RISULTATI RICERCA

Globalisation and liberalisation of trade and business around the world have made many goods and services available to consumers anywhere in the world. Econom-ic growth has been described by an increase in the purchasing power of the middle class, which is the largest consumer segment of the population. This required an emphasis on consumer protection and the promotion of responsible consumer movement around the world. The purpose of the research is to analyse the prob-lems of the legal mechanism for protecting consumer rights based on the norms of sustainable development, identify and disclose modern problems related to the le-gal status of this area. The main method of the research was comparative analysis which allowed to compare the regional mechanisms for protecting consumer rights, considering the economic and political factors inherent in each of the countries. The conducted study allowed to reveal legal approaches to the study of consumer protection, to analyse the relevant current legislative framework. It is substantiated that the issues of consumer protection are given due attention in many countries. It was concluded that during the development of the latest corrective legislative acts governing consumer protection mechanisms in the countries of the European Union, the Republic of Kazakhstan and India, the positive aspects of world experience, the content of these legal documents were considered. The content of the said legal documents was based on the UN principles of consumer protection, which indicates a significant contribution of the above countries to the perfor-mance of the obligations to guarantee the consumers their fundamental rights.

This paper investigates the behavior of private and publicly-owned corporations providing services in local industries that have undergone restructuring interventions since the Nineties in order to promote market contestability. Based on the approaches arising from the transaction costs theory, the paper proposes a comparative analysis of the economic and financial efficiency of a sample of local utilities supplying services in the water and waste industries, observed from 2008 to 2010. The efficiency analysis is achieved by measuring the distance from the stochastic frontier of the production costs of each firm, and the financial efficiency analysis through statement ratios. The findings of the study generally confirm the implications of the transaction costs approach and they show a wide convergence trend between privately and publicly owned organizations for the degree of utilization of input as well as for the financial efficiency analysis. There are sometimes slight differentials on the part of public companies, especially for the larger ones, which can be largely explained by the existence of more stringent welfare-oriented objectives.

L’importanza del ricorso alla comparazione giuridica è oggi questione ancora attuale. Sono molte le istituzioni al livello internazionale, regionale e nazionale, nonché le associazioni, le università e i centri di ricerca che si occupano di diritto comparato. Questo articolo vuole prendere in considerazione l’importanza del ruolo della Corte di Giustizia dell’Unione Europea (CGUE) nel campo del diritto comparato. Ai fini di una migliore comprensione di tale ruolo rilevano vari fattori quali la composizione e i metodi di lavoro della CGUE, l’analisi comparativa, in particolare per aspetti linguistico-terminologici, utilizzata sia nelle decisioni della Corte che nelle opinioni degli Avvocati Generali, nonché le tradizioni costituzionali degli Stati membri

Purpose. This paper quantifies and compares the environmental impacts calculated with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for four different insulating boards made with natural or recovered fibers: recycled PET, recycled textile, hemp and sheep wool fibers. Methods. The environmental impacts of the different boards are compared using as functional unit 1 R of thermic resistance and the system boundaries are taken from cradle to grave. Moreover, the length of the use phase necessary to balance the CO2 emissions linked to the life cycle of each insulating board has been assessed. Results and discussion. The results of the comparative LCA and a contribution analysis are reported in order to highlight the main sources of environmental impact. The insulating boards made with sheep wool and recycled textile show the lowest environmental impact for almost all the impact categories considered in the analysis and require the shortest use time in order to balance the CO2 emissions of the life cycle (5 months). If the CO2 uptake from the atmosphere is included in the calculation, the insulating board made with hemp outperform the other boards in impact category "climate change" and in the "offsetting period" (less than 1 month). Conclusions. The paper concludes that the use of insulating boards, in particular made with recycled or natural materials, can represent an important step towards the increase of the sustainability of the building sector. In addition, LCA results should increasingly be included in rating systems and schemes in the building sector in order to effectively lead this sector toward sustainability.

In no more than a decade, the multilevel model has spread throughout social sciences, becoming one of the basic techniques in the discipline. The focus of this article lies on the use of multilevel analysis in the domain of international comparative studies. The article shows a broad picture of potential pitfalls in using multilevel analysis for the comparative researcher. The increasing popularity of the technique does entail some potential dangers researchers are not always aware of. Five of them are dealt with in the article: definitions of multilevel comparative research, the correct use of units and levels in comparative analyses, the comparability of instruments, the availability of data and indicators and stepwise multilevel analysis strategies. The conclusions places the potential pitfalls back in a broad perspective and sketches potential directions and promises of multilevel comparative research.

This volume tries to shed light on the controversial distinction between qualitative and quantitative methodologies in sociological research on health. Together with a deep analysis of the multi-level statistical models, the qualitative methods are also investigated. A panel discussion on the state-of-the-art of comparative research in the Sociology of Health and Medicine in Italy, two comparative researches by Italian scholars and an assessment of the different typologies of health systems complete the series of contributions.

Il lavoro presenta i risultati di 17 mesi di osservazione su due popolazioni di utenti trattati rispettivamente con buprenorfina, sostitutiva di oppiacei e metadone. L’Osservazione è stata effettuata su un campione di n. 73 utenti del Ser.T. di Melfi, di cui n. 69 maschi e n. 4 donne per la durata di 17 mesi dal 1/1/2001 al 31/05/2002. Al campione è stato fatto un trattamento farmacologico della durata minima di 6 mesi con un parametro valutativo con l’esame delle urine. I risultati ottenuti dimostrano una positiva efficacia in entrambi i gruppi analizzati, poiché non sembrano emergere significative differenze nel craving per i cannabinoidi e la cocaina.

The use of ternary diagrams is here proposed as a straightforward means to show the relation between the electricity generating mixes and relevant scenario parameters, such as system carbon emissions (gCO2/kWh) and generation costs (c€/kWh). The effectiveness of the representation is improved by plotting contour lines inside the diagram to help the reader to identify the generation mixes that meet specific economic and environmental requirements. Along with the description of the potentiality of the ternary diagrams in the energy scenario field, an explanatory application is also reported. It demonstrates the helpfulness of the graph in performing preliminary assessments of specific energy policies. The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of a future (2030) Italian electricity generation system largely based on renewables - providing 50% of the demand - is plotted in a ternary diagram as function of the combination of different renewable electricity generation shares. The graph clearly shows that the cheapest electricity can be achieved by an electricity generation mix that covers 20-30% of the electricity demand with wind power, 0-20% with photovoltaic (PV) and 10-30% with the other renewables. Further assessments demonstrate that the PV capacity should be limited so as to reduce the installation of expensive energy storage capacity while wind power along with electricity from biomass could effectively contribute in reducing the system LCOE.

Typologies have been central to the comparative turn in public policy and this paper contributes to the debate by assessing the capacity of typologies of health systems to capture the institutional context of health care and to contribute to explaining health policies across countries. Using a recent comparative study of health policy and focusing on the concept of the health care state the paper suggests three things. First, the concept of the health care state holds as a set of ideal types. Second, as such the concept of the health care state provides a useful springboard for analyzing health policy, but one which needs to be complemented by more specific institutional explanations. Third, the concept of the health care state is less applicable to increasingly important, non-medical areas of health policy. Instead, different aspects of institutional context come into play and they can be combined as part of a looser ‘‘organizing framework’’.

In August 2010, the IASB and the FASB jointly released an exposure draft proposing a "right-of-use" model for the recognition of lease-related assets and liabilities. The literature shows that leasing is a relevant subject for study. Many studies have investigated the point of view of users and preparers about lease accounting. Moreover, significant studies on the impact assessment of new accounting models for leases have been conducted. The objective of this paper is to perform an impact assessment of the new standard on leases that takes into account companies listed on the main EU stock exchanges. Specifically, this paper try to estimate the magnitude of the change in some ratios that would have been produced by the new treatment with reference to 2011. The results of the paper show that the debt-to-equity ratio increased significantly and, subject to the IASB final decisions on profit or loss accounting, the EBITDA should also have increased, while ROA should not significantly be affected. Furthermore, the results show that the impact of the introduction of the IASB proposal on financial ratios will differ both among industries and among European Union countries.