1,721,308 research outputs found
Product and process innovation in the Italian food industry
No full textThe driving factors of innovation in the Italian food sector could be identified either in internal and in external dynamics. On one hand, the responses to the competition with new actors coming from emerging countries and the reaction to high-tech products demand evolution. On the other hand, endogenous dynamics appear to become more important for the strategic behaviour of the firms: a higher qualification of the human capital, a more clear orientation for high quality products, organization changes, and relation capacity development. Starting from these considerations, this paper developed an econometric analysis using information from one of the most important national dataset for innovation analysis. The results pointed out that a determinant to successfully develop and introduce product innovation is the capacity to built relationships on the product markets (i.e., with the modern distribution), while the territorial context determines a higher/lower relevance of each of the driving factors of innovation. [EconLit citations: L100; L200; L660]. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Food security in the Mediterranean countries
No full textWe have experienced a period of great agricultural capacity almost on a global scale, called "the Green Revolution". This is a term used to refer to the remarkable increase in the world agricultural production between the early 1960s and the end of the 1980s. The technological progress experienced in the more developed economies and its transfer to other regions, especially Asia and Latin America, led, at that moment, to the doubling of yields for some cereal crops which are basic for the human diet, like rice, wheat and maize, besides the productivity of other plant species and livestock. This real production boom has been able to meet rising food demand in the past 30 years and has also ensured a certain stability to food prices. What has changed? How can we account for an alarming situation that today goes well beyond the ever-neglected issue of hunger in the world's poor areas? What has compromised the reaching of internationally-agreed goals regarding the war against malnutrition? The international markets for agricultural commodities are the stage on which the new scarcity is shown in all its clarity. The rollercoaster ride of commodity prices fully expresses the tensions between demand and supply which are responsible for price rises. Since for many years these changes have not been perceived or have been at the very least underestimated, in this paper we try to address the impact on food security in Mediterranean Countries of this "new paradigm", emphasizing the most critical aspect drawn from major indicators in the field
Dynamic controls on subduction kinematics: the role of the downgoing lithosphere and passive mantle flow
No full textIt is much debated whether the forces associated with the downgoing plate, the overriding plate, passive or active mantle flow are dominant in controlling the paths of plates into the mantle. We investigate the dynamics and energetics for a free subduction system, driven solely by downgoing plate buoyancy, using a finite-element model of a viscoelastic plate with a free surface, sinking into a passive unbounded mantle represented by drag forces. Parameters are varied to study effects of an asthenosphere, ridge push, and a passive overriding plate, for a range of subducting plate viscosities and densities. Such a single, free plate achieves subduction mainly through trench retreat. Most of the energy dissipation occurs in driving the passive mantle response. As a result, the slab's sinking velocity is its Stokes velocity, determined by lithospheric buoyancy and mantle viscosity. The total subduction velocity and dip adjust to minimize bending dissipation in the lithosphere, and are affected by slab rheology as well as buoyancy. A low viscosity asthenosphere and ridge push facilitate plate advance, increasing plate dips and lowering subduction velocity, while suction and buoyancy of a work-free passive overriding plate decreases plate dips, thus increasing subduction and rollbackvelocities. However, the geometrical relation between the different parameters is the same in all model cases, because the slabs sink according to their Stokes velocity. The free subduction models thus provide a reference that can be used to distinguish the signature of downgoing plate buoyancy from that of other driving forces in global compilations of subduction parameters
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
“Risk Management through Insurance and Environmental Externalities: an Italian case study”
No full textThis study evaluates the impacts of risk management policies on the environment. The effect of public risk management programmes, such as subsidised crop insurance, on optimal nitrogen fertilizer use and land allocation to crops, were examined empirically by developing a mathematical programming model of a representative wheat-tomato farm in puglia, a region in southern Italy. The results show that with current crop insurance programmes, for tomato the optimal nitrogen fertilizer rate slightly increases and the optimal acreage substantially increases whereas for wheat they both decrease. hence this type of public intervention could lead to an increase in surface and groundwater pollution by nitrate
Italian agriculture in the context of climate change: The role of irrigation for sustainable development of rural areas
No full textThe work starts from the analysis of the objectives of the new Common Agricultural Policy which provides a tight integration between the agricultural and the climate-environmental components and that identifies a proper and efficient management of water for irrigation as an important instrument for the protection of this resource and, at the same time, for the development of primary sector. After the evaluation of the importance of irrigation investments for the competitiveness of Italian agriculture, the report contains an overview of the impacts of climate change in agriculture and of the economic models to estimate such impact; than it reports an econometric analysis to estimate the role of irrigation for Italian agriculture. Data used came from the database FADN. They refer to observations at farms level for the period 1990-2010. The main results of the econometric analysis are that irrigation of fruit and vegetable crops is particularly relevant to the northeast of the country (with an increase in income estimated in the order of 14%), and, the relevance of the irrigation of arable crops is related to the whole country (even if the most important impact has been observed for the south of Italy and the islands where we observed an increase in income of about 12%). In the second part the paper analyzes irrigation management in the different river basin districts. The analysis, made by OTE, shows a different degree of efficiency of irrigation in relation to the main characteristics of crops areas: in the Padano district and in the district of Alpi Orientali, with reference to cereals and fruit, irrigation management seems to be characterized by a lower level of efficiency; same situation is presented in the district of Sicily with refers to the cultivation of cereals. A higher degree of efficiency and virtuous behaviors emerge with refer- ence to horticulture, floriculture and fruit in the districts Appenino Meridionale and Appennino e Settentrionale
Interplay between heartbeat oscillations and wind outflow in microquasar IGR J17091-3624
No full textAims. During the bright outburst in 2011, the black hole candidate IGR J17091-3624 exhibited strong quasi-periodic flare-like events (on timescales of tens of seconds) in some characteristic states, the so-called heartbeat state. From the theoretical point of view, these oscillations may be modeled by the process of accretion disk instability, driven by the dominant radiation pressure and enhanced heating of the plasma. Although the mean accretion rate in this source is probably below the Eddington limit, the oscillations will still have large amplitudes. As the observations show, the source can exhibit strong wind outflow during the soft state. This wind may help to partially or even completely stabilize the heartbeat. Methods. Using our hydrodynamical code GLADIS, we modeled the evolution of an accretion disk responsible for X-ray emission of the source. We accounted for a variable wind outflow from the disk surface. We examined the data archive from the Chandra and XMM-Newton satellites to find the observed limitations on the wind physical properties, such as its velocity and ionization state. We also investigated the long-term evolution of this source, which lasted over about 600 days of observations, using the data collected by the Swift and RXTE satellites. During this long period, the oscillations pattern and the observable wind properties changed systematically. Results. We found that this source probably exhibits observable outbursts of appropriate timescales and amplitudes as a result of the disk instability. Our model requires a substantial wind component to explain the proper variability pattern, and even complete suppression of flares in some states. The wind mass-loss rate extracted from the data agrees quantitatively well with our scenario
Assessing Crop Yield and Risk: A New Method for Calculating Insurance Based on Rainfall
No full textThe aim of this paper is to explore a new method for data analysis that could be used for insurance calculations. In many agricultural nations rainfall per year and per annual quarter are good indications of the productive capacity in farmland. Essentially, there is a curvilinear relationship between rain and crop yield. The goldilocks zone varies by region and product, however, every farmer and minister of agriculture fears drought and/or flood. A Copula Quantile Regression (CQR) approach provides a novel approach to estimate the dependence of a function of the yield with respect to climate factors. This is then combined with quantile regression for nonlinear optics. This approach utilizes “Big Data” modeling and analytics to draw upon the wealth of information contained in the RICA databases. This study assesses variables such as the share of land covered by a sprinkler system, altitude, fragmentation of land, production intensity, rain, and temperature. It was found that this method provides a simpler and more flexible approach to analyze complex ecological, geological, economic, and sociological factors that impact business and commerce through risk management, strategic planning, and insurance
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