identified in the Bright City based on the implementation of a City Information Modeling (CIM). This methodological framework allows managing the urban transformation operations in an integrated way and represents a synthesis of the current paradigmatic references: sustainability, smartness and resilience

How Does the Public Spending Affect Technical Efficiency? Some Evidence from 15 European Countries

The relationship between government size and economic growth has been widely debated. Departing from this issue, we provide an empirical analysis of the impact of government size on technical efficiency. The aim of this paper is to estimate by using a True Random Effect model the impact of public sector’s size and of public expenditure components on 15 European countries’ technical efficiency from 1996 to 2011. Using the total public expenditure as a proxy for the government size we estimate simultaneously national optimal production function and technical efficiency model by controlling for income distribution and institutional quality. Our main findings show that the effect of public sector’s size on efficiency is positive while the type of public expenditures may have both positive and negative impact. In more details, results suggest that social protection, cultural, and health expenditures have a positive effect on technical efficiency, while others have a negative impact. More controversial is the impact of education expenditure, even if a positive effect on efficiency prevails when controlling for heteroscedasticity

What are the factors driving the adoption and intensity of sustainable irrigation technologies in Italy?

This paper aims to analyse the determinants of Italian farmers’ adoption of sustainable irrigation technologies such as micro-irrigation (drip and sprinklers) and sub-irrigation technologies. To improve farmers’ water management, climate variability adaptive behaviour should be incentivized. Italy, like other Mediterranean countries, has suffered the most for an increase in frequency and intensity of droughts, higher temperatures and fewer precipitations. Applying innovative irrigation systems, water scarcity and water stress may be overcome. Water conservation and saving technologies may help in supporting water-saving behaviour, increasing water conservation in the natural environment and reducing water stress to cultivations. However, accurate analyses of the determinants of adoption and intensity of these techniques are still scarce. This study fills this gap by using a micro-level approach which combines yearly Agricultural Accounting Information Network (RICA) datasets with climatic variables from the ERA-Interim dataset. Based on an unbalanced panel dataset for the period 2012-2016, the decision of a farmer whether to adopt an irrigation saving technology or not is estimated applying a logit and a probit model, while the intensity of adoption is estimated through a Tobit model. Our main findings confirm that crop typology, education, geography and climate are all relevant factors influencing the sustainable irrigation technology adoption choice as well as the adoption intensity given that most farmers adopt water-saving technologies only partially

Pollution and economic growth: a maximum likelihood estimation of environmental Kuznets curve

As in Brock and Taylor (2011) in this paper we consider the importance of the relationship between the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) Literature and the Economic Growth Theories. To address this issue we construct country production functions that directly incorporate CO2 emissions as input and estimate them using Stochastic Frontiers. This approach differs from that of Brock and Taylor (2011) but is similar to the one followed by Koop (1998). By introducing the environmental “bads” directly in the production function, we can analyse their contribution to total output growth. We highlight an important contribution of CO2 emissions to growth and find out that the EKC seems not to hold, at least for most countries

Climate change effects and agriculture in Italy: a stochastic frontier analysis at regional level

Climate changes, associated to atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases, could alter level of temperature at the surface, rainfalls and regional water supplies. There are many areas of the Earth that will cope with a rapid increasing of warming at the surface and with an extremization of weather conditions. Although many economic sectors are influenced, agriculture is the most susceptible as weather heavily affects crop production trends, yield variability and reduction of areas suitable to be cultivated. Climate change effects represent a “challenge” that European agriculture has to face in the immediate future. The aim of our work is to analyze the economic impacts of climate change on agricultural sector in Italy at regional scale (NUTS2) in the light of mitigation policies undertaken by Italy in accordance with the commitments made by the EU Policy in the struggle against climate change. Using the stochastic frontier approach, we investigate on the Italian Regions efficiency in the period 2000-2010. Considering that inefficiency could be influenced by two main meteorological factors – rainfall and minimum temperature– we find that rainfall variable has a positive impact on efficiency while minimum temperature variable reduces the efficiency of harvested production

The environmental Kuznets curve within European countries and sectors: greenhouse emission, production function and technology

Following the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature and the theoretical climate change literature, we analyse the impact of per capita GDP on CO2 emissions at industrial level for several European countries. This relationship is evaluated comparing the adjusted EKC specification – CO2 emission conditioned by the effects of income and final energy-consumption of several energy sources – to the simultaneous equations model, considering the determinants of income. Following Dean (2002) we introduce a second equation that takes into consideration the technological progress, measured by human and physical capital, productivity and R&D expenditure. Theoretically, it is well known that new technology and renewable energy adoptions can force the system to a more efficient economy system in term of environment and in term of quality of life. To verify if environmental policy can influence technological change, we address the effect of R&D expenditures and R&D intensities on output, and simultaneously we test weather the output (measured by the per capita GDP) affects or not the greenhouse gas emissions. In this simultaneous equation model, the shape of the GDP-CO2 relationship appears quite sensitive to both sectors and countries. However, the analysis confirms the existence of an EKC among the European countries and sectors