1,720,982 research outputs found
Farms Employing Foreign Workers in Italy: An Analysis with Census Micro Data
Full text linkOver the last decades, foreign workers have become a significant component of Italian agriculture workforce. Their presence and incidence are highly diversified with respect to farm typologies, type of contract and geographic location. A comprehensive representation of this complex phenomenon is thus the first step to understand the different problems and needs associated to the employment of foreign workforce. This study uses micro data from the 2010 Italian Agricultural Census to first describe what are the structural and geographical features of Italian farms employing foreign workers and then to group farms through a cluster analysis. Results give a detailed representation of the incidence of foreign workers employed, revealing which part of Italian agriculture relies more on foreign workers. The cluster analysis allows the definition of six groups: foreign workers are especially involved in livestock activities, both indoor and grazing and in farms specialized in permanent crops. Among major policy implications, analysing the presence of foreign workers can help targeting policies to agricultural production system needs
Using FADN Data to Estimate CO2 Abatement Costs from Italian Arable Crops
Full text linkThe assessment of economic and environmental sustainability of agricultural systems represents a critical issue, which has been addressed in this work with a multi-objective programming model to explore the abatement costs (AC) of CO2 for a set of representative contexts of Italian arable land agriculture. The study was based on the FADN-compliant Italian database RICA and estimates the abatement costs of CO2 emissions in a short time horizon, using linear multi-objective programming and compromise programming. RICA data were used to quantify technical parameters of the model, adopting an innovative concept of a cropping scheme to simulate land-use adaptation. The study shows a quite diversified situation regarding income and emission levels per hectare across the Italian region and farm classes. A reduction of CO2 emissions higher than 5 kg/ha at an AC lower than 1 EUR/kg is affordable only in seven regions, among which Abruzzo, Lombardy, and Puglia show the highest potential. Comparing the estimated abatement costs for CO2 emissions with the corresponding European Trade System prices highlights a difference of 1 order of magnitude, proving that emission reductions for Italian arable crops still require research and innovation to lower adaptation costs
Spatial nonstationarity in the stochastic frontier model: An application to the Italian wine industry
No full textThis research estimates the efficiency of a representative sample of Italian wine producers from the Italian
FADN survey following a recent spatial stochastic frontier framework that allows to isolate the spatial
dependence among units and to evaluate the role of intangible local factors in influencing the economic
performance of firms. The empirical exercise shows that the specific territorial patterns in the data cannot be
merely explained using a standard set of contextual factors. This intangible component can be interpreted as the
role of the local business climate: in most localities, the presence of an embedded community stimulates a
process of local learning that generates the diffusion of tacit knowledge through continuous interaction among
the local actors. This effect is found to be different across firm size, with a larger impact on small firms
Consume behaviour in Italy. Who spends more to buy Mediterranean diet?
Full text linkMediterranean diet is a term used to describe the traditional eating habits of peo- ple around the Mediterranean and that refers to a healthy eating model, with sig- nificant nutrition and health benefits. However, many studies have emphasised an increasing erosion of the Mediterranean diet heritage, also in Italy. Starting from the assumption that evolution of human nutrition, if it occurs rapidly, can only be conceptualised as a social phenomenon, this study intends to explore the relation- ship between purchase behaviour for typical Mediterranean diet food and some so- cioeconomic and geographic characteristics of the Italian households.
Italy’s food purchase microdata in 2013 were used to describe three different pur- chasing behaviours among households and a multinomial logit model was applied to model nominal outcome variables in relationship with socioeconomic variables. Re- sults suggest that families with older and more educated respondents have a higher probability to purchase Mediterranean diet food, while spending more on out-of-home eating or living far away from an urban area, seems to reduce this probability
Farms Employing Foreign Workers in Italy: An Analysis with Census Micro Data
Full text linkOver the last decades, foreign workers have become a significant component of Italian agriculture workforce. Their presence and incidence are highly diversified with respect to farm typologies, type of contract and geographic location. A comprehensive representation of this complex phenomenon is thus the first step to understand the different problems and needs associated to the employment of foreign workforce. This study uses micro data from the 2010 Italian Agricultural Census to first describe what are the structural and geographical features of Italian farms employing foreign workers and then to group farms through a cluster analysis. Results give a detailed representation of the incidence of foreign workers employed, revealing which part of Italian agriculture relies more on foreign workers. The cluster analysis allows the definition of six groups: foreign workers are especially involved in livestock activities, both indoor and grazing and in farms specialized in permanent crops. Among major policy implications, analysing the presence of foreign workers can help targeting policies to agricultural production system needs
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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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