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Social exclusion has become a popular topic in the policy agendas of European governments, especially after the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 hit the continent as hard as it could. The existing literature highlights the presence of spatial patterns in social exclusion, although previous contributions consist of local or national level studies, lacking a broader continental perspective. This work resorts to regional data covering 20 EU countries and aims to characterise the nature of spatial patterns, distinguishing between spatial heterogeneity and pure spatial autocorrelation. Using the Spatial Markov Chain Matrix, we find that the strong clusterisation process unfolded by previous studies tends to become less intense if the role of socio-economic covariates is taken into account. Socio-economic factors represent in other words a containment cage that reduces the extent of neighbour influence. Net of the covariates, we identify clusters of regions in Southern Europe where high levels of social exclusion constitute a structural problem, calling for long-term public intervention. The policy implications of our findings are then outlined.

In a post-industrial and globalised world, assessing the impact of Welfare State Expenditure (WSE) on economic growth has become an issue of growing interest. The debate is still open in the literature, as no consensus has currently been achieved. We argue that disaggregating WSE, the positive/negative performance dichotomy of welfare policies may be overcome. Departing from this intuition, we apply PVAR techniques in order to investigate the endogenous interactions between economic growth (proxied by GDP) and WSE, measured as single social expenditure items, using data gathered from the European System of Integrated Social Protection Statistics. Our results confirm both the positive and the negative impact of WSE on growth. Moreover, we show the existence of the different impulse responses and time persistence patterns for disaggregated WSE items. Our results imply that further research should take into account the composition of WSE in addition to its extent.

Although the recent empirical literature provides a satisfactory range of estimates of food waste at the national and global level, little attention has been devoted to lower units of aggregation. This article tackles the phenomenon of urban food waste (UFW), proposing an analysis of consumer behaviour at the local level. Using institutional data for Italian provinces, over an 11-year time span (2004–2014), we estimate the amounts of UFW and subsequently investigate the extent of persistence and spatial spillovers using the local Moran transition probability matrix. Our results suggest that the good and bad practices in food consumption that determine the levels of UFW are persistent over time. Moreover, they produce a (though limited) spatial spillover, affecting consumption practices in the neighbouring areas. Two province clusters emerge, one in Northern and Central Italy, featuring negative behaviours and the other one in South-Central and Southern Italy, displaying virtuous behaviours. This situation calls for public policies aimed at promoting convergence in the levels of UFW.

Social exclusion represents one of the main societal challenges outlined by the Europe 2020 strategy. An influential strand of the theoretical literature argues that cultural consumption may have positive social effects, favouring tolerance and fighting prejudice, thus reducing social exclusion. However, this claim has not been tested on the field. This work investigates empirically the relation between social exclusion and consumption of cultural goods in a spatial framework. Using Eurostat data, we compute the Local Moran Transition Probability Matrix for Italian Regions (NUTS-2) over the 2004–2014 timespan. The results show that social exclusion decreases significantly with cultural consumption. In particular, the spatial clusters that emerge when mapping social exclusion break up when controlling for cultural consumption. These findings point out to the importance of governmental support to cultural goods as an instrument to fight social exclusion. In this sense, cultural goods are to be viewed not only as merit goods and sources of entertainment, but also as a societal heritage and a policy instrument.