Measuring human and Sustainable Development: An Integrated Approach for European Countries

During the last few years, sustainable development has represented one of the most important policy goals at global level and how to design specific policy actions, measuring performance and results continues to present a challenge. Scientific research has explored different analysis directions in order to identify a synthetic indicator to evaluate policy planning and achievements that goes beyond traditional income indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In consideration of the social dimension of sustainable development, including health, education and employment, the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Programme represents a widely accepted methodology to be used as a starting point for building a more sustainable-oriented development index. The aim of this paper is to identify a numerical measure of what Amartya Sen defined as “sustainable human development” using a human development framework and adapt it taking into account more specific environmental aspects. For this purpose, building a complex Sustainable Human Development Index (SHDI) may be a difficult task because of data availability and the European countries – especially the European Union - could be a useful pilot area for testing the methodology. The most recent efforts of the EU to standardize statistical information at country level enable us to build more complex indicators, including those with economic, social and environmental dimensions. Long-term sustainability requires the maintenance of capital stock to guarantee constant or growing welfare levels. In a human development perspective, the sustainability condition has been directly analysed on the well-being side, assuming that a constant or growing SHDI could be the result of constant growing capital assets. An SHDI represents the core element of a comparative analysis to assess the effectiveness and the distributional effects of European policies, including environmental actions. Finally, a sensitivity analysis of the results will enable us to underline the key factors of effective sustainable human development and, at the same time test the real meaning of such a modified composite index compared with the existing GDP and HDI.human development, sustainable development, sustainability indicators

The building information modeling for the retrofitting of existing buildings. A case study in the University of Cagliari.

Italy's very consistent buildings stock has become the major field for real estate investments and for the related projects and actions. The urge of working on built environment is however facing some crucial issues. The first is the lack of documentation on the construction history and on the real constructive layout of existing buildings (in terms of components, installations, plants, etc.). The second is the poor activity in surveying their current status, with reference to use (energy behaviour, real consumptions, etc.) and maintenance (conservation status, previous maintenance works, compliance with current regulations, etc.). These obstacles cause a deep inefficiency in the planning, programming and controlling of requalification and/or refunctionalisation works. Starting from these assumptions, this paper shows the findings of a research shared by the Politecnico of Milan and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture of the University of Cagliari. It is aimed at testing the use of building information modeling (BIM) to structure the necessary knowledge to evaluate intervention scenarios. The research is focused on the Mandolesi Pavilion of the University of Cagliari, designed by Enrico Mandolesi. It is a highly stimulating architectural object because it incorporates values that require a conservative approach, but at the same time, like most contemporary buildings, it was designed and built for innovation and not for “long duration”. The work has actually led to the realization of a BIM model of the case study. It represents the first prefiguration of an approach that develops from construction history and continues with advanced diagnostics on the statical and energy performances of the building. The model formalizes knowledge and information on a significant building, aimed at its management. It allows also the setting of intervention scenarios that can be evaluated with real-time simulations of cost, time and ROI

Constraining Light-Quark Yukawa Couplings from Higgs Distributions

We propose a novel strategy to constrain the bottom and charm Yukawa couplings by exploiting LHC measurements of transverse momentum distributions in Higgs production. Our method does not rely on the reconstruction of exclusive final states or heavy-flavour tagging. Compared to other proposals it leads to an enhanced sensitivity to the Yukawa couplings due to distortions of the differential Higgs spectra from emissions which either probe quark loops or are associated to quark-initiated production. We derive constraints using data from LHC Run I, and we explore the prospects of our method at future LHC runs. Finally, we comment on the possibility of bounding the strange Yukawa coupling.Comment: Added analysis of the Higgs transverse momentum distribution. Version published in Physical Review Letter

Gender disparities in Italy from a Human Development Perspective

(1) All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions. (2) It is the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic or social nature which constrain the freedom and equality of citizens, thereby impeding the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social organisation of the country.* Sixty years after the first political election in which women voted in Italy (1946), and considering that the Article 3 of the Italian Constitution reminds the role of the republic to promote formal (art. 3.1) and substantial (art. 3.2) equality of Italian citizens, the aim of this paper is to analyse, which is situation of the gender disparities in Italy and how such disparities are distributed among Italian regions. In order to quantify such disparities a comprehensive framework for assessment is required. First, we will compare at national and regional level traditional indicators as income per capita, employment and educational level. Secondly, adopting a human development perspective, we will build some regional Gender Human Development indices with the aim to catch the disparities in terms of capabilities for men and women. Finally to better understand our results, we will build an index of empowerment using data concerning number of seats in national parliament and regional assemblies, in order to catch such existing disparities from a different point of view. In our opinion, the gender disparities in the empowerment dimension and the gender disparities in the other social dimensions are mutually reinforcing, where lack of equally distributed political power corresponds to less gender-related policy actions, and therefore wider disparities in daily life.Gender disparities, Human Development, Empowerment

A New Light Particle in B Decays?

We investigate the possibility whether the tensions with SM expectations observed in several b -> sll transitions, including hints for lepton flavour non-universality, could be due to the decay of B into a new light resonance. We find that qualitative agreement with the data can be obtained with a light vector resonance dominantly decaying invisibly. This scenario predicts a shift in the muon anomalous magnetic moment that could explain the long-standing discrepancy. The most stringent constraint comes from searches for B decays with missing energy. A striking prediction is a strong q^2 dependence of the lepton flavour universality ratios R_K and R_K* that should allow to clearly confirm or rule out this possibility experimentally. We also comment on the possible connection of the invisible decay product with Dark Matter.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. v2: typos corrected, references and clarifications adde

A project-based system for including farmers in the EU ETS

Farmers in the EU do not trade greenhouse gases under the Kyoto agreement. This is an empirical puzzle because agriculture is a significant contributor of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the EU and may harvest private net gains from trade. Furthermore, the US has strongly advocated land-use practices as ‘the missing link’ in past climate negotiations. We argue that farmers have relatively low marginal reduction costs and that consequences in terms of the effect on permit price and technology are overall positive in the EU Emission Trading System (ETS). Thus, we propose a project-based system for including the farming practices in the EU ETS that reduces the uncertainty from measuring emission reduction in this sector. The system encourages GHG reduction either by introducing a new and less polluting practice or by reducing the polluting activity. When doing so, farmers will receive GHG permits corresponding to the amount of reduction which can be stored for later use or sold in the EU ETS

Shifting the Focus from Paradigms to Goals: A New Approach Towards Defining and Assessing Wellbeing

GDP as an indicator is relatively recent. It was introduced seventy years ago and like many other institutions it is an issue of the historical period in which it was created in the years between the Great Depression and World War II. The adoption of the GDP as an indicator is not a neutral choice, but rather the logical consequence of a well-defined theoretical paradigm in which GDP appears the essential tool apt to promote well-being and development. Since then, however, times have changed, new problems have emerged and new theories and approaches have been developed to address them. Starting from these considerations the paper examines the problems connected with adopting an indicator as an absolute measure of progress. Indicators, in fact, are not neutral: they are the result of a specific economic approach; hence they are biased in nature and contribute to define policies that are implemented. After reviewing the main theories and indicators introduced by literature in the last sixty years, we propose to adopt a different approach according to which progress is measured against stated goals and not in absolute terms. Subsequently, we present an example of this approach by introducing a new indicator (ICSES – Index of Competitiveness and Social and Environmental Sustainability) to measure the performance of EU countries vis-à-vis the goals explicitly stated by the European Union.ISES, GDP , Sustainability, Human Development, Wellbeing