PROPOSAL FOR A TERRITORIAL ASSESSMENT OF THE EFFECTS OF AGRICULTURAL POLICIES WITH A GEOREFERRED MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING MODEL: A CASE STUDY

The primary sector has always had a fundamental role in human activities. In recent years, major industrialised and developed countries increased demand for the positive externalities generated by the agriculture, while they reduced the importance of the sector in terms of production of food. The evolution of public intervention followed the change of the role of agriculture and has tried to propose instruments able to consider and balance both private and public interests. It is especially with the Mid Term Review (MTR) that policy maker has tried to implement a system of subsidies that bound the farmer to a series of activities related either directly or indirectly with the collective welfare. Moving from coupled aid to decoupled one linked to the respect of cross-compliance means changing the concept of public intervention. In this context, a useful evaluation tool should be able to analyse and to catch the changes in farmers behaviour by considering also the territory in order to locate the effects. The territory, as a matter of fact, is not only the place where the effects passively fall, but it is capable of interfering directly in the farmers decision-making process. Therefore, the development of specific methodologies able to analyze farmers’ behaviours and specific instruments linked to the territorial analysis could represent an important tool to assess agricultural policies effects both on enterprises and territory. In this framework a methodology based on the Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) and on the implementation of a Geographic Information System (GIS) seems to answer the several questions about the policies’ assessment and land-use planning. The present research integrates this two methodologies. PMP is used in a territorial model and it is based on the optimization of an objective function representing a farm gross margin while GIS allows to analyze territorial aspects and to locate the effects of the policy. This tool has been tested in a specific case study in order to analyse the effects of the CAP Reform (in particular decoupling, cross-compliance and modulation) on the primary sector and on farm land use potential changes. The innovative aspect of the research is the attempt to study the impact of agricultural policy through an optimization model that considers among its variables also the specific localization of farms. The final result is represented by the creation of georeferred maps in which the land use changes are evaluated and interpreted under the framework of multifunctionality, in terms of quantitative analysis regarding landscape and, abandonment risk and cattle distribution.Agricultural and Food Policy, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Default Logic in a Coherent Setting

In this talk - based on the results of a forthcoming paper (Coletti, Scozzafava and Vantaggi 2002), presented also by one of us at the Conference on "Non Classical Logic, Approximate Reasoning and Soft-Computing" (Anacapri, Italy, 2001) - we discuss the problem of representing default rules by means of a suitable coherent conditional probability, defined on a family of conditional events. An event is singled-out (in our approach) by a proposition, that is a statement that can be either true or false; a conditional event is consequently defined by means of two propositions and is a 3-valued entity, the third value being (in this context) a conditional probability

Introduction and notations

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Complexes With Biologically Active Ligands. Part 101 Inhibition of Carbonic Anhydrase Isozymes I and II With Metal Complexes of Imidazo[2,1−b ]-1,3,4-Thiadiazole-2-Sulfonamide

The title compound was prepared by an improved variant of the literature procedure, and metal complexes containing its anion and the following metal ions: Zn(II), Cd(II), Hg(II), Co(II), Ni(II), Cu(II), V(IV), Fe(III) and Ag(I) were synthesized and characterized by standard procedures (elemental analysis; IR, electronic, NMR and EPR spectroscopy; TG, magnetic and conductimetric measurements). The parent sulfonamide and its metal complexes are potent inhibitors of two carbonic anhydrase (CA) isozymes, CA I and II, and they might possess applications as selective cerebrovasodilating agents