The EU-China Partnership on Climat Change: Bilateralism Begetting Multilateralism in Promoting a Climate Change Regime?

On 5 September 2005, during the 8th EU-China Summit held in Beijing, the European Union and China signed an agreement to establish a bilateral Partnership on Climate Change. The two parties pledged to strengthen the dialogue on climate change policies, exchange views on key issues in climate change negotiations and develop concrete action to tackle climate change by carrying out specific cooperative projects. By presenting an analysis of the outcomes of this bilateral initiative from the EU and China, this paper tries to assess if the EU-China partnership on climate change can be considered, as intended, an important contribution to a multilateral solution to climate change, or if this bilateral relationship only functions at a rhetorical level without producing concrete results

Advances in the Economic Analysis of Residential Water Use: An Introduction

The aim of this Special Issue is to gather evidence on the impact of price policies (PP) and non-price policies (NPP) in shaping residential water use in a context of increased water scarcity. Indeed, a large body of the empirical economic literature on residential water demand has been devoted to measuring the impact of PP (water price increases, use of block rate pricing or peak pricing, etc.). The consensus is that the residential water demand is inelastic with respect to water price, but not perfectly. Given the low water price elasticity, pricing schemes may not always be effective tools for modifying household water behaviors. This is puzzling since increasing the water price is still viewed by public authorities as the most direct economic tool for inducing water conservation behaviors. Additional evidence regarding the use of PP in shaping residential water use is then required. More recently, it has been argued that residential consumers may react to NPP, such as water conservation programs, education campaigns, or smart metering. NPP are based on the idea that residential water users can implement strategies that will result in water savings via changing their individual behaviors. Feedback information based on smart water metering is an example of approach used by some water utilities. There are still large gaps in the knowledge on the residential water demand, and in particular on the impact of PP and NPP on residential water use, household water affordability and water service performance. These topics are addressed in this Special Issue “Advances in the Economic Analysis of Residential Water Use

Exploring the link between the corporate governance and efficiency of Italian water utilities

The present paper analyzes the linkage between the corporate governance of Italian water utilities (ownership, board size and board composition) and their ef fi ciency measured through data envelopment analysis (DEA). Using a general panel data regression model, we found that board size negatively affects the ef fi ciency of water utilities. Moreover, the presence of directors with political af fi liations or who are/were members of local or national go- vernment negatively affects ef fi ciency, and the presence of directors with a degree on the board has a slight negative effect on productivity. Conversely, other variables (ownership, gender diversity and average age of board members) were found not to affect the ef fi ciency of Italian water utilities. The existence of economies of scale was also confirmed .Este artículo analiza la relación entre el gobierno corporativo de los servicios del agua italianos (propiedad, tamaño y composición del consejo) y su e fi ciencia medida a través del análisis envolvente de datos (AED). Usando un modelo general de regresión de datos de panel averiguamos que el tamaño del consejo afecta negativamente la e fi ciencia de los servicios del agua. Además, la presencia de directores con a fi liaciones políticas o que son o fueron miembros del gobierno local o nacional afecta negativamente a la e fi ciencia, y la presencia de directores con una carrera universitaria en el consejo tiene un efecto ligeramente negativo sobre la productividad. Inversamente, otras variables (propiedad, diversidad de género y edad media de los miembros del consejo) no afectan a la e fi ciencia de los servicios del agua italianos. La existencia de economías de escala también fue con fi rmada

Environmental sustainability and service quality beyond economic and financial indicators: A performance evaluation of Italian water utilities

As water utilities operate as natural monopolists and they provide essential services for human life, their activities are regulated by public authorities. The sustainable use of water resources and a specific attention on social needs should be essential goals for this kind of firms, so that the evaluation of their business should go beyond their profitability and their financial solvency. Keeping pace with the new Circular Economy paradigm and the evolution of the water regulatory framework, in this paper we suggest a global composite indicator apt to evaluate in a novel way the water utilities performance, encompassing financial and economic indexes together with environmental sustainability and service quality measures. To show its empirical implementation we evaluate the performance of Italian water utilities. The operating context is also under scrutiny focusing on specific water utility features such as size, geographical location, degree of diversification and ownership. In this light, operating in the Center and being large are considered favourable background conditions, while the South and the medium size display a significant unfavourable influence on the water utility performance. Multi-utilities are more advantaged with respect to the mono-utilities and no significant distinction can be made among the different ownership models. ispartof: Socio-Economic Planning Sciences status: Published onlin

Does water utilities' ownership matter in water pricing policy? An analysis of endogenous and environmental determinants of water tariffs in Italy

Owing to the growing importance of efficient water management, it has become crucial to understand water utilities' characteristics and the environmental factors affecting water pricing, so as to provide guidance to policy-makers. The analysis of factors influencing water tariffs is a challenging task in a context in which companies providing the service are characterized by different ownership features. Moreover, environmental factors and companies' characteristics may simultaneously influence both the decision to privatize the service and the water tariff level. Using a treatment effects model, where privatization is considered as an endogenous binary treatment variable, this paper analyzes whether and how certain relevant variables affect the tariffs levied by water utilities in Italy. The results show that higher tariffs are set in order to cover a greater amount of investments; furthermore, abundant water availability, measured by the average annual rainfall, significantly reduces prices. The data surprisingly show that tariffs are higher where the income level is lower. Significantly, after accounting for the endogeneity due to the fact that water firms are not randomly distributed between totally publicly or not totally publicly owned, our results seem to suggest that ownership does not influence the tariffs levied by water utilities

La quotazione in borsa nell’economia dell’azienda. Uno schema interpretativo per la valutazione strategica

La decisione di quotarsi è, come noto, portatrice di rilevanti cambiamenti all’interno del sistema aziendale con riferimento a molteplici aspetti della sua operatività. Come tutti i momenti di “discontinuità”, infatti, anche la quotazione dà vita a mutamenti notevoli e talvolta radicali per l’azienda, con riferimento al suo sistema ideologico-valoriale ed alla sua impostazione strategica, senza peraltro trascurare l’impatto sulle interazioni con l’ambiente e le notevoli innovazioni relative al sistema delle comunicazioni aziendali. Oltre ad ottemperare ad alcuni requisiti tecnico-giuridici imposti dalla regolamentazione, le società che decidono di quotarsi devono assolvere anche e soprattutto ad alcuni requisiti “sostanziali” - quali avere un business con buone prospettive di crescita, un management qualificato e determinato, un sistema di corporate governance allineato alle best practice internazionali e così via - che rappresentino una “garanzia” del potenziale successo dell’operazione. La conoscenza delle “condizioni di quotabilità” delle aziende costituisce quindi un primo elemento indispensabile per valutare la fattibilità dell’ingresso in borsa, a prescindere da quelli che sono i “fattori determinanti” della decisione e gli effetti attesi e/o reali che ne conseguiranno. Tuttavia, un percorso valutativo adeguato alla portata dell’evento “quotazione”, che consideri in modo adeguato le modifiche all’assetto strategico dell’azienda ed al suo sistema ideologico-valoriale, necessariamente deve procedere focalizzando l’attenzione su molteplici elementi. L’analisi deve infatti concentrarsi non solo sugli aspetti finanziari, che spesso costituiscono i principali fattori determinanti dell’ingresso in borsa, ma anche su altri fattori che comunque assumono un rilievo significativo prima, durante e successivamente alla quotazione. Il modello di analisi da noi suggerito si basa sulla definizione di cinque elementi oggetto di analisi, mutuando, almeno in parte, lo schema, consolidato in dottrina, che rappresenta il sistema delle strategie a livello aziendale e che si articola in quattro sottosistemi, fra loro coordinati ed interrelati: strategia organizzativa, strategia economico finanziaria, strategia sociale, strategia di portafoglio (e competitiva). Le classi di strategie a livello aziendale sopra richiamate sono infatti tutte inevitabilmente coinvolte nel processo di cambiamento indotto dalla quotazione. A tali sottosistemi è necessario aggiungere anche un altro elemento, la cui attenta valutazione risulta indispensabile; ci riferiamo al sistema ideologico-valoriale dell’azienda che è frequentemente soggetto, in modo estremamente rilevante, a cambiamenti in occasione della quotazione. È evidente, tuttavia, che l’articolazione dell’analisi in cinque “elementi di osservazione” distinti, se da un punto di vista cognitivo risulta utile ed apprezzabile, vista la possibilità che offre di semplificare la casistica oggetto di studio, non esime dalla necessità di considerare nell’analisi anche le relazioni reciproche che vincolano l’un l’altro i cinque elementi e dalla necessità di ricondurre a sistema le considerazioni emerse, al fine di rileggere il tutto in modo unitario. Il percorso valutativo dovrà concentrarsi, inoltre, non solo sull’analisi di “fattibilità” dei cambiamenti ritenuti necessari per quotare l’azienda in borsa con successo, ma anche sul contributo, in termini di economicità e di sostegno allo sviluppo durevole ed evolutivo, che eventualmente la scelta comporterà; infatti, nel caso di strategie “intenzionali” come la quotazione, la valutazione deve consentire una stima preventiva delle conseguenze che una decisione può avere sull’azienda, conseguenze che, tuttavia, non sempre si possono esprimere in termini oggettivi e con determinazioni quantitative. La complessità delle problematiche, l’incertezza degli effetti attesi, la numerosità delle variabili che possono influenzare direttamente ed indirettamente il risultato finale sono infatti spesso tali da richiedere di esprimere anche considerazioni qualitative, valutando, tra gli altri, anche le risorse e competenze disponibili, l’influenza della congiuntura, dell’andamento di altre emissioni, della situazione politica ed economica generale e così via. Il giudizio sulla opportunità della quotazione interessa quindi tre diversi profili, tra loro collegati sulla base di un ordine sequenziale: la fattibilità, l’economicità e la rispondenza alle esigenze di continuità e sviluppo dell’azienda. Il percorso di analisi, dunque, si svilupperà lungo cinque direttrici corrispondenti ai cinque “elementi di osservazione” individuati e riguarderà, per ciascuno, i tre profili di giudizio sopra accennati. Il lavoro si divide in tre capitoli. Il primo analizza i numerosi contributi teorici ed empirici sulla quotazione delle aziende, con particolare attenzione ai lavori di taglio “aziendalistico”, cercando di dare un inquadramento teorico di importanti tematiche quali la definizione dei “fattori determinanti” dell’ingresso in borsa, degli “effetti” della quotazione e dei costi connessi a tale decisione. Le considerazioni espresse in questa sede saranno la base di partenza per lo sviluppo dei successivi capitoli. Il secondo e terzo capitolo sono dedicati, rispettivamente, alla descrizione del modello di analisi e valutazione strategica dell’ingresso in borsa delle aziende da noi proposto ed all’approfondimento delle cinque direttrici di analisi, corrispondenti ad altrettante direttrici di cambiamento, individuate all’interno del suddetto modello: sistema ideologico-valoriale, strategia economico finanziaria, strategia organizzativa, strategia competitiva, strategia sociale. Il terzo capitolo si chiude con una rilettura in ottica sistemica del modello di analisi, al fine di ricondurre ad unità la visione dell’azienda in merito alle opportunità ed alle criticità che riguardano complessivamente l’impresa che intenda valutare la possibilità di quotarsi in borsa

Signaling in Posted Price Auctions

We study single-item single-unit Bayesian posted price auctions, where buyers arrive sequentially and their valuations for the item being sold depend on a random, unknown state of nature. The seller has complete knowledge of the actual state and can send signals to the buyers so as to disclose information about it. For instance, the state of nature may reflect the condition and/or some particular features of the item, which are known to the seller only. The problem faced by the seller is about how to partially disclose information about the state so as to maximize revenue. Unlike classical signaling problems, in this setting, the seller must also correlate the signals being sent to the buyers with some price proposals for them. This introduces additional challenges compared to standard settings. We consider two cases: the one where the seller can only send signals publicly visible to all buyers, and the case in which the seller can privately send a different signal to each buyer. As a first step, we prove that, in both settings, the problem of maximizing the seller's revenue does not admit an FPTAS unless P=NP, even for basic instances with a single buyer. As a result, in the rest of the paper, we focus on designing PTASs. In order to do so, we first introduce a unifying framework encompassing both public and private signaling, whose core result is a decomposition lemma that allows focusing on a finite set of possible buyers' posteriors. This forms the basis on which our PTASs are developed. In particular, in the public signaling setting, our PTAS employs some ad hoc techniques based on linear programming, while our PTAS for the private setting relies on the ellipsoid method to solve an exponentially-sized LP in polynomial time. In the latter case, we need a custom approximate separation oracle, which we implement with a dynamic programming approach

Water pollution in wastewater treatment plants: An efficiency analysis with undesirable output

The environmental efficiency of 96 Tuscan (Italian) wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is investigated taking into account the quality of the outgoing water in terms of pollutant. In this regard, the presence of the residual nitrogen in the outgoing treated water is considered as undesirable output. The efficiency analysis is performed by applying a novel integrated Analytic Hierarchy Process/Non-radial Directional Distance Function (AHP/NDDF) approach, combining the benefits of the two techniques. Similarly to the standard NDDF approach, the suggested model allows to include simultaneously inputs, desirable and undesirable outputs and not to overestimate the efficiency scores. At the same time, the AHP inclusion gives the possibility to directly take into account the decision maker preferences in the weighting system and to encompass some existing directional distance function models as special cases.The obtained results are then used to identify the efficiency explanatory variables: among them, the facilities' capacity, the percentage of wastewater discharged by the industrial and agricultural activities and the level of compliance with the pollutant concentration threshold set by the legislator have a significant impact on the WWTP performance. The integrated performance assessment allows the water authorities to combine the WWTP efficiency together with the environmental sustainability issue and it has the potential for further promising environmental inspections

Organisational Learning Analysis and Transfers of “Eco-City” Concepts to China

This article aims at showing the benefits of applying organisational learning theories to the study of transfers of eco‑city concepts to China. Following this recommendation in the study of the transfer of the concept of “careful urban renewal” to the city of Yangzhou, this article shows that the contribution of international cooperation to reforming local urban development practices can be strongly hindered by the extant institutional and organisational structures. Consequently, the reform process may present characteristics of instability and patchiness, in turn resulting in a selective, gradual and uncertain introduction of new approaches to city (re)development