In the last years a central issue in regional economic growth debate is represented by the convergence problem. Many empirical economists have noticed that per-worker GDP of poor regions tend to converge to those of richer regions. However more recently it has been observed that the economic...

Isotropic processes form an inadequate basis in modelling many spatially distributed data. In particular environmental phenomena often have strong anisotropic spatial variation, especially when the regions monitored are very large. We extend a recently proposed optimal sampling strategy by...

In sampling theory the large concentration of the population with respect to most surveyed variables constitutes a problem which is difficult to tackle by means of classical tools. One possible solution is given by cut-off sampling, which explicitly prescribes to discard part of the population;...

This paper proposes a local stationarity approach in EBLUP estimation with the aim to improve the reliability of relative poverty estimates in small areas. The results of the experimentations, performed in the framework of the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey (EU-SILC),...

In this paper we study Maximum Likelihood Estimation of the parameters of a Pareto mixture. Application of standard techniques to a mixture of Pareto is problematic. For this reason we develop two alternative algorithms. The first one is the Simulated Annealing and the second one is based on...

A multiple imputation technique is proposed to measure sustainable development using models of structural equations (LISREL) for the treatment of missing data. The reliability of such technique is verified comparing the estimation model with missing data to the estimation model with imputed...