Transport infrastructures and regional development: The discovery of centrality of the container terminal of Gioia Tauro in the Mediterranian

European container terminals of Mediterranean are enjoying of a discovery on the more dynamics routes of the whole world that link Europe to Far East-Pacific. This centrality consists in the acquisition of a relative advantage in terms of 6 -7 days less of navigation respect to big ports of call of North Europe. In this framework, the new installation of Gioia Tauro?s container terminal is demonstrating to be one of the most important junctions of transhipment of South Europe. This could manifest completely his potentialities in the same measures in which will be guided at the same time adequate territorial policies and lay the bases for logistic systems of high level. This means to direct in the national and continental hinterland the construction of a system of infrastructures of road and railway junctions necessarily adequate and advanced in terms of technician level and capacity of response. Only in this sense it will be possible to initiate a competition forms among economic systems in a territorial base rather than among single productive units. In fact, after a ten-year period of interventions for sectors, transeuropean network of transportation could start to considered as a first systematic tentative of integrated actions among transportation politics and regional politics of European Union. By starting, therefore, by a systemic approach, the paper turns to a simulation model and to specific inquiry on the field to gather the impacts of the container terminal to territorial level. The aim is to verify if and in which way the politics of national and community transport linked to the birth of container port of Gioia Tauro, will assume the features of a complex regional development politics able to mitigate and/or prevent the imbalances become worse in the ambit of European Union.

Burying the Sacred. Archaeology of Ritual Depositional Practices in Orientalising and Archaic Rome

The study of ritual behaviours has long remained the purview of socio-anthropological disciplines and for the most part has been limited to so-called traditional societies. Archaeologists only started paying attention to rituals a few decades ago, and they immediately faced a simple yet complex problem: unlike anthropologists and ethnologists, who can observe rituals as they are performed and rely on narratives provided by living participants, archaeologists must reconstruct these practices by relying on literary and archaeological sources. Scholars of ancient Roman religion have largely relied on the former for their reconstructions/interpretations of ritual, using the considerable amount of literary evidence at their disposal from the late Republic and Empire, while archaeological sources, on the other 0hand, have received less attention. Although the archaeologically detectable remains of ritual behaviours – i.e., votive deposits – are often coherent sets of finds, until recently they have been dismissed as simple deposits of discarded material and/or studied only through a chrono-typological approach. Unlike written sources, however, votive deposits and their contents preserve first-hand evidence of ritual behaviours and as such deserve closer consideration, especially for ritual contexts predating the earliest written histories, such as those in Orientalising and Archaic Rome (8th – 5th centuries BCE). By applying a context-specific methodology, this paper attempts to challenge/correct this trend and proposes that votive deposits were significant and active elements in the life cycle of sanctuaries. This proposal will be articulated in three sections: the first summarises how the study of ritual behaviours has been addressed by scientific disciplines; the second briefly focuses on how archaeologists have applied these methods to Etrusco-Italic contexts; the third section combines the insights obtained thanks to this scientific analysis with the archaeological realia relating to ritual behaviours in Rome, in a specific time frame that goes from the Orientalising to the Archaic period, that is to say during the Urbanisation of Rome.The Archaeology of Ritual. International workshop Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 7th - 8th February 202

Challenges and issues of the financial sector concerning the European Union in the forthcoming years

This paper is meant to be a general, non-exhaustive collection of snapshots and thoughts, also partially elaborated from exchanges with institutional counterparts, about the main issues for the next EU Commission in the domain of financial services. The intention is not to present an elaborated academic analysis about such topics, but, rather, to raise the awareness about the main pending issues in the economic and financial affairs domain, at the moment of a new EU Commission is taking office. This will range from the area of the complete Banking Union, being a significant trigger for reforms and for the direction of future Europe, as well as to the possible Insurance Union (e.g. the shift of EIOPA role from coordinator to central regulator); and, more in general, to the future architecture of the financial and monetary Europe. Topics include micro-economics, starting from the peculiar case of the state of the financial sector in Europe, with low profitability / low interest rates, cost reduction issues, NPLs and all the main regulatory reforms still on the table. Money laundering issues, particularly in conjunction with digital evolution and the consequent pressure on traditional banking sector; risk control, including rules for leveraged finance. But, also, macro-economic topics, starting from the effects of a possible U.S. economic downturn, including China-US trade war and connected impacts; public debt and aggregate private debt as a macroprudential issue; Brexit & the single Capital Market. Amongst others, topics such as digital innovation, climate change, market efficiency (LIBOR / EURIBOR trends? Impacts on bonds and stock market?) and sustainability of the European position internationally in the financial markets. Today in all these domains it does not seem that Europe speaks with one voice in all those, rather, national and sub-regional interests seem to prevail, jeopardizing the long-term perspective of an efficient European architecture, capable of generating growth and stability which is currently the only way to respond effectively to the challenges ahead

Redistribution and Tax Evasion: an Asymmetric Information Approach

The article studies the optimal redistribution system, achieved by direct taxation, indirect taxation and public provision of the pseudo-necessary good, when individuals, who differ in productivity, can take hidden actions (tax evasion by moral hazard) and have hidden information (tax evasion by adverse selection). It proves that any Government willing to effectively reallocate resources among individuals has to undertake measures against tax evasion, i.e. to establish tax evasion fines

Knowledge, innovation, agglomeration and regional convergence in the EU: motivating place-based regional intervention

The accumulation of knowledge, human capital and agglomeration are indicated as prominent sources of externalities. Therefore, this study examines their contributions to the economic growth of regions in Europe, while accounting for non-linear and threshold effects as well as spatial dependence. The results highlight differentiated growth patterns for less and more developed regions with the effect of knowledge being considerable only in the latter group. The findings suggest that there is the potential for innovation and agglomeration in many less developed regions located in both the new member states (NMS) and the old member states (OMS). However, to reach sustained growth, structural change is necessary in these regions. We conclude that the existing gaps in the economic structure are deemed responsible for the persistence of income disparities. This reinforces the call for specific policy actions in catching-up regions, thus strengthening the arguments in favour of a place-based approach to regional policy

Assessing regional competitiveness: analysis of stock indicators and flows variables

The purpose of this paper is the identification and definition of approaches and tools for the assessment and measurement of territorial competitiveness. Territorial competitiveness can be defined as an area that is able to face up to market competition whilst at the same time ensuring environmental, social and cultural sustainability, based on the dual approach of networking and inter-territorial relationships. The rationale behind this work is that territorial competitiveness is a concept characterized by a high level of complexity: therefore in order to understand the dynamics and the factors responsible for the competitive development of an area it is necessary to use a combination of tools that can measure both the territorial stock (tangible and intangible assets) and the economic flows between the actors (households and institutions) of a region. The Territorial Competitiveness Index (TCI) – SAM approach proposed in this paper aims at integrating a Territorial Competitiveness Index, which measures territorial assets, with a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM), that measures the economic flows within a given area, in order to define a composite model that combines sectors’ potential resulting from the multipliers based on SAM with the Index. The integration of these “stock and flows” measurement tools will enhance the capacity to identify territorial potential (both expresses and latent) and to assess territorial development scenarios. The usefulness of this approach resides therefore first and foremost in its capacity to provide the policy makers at local and central level with a simple visualisation of information to better target strategies and policies and to better allocate resources. By recognizing the importance of interdependencies among actors, sectors and spaces, the tool is also suitable to capture the multi-dimensional nature of territorial competitiveness and to support policy makers in the identification of the most appropriate territorial development policy mix

ECONOMIC POLICIES FOR FEMALE LABOUR AND FOOD NUTRITION SECURITY: THE AL-GHAB REGION CASE

Dealing with the issue of poverty, food security and social disparities becomes an even more pressing prerogative for the policy maker during economic downturns. The debate among the economists focuses on what might be the major policy initiatives to be undertaken in order to produce complementarities between growth and income-redistribution. These would involve not only generating an inequality-reducing pattern of growth but also undertaking a growth-enhancing pattern of redistribution. Developing countries are the most sensitive to this issue and are committed to develop the policy measure able to both stimulate economic growth and reduce social disparities and food insecurity. The Al-Ghab region in Syria is considered the typical resource rich poor area in a developing country. The possibility to activate the economic growth in this area goes through the exigency of diversify the economic production to stimulate the value added generation and reduce the social and economic disparities between female and male labour employment. In this way the problem of food insecurity should be better address since it is strongly connected to the poverty level of households. To address this complex target an extended multi-sector model is considered the most suitable analysis instrument especially since it is developed by means of the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for the area of interest. In this paper, we develop a SAM for the Al-Ghab region and quantify the effects of selected policy scenarios in terms of economic diversification, female labour efficiency and food nutrition security for the Al-Ghab region, in order to identify the pillars able to sustain the economic growth of the area

Determinants of intra-distribution dynamics in European Regions: An empirical assessment of the role of structural intervention

This paper looks at the dynamic of income distribution in European regions and attempts to relate movements within the distribution to the regional structural characteristics and the support of Cohesion Policy (CP). Empirical evidence highlights two main features of regional development. A generally lagging periphery with high growth rates on the one hand and a set of leading regions facing the challenge of global competitiveness on the other. There is evidence that CP support advanced economic development in lagging and peripheral regions, hence contributing to the “convergence objective”. Nonetheless, effective catch-up remains circumscribed to certain very few regions. Contrarily, CP support has failed to stimulate growth potential in leading regions, failing to strengthen EU competitiveness. Evidence presented in this paper provide useful insights for the current debate about the reshaping of EU cohesion policy toward a more place-based approach