"Tra centro e periferia" Istituzioni e processi di industrializzazione nella Sicilia del secondo dopoguerra

In Sicilia lo strumento principale che ha caratterizzato le modalità d’intervento dei poteri pubblici in economia è stato quello della partecipazione diretta o indiretta, quello cioè della Regione che si propone come ente fautore del sostegno allo sviluppo dell’industria e successivamente come soggetto imprenditore. Le formule organizzative attraverso le quali si è concretizzato l’intervento regionale in economia furono la società per azioni a partecipazione regionale, l’azienda autonoma regionale e l’ente pubblico regionale1. La storia dello sviluppo economico siciliano nel secondo dopoguerra conferma come il ricorso allo strumento dell’ente pubblico economico sia stato molto frequente nella realtà locale come, peraltro, anche in altre Regioni d’Italia. Tracce, queste, di una vicenda storica che intuiamo subito avere complesse implicazioni tali da generare la necessità di interrogarsi sul modo nel quale le istituzioni politiche hanno influito sulle dinamiche economiche siciliane nel secondo dopoguerra; per quanto noti e approfonditi siano stati infatti gli elementi caratterizzanti e i percorsi peculiari dello sviluppo economico siciliano, rimangono scarsamente approfonditi il tenore dei rapporti e i nessi politici, istituzionali ed economici tra centro e periferia, in altre parole rimane ancora parzialmente inesplorata quella parte dell’indagine inerente l’evoluzione dei processi di industrializzazione della Sicilia nel secondo dopoguerra attuata parallelamente dalle autorità regionali e dallo Stato attraverso i loro enti e strumenti. È lecito chiedersi quali siano stati i tempi, le modalità, gli ostacoli e gli eventuali risultati delle azioni di pianificazione intraprese dai poteri pubblici centrali e regionali nella prospettiva dello sviluppo economico del territorio; il coordinamento delle azioni di promozione del progresso industriale si presentava in tal senso, sin dall’inizio, come una delle sfide fondamentali per un adeguato e consistente rilancio economico delle aree più arretrate del Mezzogiorno italiano; ecco che lo studio dei provvedimenti legislativi emanati rappresenta un approfondimento indispensabile e obiettivo primario di questo lavoro.

The Alliance for Progress and Housing Policy in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in the 1960s

This article explores the construction of publicly financed low-income housing complexes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1960s. These housing developments were possible thanks to the arrival of foreign economic and technical assistance from the Alliance for Progress. Urban scholars, politicians, diplomats and urbanists of the Americas sought to promote middle-class habits, mass consumption and moderate political behaviour, especially among the poor, by expanding access to homeownership and ‘decent’ living conditions for a burgeoning urban population. As a result, the history of low-income housing should be understood within broader transnational discourses and practices about the ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ of the urban poor.

Druze linguistic landscape in Israel: indexicality of new ethnolinguistic identity boundaries

The Druze community in Israel is a distinct religious community currently undergoing important ethnolinguistic shifts. The government's implementation of an official policy has led to the deconstruction and reshaping of the Druze political and national identity to one that differs substantially from that of the Palestinian minority in Israel. In this study, I argue that the visibility, vitality and appreciation of Hebrew in the Druze linguistic landscape are indicative of new ethnolinguistic boundaries of the Druze identity in Israel. The fact that the Druze in Israel are dispersed throughout the Galilee and Mount Carmel area and experience varying levels of language contact as well as divergent economic relations with their Palestinian–Israeli and Jewish–Israeli neighbors suggests that one cannot expect uniformity in the Druze linguistic markets or the processes of social, cultural and linguistic identification. This study will show that Hebrew has become a dominant component of the linguistic repertoire and social identity of the Druze in the Mount Carmel area since it has become the first choice of communication as the linguistic landscape indicates.

Labour Migration, Trade and Investment: From Fragmentation to Coherence

Trade, investment and migration are strongly intertwined, being three key factors in international production. Yet, law and regulation of the three has remained highly fragmented. Trade is regulated by the WTO on the multilateral level, and through preferential trade agreements on the regional and bilateral levels – it is fragmented and complex in its own right. Investment, on the other hand, is mainly regulated through bilateral investment treaties with no strong links to the regulation of trade or migration. And, finally, migration is regulated by a web of different international, regional and bilateral agreements which focus on a variety of different aspects of migration ranging from humanitarian to economic. The problems of institutional fragmentation in international law are well known. There is no organizational forum for coherent strategy-making on the multilateral level covering all three areas. Normative regulations may thus contradict each other. Trade regulation may bring about liberalization of access for service providers, but eventually faces problems in recruiting the best people from abroad. Investors may withdraw investment without being held liable for disruptions to labour and to the livelihood and infrastructure of towns and communities affected by disinvestment. Finally, migration policies do not seem to have a significant impact as long as trade policies and investment policies are not working in a way that is conducive to reducing migration pressure, as trade and investment are simply more powerful on the regulatory level than migration. This chapter addresses the question as to how fragmentation of the three fields could be reme-died and greater coherence between these three areas of factor allocation in international economic relations and law could be achieved. It shows that migration regulation on the international level is lagging behind that on trade and investment. Stronger coordination and consideration of migration in trade and investment policy, and stronger international cooperation in migration, will provide the foundations for a coherent international architecture in the field.

Discarge compilation from The Global River Discharge (RivDIS) Project

The Global River Discharge (RivDIS) data set contains monthly discharge measurements for 1018 stations located throughout the world. The period of record varies widely from station to station, with a mean of 21.5 years. These data were digitized from published UNESCO archives by Charles Voromarty, Balaze Fekete, and B.A. Tucker of the Complex Systems Research Center (CSRC) at the University of New Hampshire. River discharge is typically measured through the use of a rating curve that relates local water level height to discharge. This rating curve is used to estimate discharge from the observed water level. The rating curves are periodically rechecked and recalibrated through on-site measurement of discharge and river stage.

Globalization and the Evolution of the Supply Chain: who gains and who loses?

This paper focuses on two distinct facets of globalization: the decrease in the trade costs of goods and the decline of communication costs between headquarters and production facilities within firms. When the unskilled have about the same wage in the two regions, the decrease of these costs fosters the gradual agglomeration of plants in the core region accommodating the headquarters. By contrast, when the wage gap is significant, the process of integration eventually triggers the re-location of plants into the periphery. In particular, when the process of re-location is driven by falling communication costs, the welfare of all workers living in the core goes down whereas the welfare of those who reside in the periphery rises.

International real business cycles : a re-visit

It is well known that several quantitative properties of international real business cycle models with are at odds with the data. First, the cross-country correlations are much higher for consumption than for output, while in the data the opposite is true (the BKK puzzle). Second, cross-country correlations of employment and investment are negative, while in the data they are positive. This paper quantitatively shows that preferences with a zero income effect on labor supply help generate a correct cross-country correlation in employment even without any restrictions on financial markets. In a bond economy, a zero income effect in labor supply, combined with time-to-build investment, can generate a positive cross-country correlation in investment, and the BKK puzzle is also resolved when the inter-temporal elasticity of substitution in labor supply is low.