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The paper represent a theoretical attempt to investigate the role that the local government can play in improving the level of social capital for the development of industrial districts. The social capital is not, as generally suggested by the socio-economic literature, an individual attitude towards something which does not imply privately appropriable economic benefits, as it is for a pure public good (which would not imply privately appropriable benefits). Social capital should be interpreted as a public component of an investment which implies private and public benefits entangled with each other. Firms could not have sufficient incentive to increase its investment in social capital, because this investment strictly depends on the economic convenience of investing in the impure public good. Starting from this point of view, we underline the importance of investing local public resources (funds, time and effort) for the development of the local social capital.

The aim of the paper is to propose a new approach to urban planning, evaluating the culture-led regeneration processes. In the last few years, the cultural turn in urban planning played a central role in the urban studies. In this way we try to elaborate a more robust perspective interpreting the complex phenomenology emerging from the culture-led regeneration processes. Within the concept of complexity we discuss about the metabolic process that are the processes necessary to transform energy, material and information in goods and service functional to the complex urban system life. The approach that will be employed is the MuSIASEM that is based on several novel concept and an innovative methods never applied in this research field.

It is ten years after Lisbon and in the year dedicated to poverty alleviation that this paper is written in order to investigate the implications of the decisions regarding poverty reduction taken by the EU. We present a simple comparison of the risks of poverty in European countries in 2000 and 2008, before and after transfers, and our finding is a positive effect of the policies towards poverty alleviation, even if the risk of poverty is increasing. By studying the correlation between percentage of people that fall below the poverty line and GDP per capita, we do not observe a whole diverse situation in Europe, with only few minor differences between rich and poor countries. We also discuss the importance of alternative approaches in estimating poverty, by means of a multidimensional method which considers a multitude of aspects in the quality of life.

Most of the people all over the world claim that globalization is a result of dynamic interactions between economic, technological, social and political factors. The aim of this paper is to document some stylized facts on this phenomenon in order to take

In the increasingly knowledge-based global economy, a well-educated and highly-skilled labour force and a significant degree of openness to international trade are vital for countries to successfully meet the challenge of worldwide competition. This paper