RISULTATI RICERCA

Trade and Environment in North-South Relationships (di Giovanni Scarano) - ABSTRACT: The essay comes in two parts. The first one is a rapid but critic survey of the principal concepts utilised in the literature about trade and environment, in which the focus is posed on the explicit or surreptitious nexuses existing between environmental issues and trade relationships of North with South of the World. The second one analyses the role of the environmental issues in the context of the international organizations for the world trade, by the examination of some trade disputes in the Gatt and Wto. The principal thesis is that the environmental themes are becoming a useful way for developed countries to pose non-tariff barriers against developing or emerging countries, at the moment the latest are forced to open their markets to the industrial products and investments of the formers.

Measuring Sustainability: A Review (di Valeria Costantini) - ABSTRACT: The definition of sustainable development to be promoted by international organizations calls for a complex theoretical framework to allow policy makers to achieve rational choices taking due account of the limited environmental assets. The ideal tool instrument to evaluate the sustainability of national policies is an aggregated macroeconomic indicator representing traditional income measurements in terms of sustainability. The United Nations and the World Bank have developed the most widely adopted indicators, at the level of environmental income and sustainable saving, although these indicators need further enhancement in order to build a useful index for planning and evaluating national policies.

Information Policy and Genetically Modified Food: Weighting the Benefits and Costs (di Mario F. Teisl, Julie A. Caswell) - ABSTRACT: The labeling of genetically modified foods is the topic of a debate that could dramatically alter the structure of the US and international food industry. The current lack of harmonization of policy across countries makes Gmf labelling an international trade issue. The US and Canada do not require Gmfs to be labeled unless the Gmf is significantly different than the conventional food or the Gmf presents a health concern. However, many other countries are requiring Gmfs to be labeled. This paper discusses empirical work on the sources and magnitude of benefits and costs from labeling programs.

Why, and how, to Talk about the Mediterranean Today (di Maurice Aymard) - ABSTRACT: From many viewpoints, over a wide range of disciplines, the Mediterranean question is now coming back to the centre of attention. In this area of analysis by no means solely geographical the past is going through permanent interaction with the present, where all the tensions accumulated over the last two centuries and all the uncertainties of the future seem to converge. The events of the last twenty years are calling for the development of new interpretative frameworks, going beyond the traditional approaches of the social sciences: geo-strategic, historical and anthropological. On comparative reconsideration of the approaches, the Braudelian lesson not always in peaceful coexistence with the recent interpretations of ethnologists and anthropologists leaves us in no doubt about its long run validity, suggesting we give our contemporary representation of the Mediterranean as extensive spatial and temporal dimensions as possible.

How can urban places be read and interpreted by sociologies that are not specifically urban? Some useful answers to this question that reminds urban sociologists of the crossings made inside their own discipline by social sciences that are near but different such as anthropology and history may be found in a theoretical essay written by American sociologist David Brain. 20th century towns and architectures, seen through US public housing, are presented not only as a social construction but also as a cultural object and a problematic professional product. What comes out from this transversal sociology of artifacts is an open paradigm: to come across such disciplinary openings which is almost inevitable when you take the town not only as your own research field but also as a place where different sociologies can talk can lead urban sociologists to face useful epistemological reflections on their own disciplinary identity.

This abstract is resulting from a sociological visual research about the Tourism whose aim is to understand the changes and the permanent aspects of the local and territorial structure of a specific area of the Italian East Coast: the area of Cervia. Having at our disposal a postcards collection about this area covering the first 60 years of the past century, a specifical and new method of research has been used: re-photographing, many years later, the same places showed in the postcards. In this way, the abstract try to make clear the potentiality of this new original research tool.

In line with what can be observed at a European level, the re-ordering of social assistance recently approved in Italy establishes directives for change centring on three main criteria: integration, activation, localization. Taken as a whole, these criteria point to the affirmation of an emphasis on the social policies processes, in particular of the processes of integration between sectors and actors and the processes of empowerment of recipients. This paper presents the results of a research on social services for children and the elderly in two Italian metropolitan areas, Milan and Naples, in order to analyse how these directives take concrete shapes in the organizational practices. More precisely, we observe the organizational space of the social services and its potential as generative factor. Indeed, as other symbolic components of organizational life, space is a medium of sense-making processes: it influences relationships, it conveys and creates meanings and it enacts action contexts. Firstly, we refer to the organizational theory in order to focus on the potential of organizational space to act as a generative factor. Then, taking as our basis the research carried out, we analyse how some spatial variables affect organizational practices, in order to understand if and how the relevance of processes takes place, or fails, in particular concerning the practices of territorial integration and the empowerment of recipients.

Quality of life is a multidimensional concept that has been deeply analyzed during the last forty years. Many theoretical studies and empirical research have been performed in order to define and measure living conditions. However, new emerging paths need to be explored. These paths regard linkages existing between quality of life and other topics like: time, technology, sustainability, places identity, participation, urban regeneration and city marketing.

The paper pays attention to describe the temporal superposition and segmentation of the daily activities. Then the specification of the theoretical context and the identification of the main reasons of the increase of the temporal superposition and segmentation of the daily activities in the post-modern societies, the essay describes the values of the temporal superposition and segmentation indicators, in general and with attention to main structural variables, related to the data resulting from the first national survey about the use of time, carried out by the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica in the wider context of the Multipurpose Survey on Families in Italy.

This article considers the limits which characterize GDP and GNP, if used as measures of the development of a country. Nevertheless, efforts made to overcome these limits have sometimes generated distortions worse than those to be corrected. In particular, taking the paradoxical situation looking at statistical data which characterize Equatorial Guinea as a starting point, the substantial failings are highlighted which affect GDP and GNP per capita if calculated on the basis of purchasing power parity.

Is the demographic growth a mere consequence of the changing come from the first steps of the economic growth or is the population growth which makes development possible? Experts realize that the relation between development and population hasn’t yet become emancipated from the well-known querelle risen in the XVIIIth century in the days of Malthus and Condorcet and gone on in the debate after the industrial revolution in England. Some more, in a far-off 1974, the United Nations, on the occasion of the First World Conference on Population, didn’t go any farther a tactful and neutral comment: Demographic variables have an influence on development factors and vice versa. In more recent years, the same question has come up again. From one side, in the years 60s-80s, the strong economic growth in four small Asian countries (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) knew a decrease of the demographic growth. On the other side, in the same period, both variables rose simultaneously in countries as Mexico or Ivory Coast. Anyway, it is a fact that a 60% of over 6 billion people in the world is now concentrated in Asia, particularly in China and India. From the analysis of the demographic policies of these countries with a strong economic growth, some new certainties rise as regards the ways of best discouraging the demographic growth. The most relevant ones are some policies promoting the human capital, particularly the feminine one, generally neglected in the past.

Realino Marra’s recent book on Weber’s theories about Capitalism (Capitalismo e anticapitalismo in Max Weber. Storia di Roma e sociologia del diritto nella genesi dell’opera weberiana, Bologna 2002) has one great merit: it pursues a dual purpose. One is to show that Max Weber’s youthful writings were already inspired by the fundamental problems that were later to provide a unitary guide to his entire research: the destiny that capitalism, by then dominant, reserved for mankind on the one hand and Germany on the other. The other is to identify the cultural and political orientation of a man who felt that his political and scientific task was to tackle these two problems that for him were inescapable.

A new industrial revolution is making its influence felt this time in the works of the spirit and all relationships between human beings. This information revolution comes complete with thinking geared toward liberalising forms of exchange, of the internationalisation of organisations and of the globalisation of means of regulation. The question that now arises is this: are those of Europe’s creative values that are now threatened by the global cultural industries and the leisure multinationals sufficiently durable and capable of further development? Steps must be taken to avoid Europe’s slipping into a long qualitative decline. The cultural exception may be one answer to the surge of merchandise distributed by the video or computer supermarkets, products that have no cultural intentions, but are sold en masse on a market that has never been more anonymous. Quotas and grants are the weapons used for defence by the cultural front in a society that refuses the free market system, but on condition that whatever is done behind such protective barriers never turns its back on the future and includes cultural policies that tend to essentials.

A two-year research project conducted in Italy, Brazil and Argentina looked into the problems facing agrarian reform today. In Brazil, the judicial decisions handed down about the lands occupied by the Landless Movement (Movimento Sem Terra, MST) were studied. This essay reports on the findings of the analysis, describing the general framework adopted for the research, how judicial power is organised in Brazil, the various phases of the analysis of the Brazilian judiciary’s decisions (most of which came from the region of the North-East) and the results of these analyses. The decisions of the higher courts were taken from the official Law Reports, while the decisions handed down by the courts of Pernambuco and Paraíba had never been published before. For example, in the Court of Justice (Tribunal de Justiça) of Paraíba, the researchers studied volumes, each comprising about 600 pages, that are compilations of the judicial decisions: some 231 collections of civil law decisions and 157 collections of criminal law decisions and sentences, making a total of 388 collections of decisions, covering the years from 1985 to 2002. From these collections, the researchers selected 33 civil law decisions and nine criminal law decisions, in a process of drastic reduction that indicates just how few decisions are innovative rather than merely formalistic. The statistics derived from the decisions (which are illustrated in six graphs) demonstrate that the majority of them uses purely formal criteria to apply the Brazilian law in force to the land occupations: the result is an entrenched defence of landed property. Nonetheless, the research cites numerous dicta taken from the few decisions that attempt to approach things differently, i.e. adopting a more open stance towards the squatters on the basis of considerations of a sociological nature. The conclusion is drawn that the agrarian reform is the greatest challenge facing Brazil’s current left-wing government and identifies the executive rather than the judiciary as the power that is more likely to give a new impulse to this long overdue and excessively slow reform.