EU AND GLOBALIZATION: SOME STYLIZED FACTS

Most of the people all over the world claim that globalization is a result of dynamic interactions between economic, technological, social and political factors. The aim of this paper is to document some stylized facts on this phenomenon in order to takeglobalization, cluster analysis, k-means algorithm, international ranking

EU INTEGRATION, HEALTH STANDARDS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Health is one of the most important assets for human beings, since it allows people to fully use their capacity. Poor or compromised health reduces the well-being of individuals, by affecting their future incomes, wealth and consumption. For policy implicHealth, Human capital, Development

Teaching to teach with a LMS: the experience at University of Perugia

[EN] A Learning Management System (LMS) is nowadays a pivotal element in the education environment of a modern university. However, though it generally has a beneficial and positive impact on the education, a part of the teachers is sometimes reluctant to adopt a LMS because of the perceived usage difficulty. Therefore, it is clear that a key step in order to spread the use of a LMS is to teach to the teachers how to use it and which benefits their teaching activities can gain. In this paper, we report and analyze the experience we had at University of Perugia. An e-learning course has been released to the (approximately) 1000 teachers of the university with the aim of introducing them to the basic tools provided by the LMS. Importantly, the course has been created and delivered by means of UniStudium, i.e., the Moodle-based LMS deployed in our university. This allowed us to collect interesting quantitative and qualitative data that have been elaborated and analyzed. The analysis shows that the activities carried out reached a prominent percentage of teachers, by also providing us important suggestions and hints to guide our future activities in this direction.http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Filomia, M.; Santucic, V.; Vinti, G.; De Santis, GMP.; Falcinelli, F.; Frenguelli, G.; Lorenzi, C.... (2018). Teaching to teach with a LMS: the experience at University of Perugia. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1439-1447. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.8221OCS1439144

Lifestyles and socio-cultural factors among children aged 6-8 years from five Italian towns: The MAPEC-LIFE study cohort

Background: Lifestyles profoundly determine the quality of an individual’s health and life since his childhood. Many diseases in adulthood are avoidable if health-risk behaviors are identified and improved at an early stage of life. The aim of the present research was to characterize a cohort of children aged 6–8 years selected in order to perform an epidemiological molecular study (the MAPEC_LIFE study), investigate lifestyles of the children that could have effect on their health status, and assess possible association between lifestyles and socio-cultural factors. Methods: A questionnaire composed of 148 questions was administered in two different seasons to parents of children attending 18 primary schools in five Italian cities (Torino, Brescia, Pisa, Perugia and Lecce) to obtain information regarding the criteria for exclusion from the study, demographic, anthropometric and health information on the children, as well as some aspects on their lifestyles and parental characteristics. The results were analyzed in order to assess the frequency of specific conditions among the different seasons and cities and the association between lifestyles and socio-economic factors. Results: The final cohort was composed of 1,164 children (50.9 boys, 95.4% born in Italy). Frequency of some factors appeared different in terms of the survey season (physical activity in the open air, the ways of cooking certain foods) and among the various cities (parents’ level of education and rate of employment, sport, traffic near the home, type of heating, exposure to passive smoking, ways of cooking certain foods). Exposure to passive smoking and cooking fumes, obesity, residence in areas with heavy traffic, frequency of outdoor play and consumption of barbecued and fried foods were higher among children living in families with low educational and/or occupational level while children doing sports and consuming toasted bread were more frequent in families with high socio-economic level. Conclusions: The socio-economic level seems to affect the lifestyles of children enrolled in the study including those that could cause health effects. Many factors are linked to the geographical area and may depend on environmental, cultural and social aspects of the city of residence

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT DEVELOPMENT: THE ROLE OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT

The paper represent a theoretical attempt to investigate the role that the local government can play in improving the level of social capital for the development of industrial districts. The social capital is not, as generally suggested by the socio-economic literature, an individual attitude towards something which does not imply privately appropriable economic benefits, as it is for a pure public good (which would not imply privately appropriable benefits). Social capital should be interpreted as a public component of an investment which implies private and public benefits entangled with each other. Firms could not have sufficient incentive to increase its investment in social capital, because this investment strictly depends on the economic convenience of investing in the impure public good. Starting from this point of view, we underline the importance of investing local public resources (funds, time and effort) for the development of the local social capital

Voluntary work and cultural capital: an exploratory analysis for Italian regional data

This paper addresses the relationship between voluntary work and cultural capital, providing a conceptual framework by moving from a cultural economics standpoint to a relational goods theory approach. The two main hypotheses relate to a positive relationship between cultural capital and voluntary work and a significant relationship between relational cultural goods and voluntary work. We corroborate these assumptions empirically by applying a two-stage least squares regression to Italian data at the regional level. The data are drawn from official sources and cover 20 Italian regions over the span of 2005–2013. The results show that volunteering is stimulated by cultural participation in more niche cultural goods and is shared by individuals with some knowledge and human and artistic sensitivity. Moreover, the consumption of specific cultural goods with a strong relational component, such as museums, exhibitions and theatre, has a significant impact on volunteer activity

EU INTEGRATION, HEALTH STANDARDS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Health is one of the most important assets for human beings, since it allows people to fully use their capacity. Poor or compromised health reduces the well-being of individuals, by affecting their future incomes, wealth and consumption. For policy impli

REDUCING POVERTY AS A DRIVER OF DEVELOPMENT

It is ten years after Lisbon and in the year dedicated to poverty alleviation that this paper is written in order to investigate the implications of the decisions regarding poverty reduction taken by the EU. We present a simple comparison of the risks of poverty in European countries in 2000 and 2008, before and after transfers, and our finding is a positive effect of the policies towards poverty alleviation, even if the risk of poverty is increasing. By studying the correlation between percentage of people that fall below the poverty line and GDP per capita, we do not observe a whole diverse situation in Europe, with only few minor differences between rich and poor countries. We also discuss the importance of alternative approaches in estimating poverty, by means of a multidimensional method which considers a multitude of aspects in the quality of life