RISULTATI RICERCA

The Kosovo experience has been a positive one, especially form the standpoint of the protection of the Albanian minority from the onslaught of the Serbian para-military forces. Unfortunately, the period following the armed intervention of the international community is not such as to allow a similar favorable judgment. In fact, the situation is now the reverse of the past one, in the sense that the most suffering minority now seems to be the Serbian. Abeille gives us a complete picture of the situation, including a detailed description of the forces and institutions designed to restore the normality within this harassed area of Europe.

D’Auria analyzes an important and relatively recent phenomenon in the field of international conflicts: the rise and development of the Contractors. Such Security (and Logistical) personnel is hired, generally on a Corporate Provider basis, by public bodies (both Military and Civilian), as well as by private concerns. The objective is to protect their people, facilities, transportation, communication systems, etc., by the attack of non-conventional military forces and/or by terrorists and/or malefactors, on a single or group basis. The problems connected with this growing field of activity are many, and difficult to solve. D’Auria highlights the most relevant among them.

La Bella has made a comparative study of Ombudsmen in Italy (Difensore civico) and in France (Médiateur de la Republique and Délegués). He analyzes in deep the situation in the two countries from a historic, institutional and attitudal perspective. From a series of interviews conducted by the Author in Italy with a group of Difensori Civici, and in France with a comparable group of Délegués du Médiateur de la Republique, the Author has drawn some interesting considerations. The most important differences between the Italians and the French Ombudsmen seem to be found in the diversity of the institutional frameworks and of their backgrounds (more legalistic oriented, in the case of Italians), and in their self-perception of the role, seen as less political by the French, compared to the Italians.

The Authors describe the results of their empirical inquiry in a specific case of information utilization for decision-making within five Italian Universities. Four macro areas have been analyzed: Resources, Teaching, Research and Financial Management. Wide differences have been ascertained by the Authors, not only among the five Universities, but also within each one of them for the above mentioned macro-areas. In some cases informations needed for decision-making were not available; in other cases, they were not even requested by the decision-makers. Generally speaking, the information base seems to be more narrow in those Universities whose decision-making structure is more centralized and open to negotiation. Besides, the decision-makers in those institutions tend to decide on the basis of their own strategies, and to avoid an external confrontation with other Universities, as well as with the National Government.

Bruno Leuzzi analyzes in this article the changes achieved in the most recent period by EU in the complex and very important field of the European Funds (both Structural Funds and Objective 1), which are especially relevant for all Southern Regions of Italy. Those changes are having important consequences on the activity, as well as on the configuration of the administrative institutions (both at the central and local level) and for the very constitutional future of the Member States. Said changes began with the European Act of 1986, which established the policy of cohesion, and of a process of restructuration of both contents and methods of the whole specter of the European policies, as well as of the institutions, at the European and Member States level.

An international debate on which economic instrument should be used to reduce pollutant emissions has begun since the nineties when the awareness of climatic risks aroused and first attempts to introduce a European carbon tax were made. Although this project failed, several national programmes of carbon/energy taxes have been developed with a common concern for industrial competitiveness of energy and/or carbon-intensive firms. Therefore, double dividend schemes have been applied to reduce existing distorsive taxes while introducing a higher burden on energy products. This paper reviews the most important European case studies and analyses the effects of the introduction of a carbon tax in Italy on energy expenditure and economic profitability of Italian manufacturing enterprises. This tax has been introduced in 1998 and should have progressively increased up to the final tax rates in 2005. However, this process halted in the year 2000 as the world energy prices increased and the ultimate rates have never been applied. Nonetheless, our analysis offers relevant insights both because energy excises are a major instrument in environmental policy and because industrial activities affected by energy taxes will also be affected by the tradable permits scheme recently adopted by the European Union. The study is performed with a microsimulation model to simulate changes in energy excises and the associated reduction of social contributions to achieve the double dividend. Existing empirical analyses have usually been carried out at aggregate or sectoral level, but the effects on costs both of carbon tax and of compensative measures differ at the firm level, thus it is significant to study the impact on economic profitability on individual units of analysis. The data show that energy expenditure as a component of intermediate costs varies by economic activity as well as the energy mix used in the production process, thus suggesting possible competitiveness problems for some firms as taxation is linked to the carbon content of each energy source. A further element is the sectoral and dimensional variability of prices of some energy products which introduces an additional information to evaluate the impact of rising international energy quotations. The empirical results show a large sectoral and dimensional differentiation of economic effects although the estimated impact on competitiveness is negligible for most sectors. The difference is due to the energy intensity of production and to the energy mix for each process as well as to the quantity of labour employed. In general, the tax burden in the year 2000 has produced fiscal savings compared to the previous tax rules, as the reduction of social contributions has been higher than the cost due to the carbon tax. However, some exceptions occur: economic activities where heavily-taxed products are used such as coal and coke are not fully compensated by the social contribution cut: this is the case of metal products and the production of non metallic mineral products. Moreover, small and medium enterprises benefited more than large industrial firms. As the EU tradable permits scheme will fully come into force and a policy mix of excises and permits on energy products will deploy its effects on the same group of energy-intensive firms, this set of fiscal environmental rules is likely to produce dissimilar effects by economic sectors and by firm size which are worth investigating.