Saccone Donatella

Several studies show a positive association between the rise of obesity in developing countries and globalization, trade, and food trade, but most do not account for reverse causality between the prevalence of obesity and trade flows. Moreover, most studies adopt broad definitions of trade and food trade, notwithstanding the main effects of trade o...

The fight against hunger has been confirmed as a global goal by the UN Agenda 2030 but the war between Russia and Ukraine is expected to create millions of new undernourished due, among others, to its impact on international trade in cereals, especially in wheat and maize. The present note represents a first effort to quantify such impact and its c...

The Agenda 2030 poses critical elements regarding the transition towards a more sustainable development. This paper aims at exploring and comparing the path of sustainable development within the United States and China at the subnational level. An index of Integrated Sustainable Development is introduced to measure local sustainable development on...

China has recorded impressive economic achievements driving the structural transformation of its society. However, this transformation is marked by rising inequality, environmental pollution and stark provincial disparities. In 2015, the launching of the Agenda 2030 provided a common ground at the international level conceptualizing the United Nati...

Seasonal influenzas are annually responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, often because of insufficient care, which may depend on orientations of economic policy. Yet, the empirical evidence on the relations existing between policies based on different degrees of economic liberalism and flu mortality is still scarce. This paper co...

While the extant literature shows that various indices of economic freedom display a positive relationship with the level of income inequality, it is unclear who are the winners and, in particular, the losers. For this reason, an analysis based on deciles and top percentiles helps to deepen the understanding of this issue. Starting from this consid...

While trade policies are considered strategic to shape national food systems and promote food security, the ultimate impact of trade openness on hunger is still highly debated. Using a sample of 81 developing over the period 2001–2016 and principally focusing on the prevalence of undernourishment, this study provides new empirical evidence. Firstly...

New evidence on the relationships between economic freedoms and poverty traps is provided. Methodologically, a new way to classify countries into clusters is used, which stresses the relative position of economies with respect to each other. The paper investigates whether economic freedoms have any impact on shifts from one cluster to another, towa...

This paper contributes to the scientific and political debate on public investment multipliers by estimating them according to their respective function of government. The analysis is conducted on a sample of 31 European countries over the period 1995-2019 and uses the local projection method to estimate the multipliers. Total public investment is...

The ongoing Covid19 pandemic is producing dramatic effects on the economic and social life of many countries, which in turn may further undermine people’s health and well-being. This note focuses on some potential effects on the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 ‘Zero Hunger’ (Target 2.1) and, specifically, on the prevalence of u...

Among the determinants of economic freedom, the presence of different ethnic groups within a country has sometimes been explored by the empirical literature, without conclusive evidence on the sign of the relation, its drivers, and the conditions under which it holds. This paper offers new evidence by empirically modelling how ethnic fragmentation...

Energy access, as defined in SDG 7, is a consistent component of decent livelihood and is therefore strictly connected to the fulfillment of the broad goal of sustainable development. While it may have significant impacts on various dimensions of development and sustainability, this study focuses on its effect on the level of food security of the o...

By analysing a panel of 76 developed and developing countries for period 1980–2014, this paper provides new evidence about the relation between economic freedom and income distribution, measured through decile income shares. The results show that a higher degree of economic freedom has a negative impact on the first eight deciles; conversely, it fa...

The paper offers a new country classification system defined in relative terms and jointly based on the level and the medium–long term rate of growth of per capita income. The classification system identifies four categories of economies: poor (low income–low growth), emerging (low income–high growth), booming (high income–high growth) and affluent...

This article proposes a general definition of emerging economies (EEs) and investigates the main determinants of their high rates of economic growth by extending the basic framework of neoclassical growth models to include various dimensions of economic development. According to the proposed definition, we find a list of 38 EEs for the period 2000?...

The purpose of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention is to protect the global merit good of cultural and natural heritage of outstanding universal value for humanity. Many observers, however, have suggested that this international organization is subject to politicization as the selection process of sites on the World Heritage List is increasingly d...

In their period of rapid economic growth China and India have experienced profound structural transformations. The aim of the paper is to analyze the relation between structural change, the process of globalization and economic growth in the two great Asian countries, using a highly disaggregated dataset for the 1987-2009 period. While China had a...

Why have deliberations over World Heritage sites become such a volatile arena for the performance of international tensions, new political alliances and challenges to global cooperation? Across UN platforms, the failures of multilateralism are increasingly evident. We suggest that decision-making within the World Heritage Committee is no different...

The paper aims to analyze the relationship between income concentration and inequality in education in China for the period 1989-2006. We first estimate the association between individual attributes and income over time and, then, calculate the contribution of education and its distribution to income concentration. We find that education has become...

The aim of the paper is twofold. First, we measure the degree of cultural diversity on the World Heritage list, considering both geographical and chronological unbalances. Second, we estimate the number of sites that would guarantee the highest level of cultural diversity and, then, we propose to increase the quality of the World Heritage list thro...

The paper addresses imbalances affecting world heritage sites in terms of how well conserved they are and what resources are available for their valorisation. We propose a policy mechanism of global governance divided into three steps. The first is a tax mechanism based on collecting resources from tourist activities and redistributing these resour...

The paper explores the determinants influencing the nomination and selection of sites in the World Heritage List. Using country panel data and a unique dataset with individual site nominations, we provide evidence that the nomination of heritage sites in the List depends on institutional and economic conditions of countries and that sites selection...

La Cina e l’India sono state protagoniste della letteratura economica recente non solo grazie alla rapida crescita economica che le caratterizza ma anche a causa della preoccupazione crescente per gli alti livelli di disuguaglianze sociali che si sono registrati parallelamente a tale crescita. L’obiettivo del paper è quello di studiare ed evidenzia...

There has been a large debate on the relations between demography and economic development. Our paper discusses the possibility that there exists an inverted-U curve, similar in shape to Kuznets’s curve, between the growth rate of population and the growth rate of the per-capita GDP. The cross-country empirical analysis, carried out on over 90 coun...

The comparison of the periods of rapid economic growth in China since 1978 and India since 1992 markedly show different patterns of development and structural change. However, both countries experienced some advantages of "relative economic backwardness" and some aspects of the "fordist model of growth". China had an anticipated and deeper structur...

Together with the economic transition, in China the return to education and the skill premium increased; this phenomenon was deeply demonstrated by a large number of studies identifying it with one of the main cause of the increasing inequalities at national, regional and sector level. For this reason, these studies underlined the relevant role of...

Sebbene lo studio del legame tra crescita economica e distribuzione del reddito abbia radici antiche, l’evoluzione storica che l’economia mondiale ha manifestato nell’ultimo quarto di secolo ha rinnovato l’interesse per tale tematica inserendola in un nuovo scenario; questo scenario viene comunemente identificato con il nome di globalizzazione. In...