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Objectives of this paper is to verify whether the relationship between the level of per capita income and the environment quality, for the Italian regions, follows the prescription of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), taking into account the contribution of agriculture and rural areas. The Arellano-Bond two-step dynamic panel data GMM estimator has been applied to a data set of the 20 Italian administrative regions referred to the 2000-‘06 years. The quality of environment is represented by the level of per capita CO2 emissions from the whole economy and the level of per capita CO2 emissions from agriculture. The regression results show that i) the EKC prescription holds for the Italian regions, ii) the more agricultural regions are found on the rising section of the curve; iii) a greater intensity of expenditure under the RDP regional agro-environmental and forestry measures is positively associated to a more degraded environment.

Objective of this paper is to analyse the presence of gender differences in the purchase motivations of Fair Trade (FT) food products sold in the Italian World Shops (WS). At this end, a questionnaire has been distributed to a sample of consumers in four Italian regions. A bivariate ordered probit analysis has been performed in order to identify the determinants of the two main ethical motivations in the purchase: worker guarantees and solidarity. The variables used as determinants are individual and municipal characteristics. Among individual characteristics, gender is significant; among the municipal characteristics, the rate of female job market participation is also significant. These results give evidence of a gender gap in the preferences for public goods.

Objective of the paper is to verify which are the determinants of innovations in the Italian food industry and which role R&D networking, through the cooperative nature of firm, plays among these determinants. The data used are the 9th (2001-2003) wave of Capitalia surveys based on a representative sample of manufacturing firms with information on firm characteristics, employee education levels, innovation and R&D investments. The approach is a bivariate probit analysis where the two dependent variables are the presence of firm R&D and of innovations and the independent variables are firm characteristics. The results of the analysis show that, among the determinants of firm R&D intra moenia and of firm innovations in the Italian food industry for the years 2001-03, the presence of subsidies for R&D extra moenia, is the most significant variable with the highest marginal effect while the cooperative variable turns out to be positive and significant (6%) after including relative input prices.

This study aims to ascertain whether the implicit price paid for Fair Trade coffee in regular supermarkets is influenced by the stock of social capital in the territory where consumers live. A hedonic regression set-up is adopted, based on Italian scanner data taken at NUTS3 level. Regressors include attributes described on the label, which include separate certifications for Fair Trade and organic/eco-label status, plus various indicators of social capital and their interactions with the Fair Trade and organic/eco-label attributes. The implicit consumer price paid for the Fair Trade attribute is significantly and positively affected by a social capital proxy, the ratio of co-op members to total employment.

This paper studies whether high-quality research in first-tier universities has greater local knowledge spillovers than that in lower-tier universities. First-tier universities are identified as those among the top 150, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities. Several indicators of academic excellence are included among the contextual drivers of innovation in a multivariate probit regression applied to European manufacturing data. The results show that top-10 publications of second-tier universities exhibit the highest positive association with product innovation of science-based sectors, but negative associations with top-10 publications of first- and second-tier universities are evidenced for process innovation in this macro-sector.

This paper aims to analyse to what extent pupils value the characteristics of the state school foodservice and identify which variables affect the degree of pupils’ satisfaction with the quality of school meals. A representative sample of 33 state primary schools providing meals was extracted for the metropolitan city of Naples. Two questionnaires were distributed, one to the headteachers concerned and the other to 5th grade pupils (10–11 years old). Information about the catering companies was mainly sourced from the AIDA database. Pupil satisfaction was measured by two key variables: pleasantness of eating at school and food tastiness. Controlling for pupil, family, school, foodservice and catering company characteristics, the paper shows that the catering company size negatively impacts upon pupil satisfaction with the foodservice, whereas the estimated meal average production cost is positively associated with pupil satisfaction. The study could assist city boroughs in devising meal quality indicators to be taken into account in designing competitive tendering.

The main aim of the paper is to examine the drivers of university–firm R&D collaboration while at the same time assessing the determinants of innovation in a low-tech industry. This includes analysing firm R&D collaborations with partners different from universities. The paper relies on a unique data-set where firm data were sourced from the Capitalia survey, covering the 1995–2006 years, and the university data were gathered from a number of sources. Result from a multivariate probit model reiterate that university–firm R&D collaboration affects process innovation. Evidence of a more novel kind suggests that product innovation is positively affected by geographical proximity to a university but is negatively affected by the amount of its codified knowledge production. Degree programmes in fields useful for local firms favour R&D collaborations. Academic policies that aim to commercialise research output negatively impact both product and process innovations of local firms.

In the National Innovation System (NIS), knowledge is produced and accumulated through interactive innovation processes that are embedded in a national context, which in turn may help determine innovation. This paper investigates how product and process innovations in the European food and drink industry are affected by: (i) NIS structure; (ii) NIS output in terms of scientific publications and the supply of graduates; (iii) NIS cohesion and coordination; (iv) NIS scientific impact and specialisation. The main source of data on innovation by firms is the EU-EFIGE/Bruegel-UniCredit dataset. This is supplemented by information from the International Handbook of Universities, Eurostat and a bibliometric analysis of academic research output. Our results suggest that large research institutions in the public sector may well be detrimental to interaction between university and industry and to process innovation. The indicators used for public research assessment are not necessarily the most appropriate proxies of local knowledge spillovers.

In this paper, we test the extent to which producers' cooperatives can experience an increase in technical efficiency following a tightening of financial constraints. This hypothesis is tested on a sample of Italian conventional and cooperative firms for the wine production and processing sector, using frontier analysis. The results support the hypothesis that increasing financial pressure can affect positively the cooperatives efficiency. Journal compilation

In this paper, we analyse the nature of the relationship between market power and technical efficiency for producers' cooperatives. More specifically we test two hypotheses: first, we evaluate the extent to which increasing market pressure may help producers' cooperatives to improve technical efficiency to guarantee positive profits; second, we test whether higher technical efficiency induces producers' cooperatives to have a larger market share. These hypotheses are tested on a sample of Italian conventional and cooperative firms for the Wine Production and Processing sector, using both frontier analysis and dynamic panel techniques. The results support the hypothesis that increasing market pressure can affect positively the cooperativeś efficiency, while gains in technical efficiency do not seem to have any impact on the cooperatives' market share. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

The shadow cost model can be estimated by adopting two different normalizations of the input price distortions. However, the normalization suggested by Balk [Econ. Lett. 55 (1997) 45] produces estimates not invariant to the choice of the shadow input price chosen as numeraire in order to obtain linear homogeneity of the cost function.

Objective of this paper is to analyse the presence of gender differences in the purchase motivations of Fair Trade (FT) food products sold in the Italian World Shops (WS). At the end of investigating FT purchase motivations, a questionnaire has been distributed to a sample of consumers in four Italian regions. A bivariate ordered probit analysis has been performed in order to identify the determinants of the two main ethical purchase motivations: worker guarantees and solidarity. The variables used as determinants are individual and municipal characteristics. Among individual characteristics, gender is significant; among the municipal characteristics, the rate of female labor force participation is also significant. These results give evidence of a gender-based differentiation in the preferences for FT public goods.

Understanding the determinants of the demand for goods, which have been produced according to ethical considerations and marketed accordingly, has become an important research area in business economics. Less clear is the role that the social environment plays in shaping the preferences for ethically produced goods. Our main objective is to fill this gap in the literature by quantifying the extent to which the social capital generated by the presence of co-operatives in an area can have an impact on the consumers’ motivations to buy ethically produced goods by using a sample of 889 individuals who have visited one of the retailers specialized in the distribution of ethically produced goods in four Italian regions. Our results show that the presence of co-operatives in an area has a positive influence on the consumers’ preferences for fair trade goods.Understanding the determinants of the demand for goods, which have been produced according to ethical considerations and marketed accordingly, has become an important research area in business economics. Less clear is the role that the social environment plays in shaping the preferences for ethically produced goods. Our main objective is to fill this gap in the literature by quantifying the extent to which the social capital generated by the presence of co-operatives in an area can have an impact on the consumers’ motivations to buy ethically produced goods by using a sample of 889 individuals who have visited one of the retailers specialized in the distribution of ethically produced goods in four Italian regions. Our results show that the presence of co-operatives in an area has a positive influence on the consumers’ preferences for fair trade goods

This paper analyzes the relatively novel concept of a downward-sloping demand for volunteer labour, using data from the Italian social services sector. Both descriptive and econometric evidence shows that the price of volunteer labour (proxied by its shadow price obtained through DEA) is negatively related to the number of volunteer hours. Furthermore, the demand for volunteer labour is higher in areas relatively well endowed with social capital, where there is also evidence that organizations refrain from substituting volunteers for paid workers when the latter become more expensive. According to our results, the productivity of voluntary labour is higher in social capital-rich regions, where more motivated and skilful volunteers are drawn from a relatively larger pool.

We test the underinvestment hypothesis (the so-called Furubotn–Pejovich effect) from the specialized literature on co-ops by comparing the shadow price of capital and the dual capacity utilization index for a panel of Italian cooperative and conventional firms, 1996–2003. The results do not show any difference between co-ops and conventional firms in this respect.

This paper tries to identify under which conditions increasing market competition may help cooperatives to improve technical efficiency to guarantee positive profits. This hypothesis is first formalized in a partial equilibrium framework and then is tested on a sample of Italian conventional and cooperative firms, using frontier analysis. Technical efficiency indexes are computed by using the one-stage approach as suggested by Battese and Coelli (1995), where proxies for competition are introduced as determinants of efficiency, along with other exogenous factors accounting for the firms’ heterogeneity. However, the overall impact of increasing competition on efficiency is negative.

This paper analyses the mechanisms through which profit-sharing schemes may induce debt constrained firms to improve technical efficiency over time to guarantee positive profits. This hypothesis is first formalised in a partial equilibrium framework and then is tested on a sample of Italian traditional and cooperative firms. Technical efficiency change indexes are computed by DEA. These are regressed on a measure of finance constraints to analyse their impact on firms’ efficiency growth. The results support the hypothesis that a restriction in the availability of financial resources can affect positively the growth in efficiency in firms with profit-sharing schemes.