Italian wines and Asian markets: opportunities and threats under new policy scenarios and competitive dynamics

The world wine market is facing a particularly difficult situation. Both the EU and New World (NW) Countries are trying to manage this critical moment by filling reciprocal gaps in order to increase their competitiveness at a global level and to strengthen their position in key strategic markets. On the EU side, one of the fundamental aspects of this changing framework is the evolution of the Common Market Organisation (CMO) for the wine sector. The first pivotal change is the fact that a parcel of land cannot host more than one designation of origin (either Geographical Indication – GI – Denominazione di Origine Controllata – DOC – or Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita – DOCG), thus completely changing the approach to vintage choices, which characterised the Italian production in the last 50 years. A second important variation is the introduction of the possibility to show grape varieties and the vintage year on table wines (a strategy often used by NW producers). Conversely, on the NW side, the changes are mainly relative to the increase in the use of European grape varieties and the emphasis on the region-grape combination as an element of excellence.International Relations/Trade, Marketing,

Productivity growth in the winery sector: evidence from Italy and Spain

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to estimate total productivity change in the winery sector, decomposing it into efficiency change and technical change. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is based on the estimation of the Malmquist productivity index for a sample of Spanish and Italian wineries between 2005 and 2013. Findings – The results show very low efficiency levels for the wineries under study. Further, Spanish and Italian wineries show a decrease in their average annual productivity for the period of time analysed. Practical implications – The analysis of the efficiency and the productivity of the wineries is crucial to improve their competitiveness and guarantee their survival. Originality/value – For the first time, a comparative analysis is carried out with data from two major wine-producing countries

Peripheral accumulation of newly produced T and B lymphocytes in natalizumab-treated multiple sclerosis patients

The anti-α4 monoclonal antibody natalizumab inhibits lymphocyte extravasation into the central nervous system and increases peripheral T and B lymphocytes in multiple sclerosis patients. To investigate whether the lymphocyte accumulation was due to a higher lymphocyte production, an altered homeostasis, or a differential transmigration of lymphocyte subsets through endothelia, T-cell receptor excision circles and kappa-deleting recombination excision circles were quantified before and after treatment, T-cell receptor repertoire was analyzed by spectratyping, and T- and B-lymphocyte subset migration was studied using transwell coated with vascular and lymphatic endothelial cells. We found that the number of newly produced T and B lymphocytes is increased because of a high release and of a low propensity of naïve subsets to migrate across endothelial cells. In some patients this resulted in an enlargement of T-cell heterogeneity. Because new lymphocyte production ensures the integrity of immune surveillance, its quantification could be used to monitor natalizumab therapy safety

Thymic involution and rising disease incidence with age

For many cancer types, incidence rises rapidly with age as an apparent power law, supporting the idea that cancer is caused by a gradual accumulation of genetic mutations. Similarly, the incidence of many infectious diseases strongly increases with age. Here, combining data from immunology and epidemiology, we show that many of these dramatic age-related increases in incidence can be modeled based on immune system decline, rather than mutation accumulation. In humans, the thymus atrophies from infancy, resulting in an exponential decline in T cell production with a half-life of ∼16 years, which we use as the basis for a minimal mathematical model of disease incidence. Our model outperforms the power law model with the same number of fitting parameters in describing cancer incidence data across a wide spectrum of different cancers, and provides excellent fits to infectious disease data. This framework provides mechanistic insight into cancer emergence, suggesting that age-related decline in T cell output is a major risk factor

Trends and Patterns in the Nexus Between Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation: a Bibliometric Review and Research Agenda

Scholars’ interest in social entrepreneurship (SE) and social innovation (SI) has been growing in recent decades. Despite the literature’s contribution to the scientific maturity of these fields via rigorous bibliometric reviews, whether social innovation occurs within social entrepreneurship is still unclear. The extant reviews also remain limited by their use of traditional bibliometric indicators. We therefore address these theoretical and methodological limitations via a bibliometric analysis of the intersection of these two theoretical domains, combining co-citation analysis, historiography, and bibliographic coupling. Demonstrating the recent theoretical evolution of social innovation research under the social entrepreneurship umbrella, we document the beginning of a new trend that can open new research pathways. Thus, we contribute to academic research by documenting the theoretical developments, clusters, and groups of interests at the intersection of SE and SI. Finally, our suggestions for future research may support the proliferation of and cross-pollination among these studies

Life's work and the gendered processes of migrant precarity: the case of Mongolian migrant women in Seoul, South Korea

In this thesis, I identify and explain the empirical processes - namely citizenship-making, labour differentiation, and ethnicisation - which reproduce the various forms of gendered precarity that Mongolian migrant women experience in Korea. I explain how these three processes are interconnected, and mutually exacerbate the legal, labour, and social precarity they each reproduce. By focusing on Mongolian marriage and labour migrant women, I illustrate how different groups of migrants navigate and mitigate these processes and their outcomes in distinct ways. With the concept of Life’s Work at the centre of my conceptual framework, and gender as a complementary conceptual lens, this thesis is based on approximately six months of qualitative fieldwork in the Seoul metropolitan area, split across two phases between October 2021 and May 2022. Conducting fieldwork whilst COVID-19 measures were still in place, I adopted life-story, in-depth, and semi-structured interviews as key methods. Interviews were conducted in person and online with Mongolian marriage and labour migrant women In this thesis, I firstly argue that the empirical process of citizenship-making, which is deeply informed by gendered expectations determining migrant women’s value in Korea’s visa system, contributes to the social reproduction of Life’s Work in the form of legal precarity. Secondly, I show that pre-existing material structural barriers, stemming from the social structure and relations of gender, reproduce the devaluation of migrant women’s market value, which in turns results in migrant women’s labour precarity, which I define as the devaluation of their human capital and subsequent marginalisation into visa-specific precarious segments of the labour market. Finally, I argue that the everyday process of ethnicisation that Mongolian marriage and labour migrant women deal with, contributes to the social reproduction of Life’s Work by reproducing everyday social precarity. By social precarity, I am referring to the social hierarchisation of Mongolian women on the basis of their nationality and ethnic traits, and gender