Italy has been characterized, throughout its history as a unified country, by large regional differentials in the levels of income, industrialization and socio-economic development. This paper aims at testing the New Economic Geography hypothesis on the role of market access in explaining these...

New entrepreneurial ventures may represent a viable and effective mechanism to transform academic knowledge into regional economic growth. We test this notion for the Italian provinces between 2001 and 2006. We evaluate three outputs of academic activities: teaching, research and Intellectual...

The paper argues that the way in which social scientists and policy-makers have conceptualised the Italian territory has significantly changed since the 1950s as a consequence of methodological shifts and attempts to capture the changing territorial organisation of the economy. In retrospect,...

The interest for the measurement of well-being has been increasing among scholars and major international institutions. This paper proposes a synthetic index for ten dimensions of well-being combining a set of 57 variables at the Italian regional level and an overall indicator of well-being by...

The contribution of this paper to the social capital literature is threefold. It first develops an innovative framework for measuring social capital, which allows for quantification of five different components of the multidimensional concept of social capital. Secondly, it provides a single,...

This paper makes an attempt to estimate the impact of regional variety and trade linkages on regional economic growth by means of export and import data by Italian province (NUTS 3) and sector (3-digit) for the period 1995-2003. Our results show strong evidence of related variety contributing to...

This paper investigates the impact of regional sectoral diversity on regional employment growth in Italy over the period 1991-2001. Assuming that externalities may be stronger between industries selling similar products or sharing the same skills and technology (i.e. related industries), we...

In a multivariate setting, we document that renewable energy generation has a positive impact on economic growth at the regional level in Italy. We do so by adopting panel data unit-root and cointegration tests as well as Granger non-causality tests relying on the system GMM estimator. Our...

It is well-known that Italy has two distinguishing characteristics closely intertwined with each other and unusual for an advanced country: a persisting specialization in traditional industries and deep internal disparities. The Italian "anomaly" is rooted in the predominance of clusters of...

New entrepreneurial ventures may represent a viable and effective mechanism to transform academic knowledge into regional economic growth. We test this notion for the Italian provinces between 2001 and 2006. We evaluate three outputs of academic activities: teaching, research and Intellectual...