The food neophobia scale and young adults’ intention to eat insect products

In the coming years, the new EU Regulation on Novel Food is likely to facilitate the development of a niche market for insects and insect‐based ingredients in many European countries. In this research, the aim is to explore the relationship between willingness to try (WTT) and behavior of eating insects, where the independent variables are food neophobia, sensory property expectations, and previous consumption. In total, 88 Italian participants took part in the study. The food neophobia scale (FNS) was constructed using 9 of the 10 items from the original FNS, and a Structural Equation Modeling approach was used to test the research hypotheses. The results show that males are more open to trying insects than females, and food neophobia is negatively correlated with the willingness to eat insects. Findings also indicate that the first exposure to insects positively increases consumers’ sensory property expectations. Intention to try is a strong predictor of the behavior of eating insects. People who scored lower on the FNS were more likely to try (intention) and consequently eat insects (behavior). These findings enhance knowledge about factors which could lead to lower levels of negative prejudice and greater willingness to taste edible insects among Western consumers. Finally, some marketing implications are discussed, like the need of information campaigns to emphasize positive sensory attributes of edible insects to increase the WTT this unfamiliar food.     

Unlocking the potential of Italian broadband: Case studies and policy lessons

A number of regional initiatives have recently revived the Italian broadband sector, although their fortunes vary depending on governance, market and geographical issues. However, all these initiatives jointly succeeded in sparking a heated debate on how public–private interplay can facilitate the deployment of broadband networks in a country still lagging behind European frontrunners such as Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. In the light of European Union regulation and recent case law, the paper examines three regional initiatives (Progetto Banda Ultra Larga Lombardia, Trentino Network and Lepida Emilia Romagna) by using the conceptual model on public private interplay developed by Nucciarelli, Sadowski, and Achard (2010). Thereafter, the paper elaborates on initiatives' ups and downs to focus on conditions and trigger events that have made them a success or a failure story. Lessons learnt conclude.     

XBRL for Financial Reporting: Evidence on Italian GAAP versus IFRS

The systematic adoption of the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) for financial reporting represents a great challenge. Worldwide, a large number of regulators are making an effort to promote the adoption of this standard to simplify and enhance the communication of financial information. This requires the definition of well‐structured taxonomies that can standardize and accommodate the content of financial reports prepared by firms. This study aims to analyze the regulator‐led adoption of XBRL for financial reporting. It examines the XBRL taxonomies used by Italian firms to reflect their financial reporting under rule‐based Italian GAAP and principles‐based International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). We compare the alignment of the Italian GAAP taxonomy and the IFRS taxonomy with Italian companies' financial statements and find two different levels of fit. The results offer useful insights for regulators and policy makers in prescribing or establishing appropriate taxonomies. We illustrate the potential impacts of the different taxonomies on the quality of financial reporting in terms of comparability and potential loss of information.     

Recent evolution of land use systems in the Abruzzi region, Italy

Agriculture in the Abruzzi mountain area of Italy's Mezzogiorno region has been drastically transformed over the past 20 years. This article describes the traditional land-use systems and the processes by which they have changed to modern farming or fallen into decline. Traditional farming still has a strong influence, even where new crops such as grapes and peaches are being grown. A confusion of systems exists, ranging from the most conservative mixed farming to intensive monoculture.     

Airport ownership and financial performance: Evidence from Italy

In the past few decades many countries have increased the presence of various forms of private sector involvement in airport ownership and management. This paper focuses on the financial performance of Italian airport companies. We present empirical evidence separately for two groups where public or private management majority prevails. The main findings indicate that companies with a private majority outperform the others in terms of financial indicators that are related to operating income.     

Assessing the Determinants of High-Growth Manufacturing Firms in Italy

Few firms grow rapidly, but their contribution to employment growth is often impressive. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse both the external and internal factors that can affect the probability of being a high-growth firm (HGF) in Italy. We found that HGFs are, on average, young firms and are present in different industries, but the role of demand is important to understanding their performance at the sectoral level. Moreover, our findings show that financial constraints and profitability are not associated with the probability of being a HGF. HGFs, on average, are characterised by high productivity, but only when growth is measured in terms of sales. The most original results of this study concern the endogenous determinants of rapid growth, which have yet to be adequately examined in the literature. First, we found that the concentration of ownership is important for HGFs that experienced rapid growth in their sales. Second, the quality of human capital is a strong point for firms experiencing rapid employment growth.     

Balancing irrigation multifunctionality based on key stakeholders’ attitudes: Lessons learned from the Muzza system,Italy

This research aims to evaluate the perceptions of and preferences for irrigation multifunctionality based on an analysis of stakeholder’ attitudes in a large irrigation system in Northern Italy, the Muzza canal. As the first artificial canal built in Northern Italy, this canal articulates a network of open earth canals that distribute water for irrigation, especially maize. The Stakeholder analysis approach and Governance model approach are applied. The collected data highlights: (1) each key stakeholder points of view regarding multifunctionality and ecosystem services, (2) the nature of conflicting attitudes regarding who and how the Muzza system is managed, and (3) the ability or inability to promote agreements among conflicting water demands. The results show how public administration is concerned about how to manage ecosystem services provided by irrigation practices, while private services are focused on how to guarantee the coexistence of consumptive and non-consumptive water uses, highlighting the persistent conflict between farming production and environmental protection. The rural community and civil society call for a debate about the future of irrigation multifunctionality in the Muzza system and the role of irrigation practices in landscape provision and management. In addition, the paper examines if multifunctionality is a characteristic or an objective of irrigation systems. These results can be used by researchers and relevant authorities to customize their interventions based on previous, well-structured knowledge of various stakeholders’ priorities.     

Drivers of Autonomy of Public Agencies in Italy

The creation of agencies has been and still is a widespread trend in the public sector: governments in many countries often establish semi‐autonomous single‐purpose organizations to carry out a wide range of functions and tasks. The trend to autonomization is problematic as it affects public sector's governance: several bodies operate partly autonomously from the core elective government, and are sometimes loosely coupled with their ‘parent’ administration. Consequently, analysing the drivers of agencies’ autonomy is a crucial issue for public management. This paper, in the light of some major contributions in organizational science, assumes that agencies’ autonomy is influenced by factors that affect post‐delegation relationships: agencies’ structure, culture and nature of the tasks executed. The study was aimed at testing a range of hypotheses about the autonomy of public agencies, using for this purpose the so‐far not investigated case of Italy–much in the spirit of the accumulation of knowledge in an area of public management. Results do not provide any strikingly counter‐intuitive finding, but a mix of confirmations and disconfirmations of previous findings that allow a finer‐grained analysis on the determinants of agency autonomy.     

Land system change in Italy from 1884 to 2007: Analysing the North–South divergence on the basis of an integrated indicator framework

Over the past centuries, land systems in Italy experienced fundamental shifts, owing to the availability of new energy forms, population surges, and technological progress. The 20th century was characterized by massive productivity increases, accompanied by gradual land abandonment and the return of forest land. We here analyze 120 years of land system change in Italy, applying the human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) framework, a metric for socio-economic pressures on terrestrial ecosystems. HANPP allows integrating ecological with societal perspectives, by systematically quantifying (a) biomass harvest and (b) the difference between potential productivity of ecosystems and current productivity induced by land use processes, such as land conversion, or land degradation. Besides assessing national trends we calculated HANPP separately for the Italian North and South between 1934 and 2007, in order to scrutinize if high regional discrepancies in terms of natural and socio-economic preconditions translate into diverging land system trajectories. Our results show that national HANPP has been declining from 78% of natural productivity before WWII to 56% in 2007, indicating a declining land -use induced pressure on biomass flows over time. Simultaneously, biomass harvest increased by around 26% due to agricultural intensification, despite shrinking croplands. Although we found a significant difference between the Northern and Southern region in the absolute levels of several land use indicators related to biomass appropriation, the overarching trends of land system change were remarkably similar in both regions. This suggests that underlying drivers of land system change, such as policies aimed at land-use intensification and structural change were equally dominating land system trajectories in the North and South of Italy, not withstanding their socio-ecological divergences.     

Structure and Location of Innovative Activity in the Italian Economy, 1981–85

An ‘innovative activity matrix’ is established from a recent ISTAT/CNR survey of innovation. After specifying the particularities of an innovative activity matrix in comparison with other flow matrices, we show that it is asymmetrical and clustered in parts of economic space. The structure of the innovative activity matrix is similar to that of the domestic and import requirement but not the capital flow matrix. Strong correlations indicate the following: that input–output analysis is useful for identifying the location of innovative activities in economic space; that it can be analyzed in an economically meaningful way; that its location is structured; and that, furthermore, it is structured in ways which are statistically related to economic activity. The paper ends with suggestions for the examination of possible causal relationships.