La tutela penale ambientale e la nozione di rifiuto fra istanze soprannazionali ed approdi nostrani

Essays on the political economy of European integration

Recently, a rising interest in political and economic integration/disintegration issues has been developed in the political economy field. This growing strand of literature partly draws on traditional issues of fiscal federalism and optimum public good provision and focuses on a trade-off between the benefits of centralization, arising from economies of scale or externalities, and the costs of harmonizing policies as a consequence of the increased heterogeneity of individual preferences in an international union or in a country composed of at least two regions. This thesis stems from this strand of literature and aims to shed some light on two highly relevant aspects of the political economy of European integration. The first concerns the role of public opinion in the integration process; more precisely, how economic benefits and costs of integration shape citizens' support for European Union (EU) membership. The second is the allocation of policy competences among different levels of government: European, national and regional. Chapter 1 introduces the topics developed in this thesis by reviewing the main recent theoretical developments in the political economy analysis of integration processes. It is structured as follows. First, it briefly surveys a few relevant articles on economic theories of integration and disintegration processes (Alesina and Spolaore 1997, Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina et al. 2000, Casella and Feinstein 2002) and discusses their relevance for the study of the impact of economic benefits and costs on public opinion attitude towards the EU. Subsequently, it explores the links existing between such political economy literature and theories of fiscal federalism, especially with regard to normative considerations concerning the optimal allocation of competences in a union. Chapter 2 firstly proposes a model of citizens’ support for membership of international unions, with explicit reference to the EU; subsequently it tests the model on a panel of EU countries. What are the factors that influence public opinion support for the European Union (EU)? In international relations theory, the idea that citizens' support for the EU depends on material benefits deriving from integration, i.e. whether European integration makes individuals economically better off (utilitarian support), has been common since the 1970s, but has never been the subject of a formal treatment (Hix 2005). A small number of studies in the 1990s have investigated econometrically the link between national economic performance and mass support for European integration (Eichenberg and Dalton 1993; Anderson and Kalthenthaler 1996), but only making informal assumptions. The main aim of Chapter 2 is thus to propose and test our model with a view to providing a more complete and theoretically grounded picture of public support for the EU. Following theories of utilitarian support, we assume that citizens are in favour of membership if they receive economic benefits from it. To develop this idea, we propose a simple political economic model drawing on the recent economic literature on integration and disintegration processes. The basic element is the existence of a trade-off between the benefits of centralisation and the costs of harmonising policies in presence of heterogeneous preferences among countries. The approach we follow is that of the recent literature on the political economy of international unions and the unification or break-up of nations (Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina and Wacziarg 1999, Alesina et al. 2001, 2005a, to mention only the relevant). The general perspective is that unification provides returns to scale in the provision of public goods, but reduces each member state’s ability to determine its most favoured bundle of public goods. In the simple model presented in Chapter 2, support for membership of the union is increasing in the union’s average income and in the loss of efficiency stemming from being outside the union, and decreasing in a country’s average income, while increasing heterogeneity of preferences among countries points to a reduced scope of the union. Afterwards we empirically test the model with data on the EU; more precisely, we perform an econometric analysis employing a panel of member countries over time. The second part of Chapter 2 thus tries to answer the following question: does public opinion support for the EU really depend on economic factors? The findings are broadly consistent with our theoretical expectations: the conditions of the national economy, differences in income among member states and heterogeneity of preferences shape citizens’ attitude towards their country’s membership of the EU. Consequently, this analysis offers some interesting policy implications for the present debate about ratification of the European Constitution and, more generally, about how the EU could act in order to gain more support from the European public. Citizens in many member states are called to express their opinion in national referenda, which may well end up in rejection of the Constitution, as recently happened in France and the Netherlands, triggering a European-wide political crisis. These events show that nowadays understanding public attitude towards the EU is not only of academic interest, but has a strong relevance for policy-making too. Chapter 3 empirically investigates the link between European integration and regional autonomy in Italy. Over the last few decades, the double tendency towards supranationalism and regional autonomy, which has characterised some European States, has taken a very interesting form in this country, because Italy, besides being one of the founding members of the EU, also implemented a process of decentralisation during the 1970s, further strengthened by a constitutional reform in 2001. Moreover, the issue of the allocation of competences among the EU, the Member States and the regions is now especially topical. The process leading to the drafting of European Constitution (even if then it has not come into force) has attracted much attention from a constitutional political economy perspective both on a normative and positive point of view (Breuss and Eller 2004, Mueller 2005). The Italian parliament has recently passed a new thorough constitutional reform, still to be approved by citizens in a referendum, which includes, among other things, the so called “devolution”, i.e. granting the regions exclusive competence in public health care, education and local police. Following and extending the methodology proposed in a recent influential article by Alesina et al. (2005b), which only concentrated on the EU activity (treaties, legislation, and European Court of Justice’s rulings), we develop a set of quantitative indicators measuring the intensity of the legislative activity of the Italian State, the EU and the Italian regions from 1973 to 2005 in a large number of policy categories. By doing so, we seek to answer the following broad questions. Are European and regional legislations substitutes for state laws? To what extent are the competences attributed by the European treaties or the Italian Constitution actually exerted in the various policy areas? Is their exertion consistent with the normative recommendations from the economic literature about their optimum allocation among different levels of government? The main results show that, first, there seems to be a certain substitutability between EU and national legislations (even if not a very strong one), but not between regional and national ones. Second, the EU concentrates its legislative activity mainly in international trade and agriculture, whilst social policy is where the regions and the State (which is also the main actor in foreign policy) are more active. Third, at least two levels of government (in some cases all of them) are significantly involved in the legislative activity in many sectors, even where the rationale for that is, at best, very questionable, indicating that they actually share a larger number of policy tasks than that suggested by the economic theory. It appears therefore that an excessive number of competences are actually shared among different levels of government. From an economic perspective, it may well be recommended that some competences be shared, but only when the balance between scale or spillover effects and heterogeneity of preferences suggests so. When, on the contrary, too many levels of government are involved in a certain policy area, the distinction between their different responsibilities easily becomes unnecessarily blurred. This may not only leads to a slower and inefficient policy-making process, but also risks to make it too complicate to understand for citizens, who, on the contrary, should be able to know who is really responsible for a certain policy when they vote in national,local or European elections or in referenda on national or European constitutional issues.

Unitarietà della successione mortis causa, successioni anomale e separate, alla luce delle recenti evoluzioni legislative

L'Autore opera una ricostruzione teorica del concetto di unità della successione, apprezzandone diverse sfumature: un significato più ristretto, per cui esso si lega al concetto di universitas ed individua appunto come unico il complesso delle situazioni giuridiche soggettive riferibili al de cuius; un secondo concetto più ampio, per cui unitarietà della successione mortis causa è il fenomeno per cui la successione nella somma delle posizioni giuridiche spettanti al defunto riceve una unica regolazione legislativa; un terzo profilo, che abbandona il concetto di successione mortis causa in senso giuridico, per accostarsi ad un concetto (piuttosto di natura economica)di unità della vicenda successoria. Se il concetto di unità della successione possiede un triplice, valore, anche la deroga ad esso potrà assumere diverse vesti, a seconda che incida sul primo, sul secondo o sul terzo di questi significati. Se il terzo profilo riguarda piuttosto un concetto economico e non tecnico di successione, ed importa conseguentemente deroghe solo indirette all’unità della successione, l’anomalia può essere di due tipi: possono essere dettate regole particolari per singoli beni, che però rimangono entro l’unica massa ereditaria, pur avendo una destinazione loro propria, e può invece essere creata dal legislatore una separata massa per cui si fa luogo ad una distinta regolazione successoria. Procedendo nella classificazione, le ipotesi di una deroga del primo tipo possono essere definite successioni speciali, riservando alla seconda classe di anomalie il nome di successioni separate. Conclusivamente, l'autore rileva che la disciplina della vicenda successoria, così come consegnata dalla tradizione e sancita ancora nelle norme della codificazione del 1942, non è più caratterizzata dall’assoluto dominio del principio di unità della successione, anche perché non si è rivelata, nella esperienza giuridica successiva alla codificazione, del tutto adeguata, in relazione a determinate categorie di beni e ad alcune categorie di soggetti coinvolti. Il legislatore ha infatti ritenuto di introdurre deroghe, via via maggiori al principio, con riferimento sia ai beni d’impresa sia alla particolare posizione – ed agli interessi tutelati – dei soggetti più vicini al de cuius, come il coniuge ed i parenti che vivessero a suo carico.

L'arbitrato estero

La tesi tratta l'istituto dell'arbitrato estero sotto la duplice prospettiva internazionale e italiana. Particolare attenzione è dedicata alla disciplina dettata in materia dalla Convenzione di New York del 1958 in tema di riconoscimento e l'esecuzione delle sentenze arbitrali estere, con uno sguardo preferenziale alle interpretazioni e alle applicazioni concrete della stessa in campo internazionale. Ugualmente si affrontano i temi che maggiormente interessano il fenomeno arbitrale, e segnatamente il regime di circolazione del suo prodotto finale, con particolare attenzione ai rapporti fra il fenomeno arbitrale da un lato e i sistemi giurisdizionali dall'altro (con riferimento all'applicabilità a livello internazionale di principi come la Competence-Competence o il rilievo del meccanismo del forum prorgatum). Illuminata la prospettiva internazionale si analizza l'istituto in chiave interna: dalla definizione del concetto di arbitrato interno ed estero secondo l'ordinamento italiano, all'analisi delle condizioni richieste per il riconoscimento e della relativa procedura, fino ad affrontare gli aspetti ancora discussi, in particolare in relazione al trattamento da riservarsi ai lodi de eadem re e in generale al regime giuridico da riconoscersi alla clausola che preveda arbitrato estero, anche il relazione alle evoluzioni giurisprudenziali e legislative degli ultimi anni. Lo studio si conclude con uno sguardo alla circolabilità extra moenia del prodotto arbitrale italiano.

The school environment as a teacher. The role of space and place in enhancing ecological literacy and social competence development in children and young people

Can space and place foster child development, and in particular social competence and ecological literacy? If yes, how can space and place do that? This study shows that the answer to the first question is positive and then tries to explain the way space and place can make a difference. The thesis begins with the review of literature from different disciplines – child development and child psychology, education, environmental psychology, architecture and landscape architecture. Some bridges among such disciplines are created and in some cases the ideas from the different areas of research merge: thus, this is an interdisciplinary study. The interdisciplinary knowledge from these disciplines is translated into a range of design suggestions that can foster the development of social competence and ecological literacy. Using scientific knowledge from different disciplines is a way of introducing forms of evidence into the development of design criteria. However, the definition of design criteria also has to pass through the study of a series of school buildings and un-built projects: case studies can give a positive contribution to the criteria because examples and good practices can help “translating” the theoretical knowledge into design ideas and illustrations. To do that, the different case studies have to be assessed in relation to the various themes that emerged in the literature review. Finally, research by design can be used to help define the illustrated design criteria: based on all the background knowledge that has been built, the role of the architect is to provide a series of different design solutions that can give answers to the different “questions” emerged in the literature review.

Competence: intelligence in sheep's clothing? Culture, representations, and cognitive performance

The first aim of this thesis was to contribute to the understanding of how cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1983/1986) affects students achievements and performances. We specifically claimed that the effect of cultural capital is at least partly explained by the positioning students take towards the principles they use to attribute competence and intelligence. The testing of these hypothesis have been framed within the social representations theory, specifically in the formulation of the Lemanic school approach (Doise, 1986).

Lotta alla criminalita' e salvaguardia dei diritti e delle liberta' fondamentali nell'U.E.

La ricerca è dedicata a verificare se e come, a livello dell’Unione europea, la lotta alla criminalità (ed in particolare quella organizzata) venga condotta nel rispetto di diritti e libertà fondamentali, e se la cooperazione tra Stati membri su questo fronte possa giungere a promuovere standard omogenei ed elevati di tutela degli stessi. Gli ambiti di cooperazione interessati sono principalmente quello giudiziario in materia penale e quello di polizia, e la ritrosia degli Stati a cedere all’Unione competenze in materia si è accompagnata ad un ritardo ancora maggiore dell’emersione, nell’ambito degli stessi, della dimensione dei diritti. Ciò ha reso molto difficile lo sviluppo completo ed equilibrato di uno “spazio di libertà, sicurezza e giustizia” (art. 67 TFUE). L’assetto istituzionale introdotto dal Trattato di Lisbona e l’attribuzione di valore giuridico vincolante alla Carta hanno però posto le basi per il superamento della condizione precedente, anche grazie al fatto che, negli ambiti richiamati, la salvaguardia dei diritti è divenuta competenza ed obiettivo esplicito dell’Unione. Centrale è per la ricerca la cooperazione giudiziaria in materia penale, che ha visto la ricca produzione normativa di stampo repressivo recentemente bilanciata da interventi del legislatore europeo a finalità garantista e promozionale. L’analisi degli strumenti nella prospettiva indicata all’inizio dell’esposizione è quindi oggetto della prima parte dell’elaborato. La seconda parte affronta invece la cooperazione di polizia e quello degli interventi volti alla confisca dei beni e ad impedire il riciclaggio, misure – queste ultime - di particolare rilievo soprattutto per il contrasto al crimine organizzato. Sottesi all’azione dell’Unione in queste materie sono, in modo preponderante, due diritti: quello alla salvaguardia dei dati personali e quello al rispetto della proprietà privata. Questi, anche in ragione delle peculiarità che li caratterizzano e della loro natura di diritti non assoluti, sono analizzati con particolare attenzione.