1,721,359 research outputs found
Three essays on profits, technology, and economic change
Full text linkThis thesis aims to study from a broad perspective the recent wave of capitalist development driven
by the neoliberal revolution that occurred after the 1980s. In each stage of capitalist development,
according to Marxian analysis, the search for profits drives the process of capital accumulation and
the evolution of the economy. Therefore, an analysis of the accumulation patterns in capitalism
requires a deep understanding of profit.
In a dynamic perspective, the search for profits shapes technological competition of firms and
industries to develop innovative breakthroughs aiming to gain “Schumpeterian profits”. This
turbulent and uneven process of technological competition determines long-run economic growth
(Pianta, 2020).
Therefore, this work tries to understand the relationships between profit, technological development,
and economic change by looking at how capital accumulation and innovation proceeds, shaping longrun economic growth.
The first chapter explores the relationship between finance, profits, and capital accumulation,
focusing on the financialization of the economy that occurred since the 1980s. I review the recent
literature about the financialization process in which profits accrue primarily throughout financial
deals and speculative transactions.
The rise of financial profits as a leading economic activity has major implications for the economic
system. I examine the drivers of these dynamics, including the long-term cycles of capitalist
development, in which phases of material accumulation alters periods driven by financial expansion.
Some stylized evidence about the recent financialization is provided, showing the expansion of
financial actors’ activities, the increasing involvement of non-financial corporations in financial
investments, the multiple ways households are drawn into financial deals, and the long-term boom of
financial assets. These developments change the dominant accumulation patterns by moving
resources from material and technological activities to financial deals. The rise of finance changes
the nature of capital accumulation, leading to important transformations in capitalism itself.
The second chapter focus on the relationship between profit search, capital accumulation, and
technological development across industries in six major European countries. Profit growth in this
model is linked to two different innovation strategies and to different orientations of investments
pursuing alternatively technological or cost competitiveness. Profits are driven by two alternative
cumulative and self-reinforcing patterns. The first is based on the introduction of product innovations.
The second is fed by capital investments, productivity gains, and wage reduction. The empirical
evidence confirms the coexistence of different technological and accumulation regimes in both
manufacturing and services. In high-tech sectors, profits are linked to the introduction of product
innovation and on the complementarity between capital accumulation and disembodied technological
change. Conversely, in low-tech industries, profits and investment growth are linked to introducing
process and labor-saving innovations.
The third chapter This paper contributes to the literature of evolutionary economic geography and
innovation studies by analyzing the trends of population, technological and economic changes in
Italian metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2018.
The rise of the population in a few metropolitan zones shrinks the demography of the peripheries.
The growth of income concentrates in large cities along with the decline of old manufacturing centers.
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High-profit corporate services cluster in few places, enlarging the disparities in wealth and
opportunities. Moreover, innovation activities gather in a few urban zones, expanding geographical
structural imbalances.
Two are the roots of this stage of development. First, knowledge-intensive services such as Finance
and ICT benefit from agglomeration externalities and concentrate in large metropolitan cities
(Balland et al., 2020, Diodato et al., 2019, Sassen, 2018 ). Second, innovation activities take place in
a few metropolitan hubs where the accumulation of capital, researchers, and firms creates an
especially innovative environment (Crescenzi et al., 2019). These two developments created a new
spatial order featured by a few rich urban agglomerations –"superstars cities"-, and declining
territories –"places that do not matter" (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018), overlooked by the world economy.
The work finds geographical polarisation across Italian Metropolitan Areas concerning GDP per
capita and value-added growth, as well as for the sectoral composition of metropolitan economies,
focusing on three key economic sectors: Financial and Insurance Services, ICT services, and the
manufacturing industry. Likewise, we witness evidence of the concentration of innovation activity in
a few metropolitan cities. Indeed, the development of one global city and a few middle-sized
metropolitan areas coexists with the decline of old manufacturing territories. These results suggest a
structural divergent growth path among Italian metropolitan zones, increasing the country's
geographical imbalances.
We performed a factor and cluster analysis to grasp the evolution of Italian metropolitan areas
between 2000-2018 according to economic, sectoral, and technological variables. We witness a
process of polarisation fed by the growing relevance of the metropolitan area of Milan, where the
advancements in ICT and Financial industries concentrate, while the other metropolitan zones
achieved very barely improvements. These developments augment the gap across metropolitan
economies. Moreover, cluster analysis results indicate no substantial modification in the group
formed between the two periods, mirroring the absence of a process of convergence among the Italian
metropolitan economies. Instead, we found that cluster score differences enlarged in 2018, suggesting
a growing polarisation across metropolitan economies in terms of technological and economic
trajectories of these cycles of accumulation
Migrant Entrepreneurship: Developments at the Intersection of Policy and Practice. Final conference of the project MIG.EN.CUBE.
No full textThis book collects the proceedings of the international Conference “Migrant Entrepreneurship: Developments at the Intersection of Policy and Practice” held in Sala Borsa (Bologna) on the 27th and 28th April 2023. The conference was foreseen as one of the dissemination events of the Erasmus+ project MIG.EN.CUBE – fostering MIGrant ENtrepreneurship inCUBation in Europe. It was organized as a free interdisciplinary event open to scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners, with the aim to share experiences of policies and practices of entrepreneurial support initiatives for migrants (e.g., pre-incubation, incubation, or acceleration programmes), increase awareness of potential strengths and weaknesses of such initiatives, and stimulate academic-policy-practice dialogue
Materiali e formazione in rete: standard tecnologici e metodologici.
No full textIl paradigma costruttivista si è affermato come teoria dell’apprendimento di riferimento per la
costruzione di ambienti di apprendimento on-line.
Le tecnologie consentono di organizzare ambienti di apprendimento/insegnamento che,
integrando multimedialità, telematica ed internet, facendo diventare l’apprendimento un processo
situato e sociale.
Si possono realizzare learning environment che fanno più o meno uso delle tecnologie: nel
primo caso si punta sull’uso di strumenti che permettono un apprendimento
cooperativo/collaborativo; nel secondo, l’ambiente è semplicemente uno strumento “autogestito”
che fornisce l’accesso ai contenuti da utilizzarsi in modalità di autoformazione.
Per rendere accessibile a tutti tali processi è fondamentale realizzare ed attenersi a regole
comuni che consentono un interscambio di risorse e materiali.
Questa necessità si riflette sulla struttura dell’intervento formativo, sull’organizzazione dei
supporti forniti dai docenti, sulle funzionalità offerte dai learning objects.
Anche se tra le categorie dei metadati previsti dagli standard IMS e SCORM sono presenti i
descrittori educational e annotation, con lo scopo di rappresentare rispettivamente le caratteristiche
pedagogiche della risorsa e di inserire commenti relativi al suo uso didattico.
L’azione di standardizzazione porta alla rappresentazione dei learning objects come elementi
“pedagogicamente neutri”, in grado di adeguarsi a qualsiasi schema metodologico sul piano delle
strategie didattiche e delle teorie dell’apprendimento che le sostengono
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
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