Local sustainable development and well-being/quality of life. An application of the capability approach at regional level

This paper has a twofold aim: the former is to focus on the concept of well-being/quality of life and its relationships with local sustainable development and the latter is to apply the capability approach at regional level. More specifically, one wants to analyse if sustainable development at a local level serves to better understand both the formation of well-being and/or quality of life. The instrument which will allow us to verify the operational value of the capability approach is the building of a multidimensional synthetic index of sustainability. This index will consists of aggregating a set of variables of different nature from the socio-economic to the environmental ones. It may be considered an alternative to the conventional indices, which are normally founded on GDP, and will be applied to the Italian regions. After having standardised each variable so to make them homogeneous, the methodology proposed, which will allow us to gather and compare the Italian regions according to the higher or lower level of quality of life, is the Wroclaws Economic School taxonomic method. The results obtained may represent an information tool for targeting and zoning sustainable development measures which aim at improving well-being/quality of life at a local level.

Platform Competition and Broadband Uptake: Theory and Empirical Evidence from the European Union

Broadband access provides users with high speed, always-on connectivity to the Internet. Due to its superiority, broadband is seen as the way for consumers and firms to exploit the great potentials of new applications. This has generated a policy debate on how to stimulate adoption of broadband technology. One of the most disputed issues is about competition policies: these may be intended to promote competition in the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) segment of the market (intra- platform competition), or to stimulate entry into the market for alternative platforms such as cable access or fiber optics (inter- platform competition). Using a model of oligopoly competition between differentiated products, our paper explicitly studies the effect of inter and intra platform competition on the diffusion of broadband access. The implications of the model are then tested using data from 14 European countries. The econometric evidence confirms the results of the theoretical model and indicates that while inter-platform competition drives broadband adoption, competition in the market for DSL services does not play a significant role. The results also confirm that lower unbundling prices stimulate broadband uptake.Broadband, inter-platform and intra-platform competition,local loop unbundling

What is the relationship between somaesthetics and the sociopolitical aesthetics of the Frankfurt School?

La relazione ha offerto un quadro storico e teorico sul ruolo della sensibilità come elemento di emancipazione politica e di critica al vigente per un'estetica in chiave politica

L'incantesimo della mimesis: poesia e filosofia tra essere stato e poter essere.

Forgetting the socratic vocation and the platonic sentence – the most difficult and risky task – also means stop explaining everything to the people, the same people who Plato wants to lead out to the cave, and who Socrates said was more able that poets to reason. Adorno broke this spell to find again the enchantment of poetry (after Auschwitz), beyond the communication announcing the impossibility of the same communication and bringing again the word to itself

Model-Free Estimation of Large Variance Matrices

This paper introduces a new method for estimating large variance matrices. Starting from the orthogonal decomposition of the sample variance matrix, we exploit the fact that orthogonal matrices are never ill-conditioned and therefore focus on improving the estimation of the eigenvalues. We estimate the eigenvectors from just a fraction of the data, then use them to transform the data into approximately orthogonal series that we use to estimate a well-conditioned matrix of eigenvalues. Our estimator is model-free: we make no assumptions on the distribution of the random sample or on any parametric structure the variance matrix may have. By design, it delivers well-conditioned estimates regardless of the dimension of problem and the number of observations available. Simulation evidence show that the new estimator outperforms the usual sample variance matrix, not only by achieving a substantial improvement in the condition number (as expected), but also by much lower error norms that measure its deviation from the true variance.variance matrices, ill-conditioning, mean squared error, mean absolute deviations, resampling

An I(d) Model with Trend and Cycles

This paper deals with models allowing for trending processes and cyclical component with error processes that are possibly nonstationary, nonlinear, and non-Gaussian. Asymptotic confidence intervals for the trend, cyclical component, and memory parameters are obtained. The confidence intervals are applicable for a wide class of processes, exhibit good coverage accuracy, and are easy to implement.fractional integration, trend, cycle, nonlinear process, Whittle objective function

Platform Competition and Broadband Uptake: Theory and Empirical Evidence from the European Union

Broadband access provides users with high speed, always-on connectivity to the Internet. Due to its superiority, broadband is seen as the way for consumers and firms to exploit the great potentials of new applications. This has generated a policy debate on how to stimulate adoption of broadband technology. One of the most disputed issues is about competition policies: these may be intended to promote competition in the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) segment of the market (intra- platform competition), or to stimulate entry into the market for alternative platforms such as cable access or fiber optics (inter- platform competition). Using a model of oligopoly competition between differentiated products, our paper explicitly studies the effect of inter and intra platform competition on the diffusion of broadband access. The implications of the model are then tested using data from 14 European countries. The econometric evidence confirms the results of the theoretical model and indicates that while inter-platform competition drives broadband adoption, competition in the market for DSL services does not play a significant role. The results also confirm that lower unbundling prices stimulate broadband uptake.Broadband, inter-platform and intra-platform competition, local loop unbundling

L'altro altrimenti possibile: sul pensare contro se stesso. Un dialogo tra Primo Levi e Theodor W. Adorno

In the time between If This is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi becomes aware of how much he has been a witness of the failure of culture, the failure of which Auschwitz represents its emblem. The present reconstructs some pages of Levi – pages of testimony those of 1947, pages of reflection those of 1986 – and interprets them in the development of critical theory elaborated by Horkheimer and Adorno during the 1930s and the mid-1940s. Horkheimer's refusal of Hegelian reconciliation of subject and object (I and Other) in the identity of the State and of the bourgeois Kultur – refusal that leads Horkheimer first to clarify the current state of the philosophy of society (1931) and then to elaborate a critical and philosophical theory of society, which is capable of analyzing the betrayal of bourgeois (instrumental) reason and of the authoritarian state (1937) – presents an important implication in the analysis of anti-Semitism and in the explanation of National Socialism, as historical expressions of the catastrophe of reconciliation. This, together with Adorno's subsequent reflections on the failure of Kultur, his many questions about the meaning of post-Auschwitz, his questions about ideological reification as a reaction of the false conscience with respect to failure, to his investigation into the liquidation of individual as a nullification of the logic of recognition of the I and of the Other, can be an important contribution to the reflection, that not only accompanies those of Levi, but may be able to respond to some of its requests unmasking, at the same time, the hypocrisy and the falseness of the self-preservation of a subjectivity that has nullified the Otherness in an apparent conciliation