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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of regional images of Italy on the purchase probability of wine. Instead of regarding country image as a homogeneous national construct, this article focuses on revealing regional differences in Italian country image and investigating whether they are related with purchase probability. Moreover, several scholars state, that the development of larger regional brands can improve consumer choice especially for the product wine. In the light of growing global competition from ‘New World’ wine countries and simultaneously decreasing competitivity of the main European wine-producing countries (including Italy), the possibility to actively shape the development of regional brands and thereby potentially strengthening the competitive advantage within the European Union and on a global level, seems to offer an adequate approach to maintain the leading role of Italian wine producers in European and international trade. Therefore, this study aims to test, whether using larger regions (and not specific wine regions) as origin information for wine is applicable and improving consumer choice. The empirical framework was tested on a random sample of consumers living in Germany and comprises (a) the description of image differences between Northern and Southern Italy, (b) measuring the influence of regional indication of origin on purchase probability, (c) determining the predictive value of image components for purchase probability, and (d) the investigation of moderation effects of country knowledge on the results. Data from 388 respondents were analysed using multiple linear regression and paired t test. Results show significant image differences, which affects purchase probability. It is shown that the image of Southern Italy does not provide respondents with a suitable decision-making heuristic for buying wine. Furthermore, country knowledge negatively influences the predictive value of the measured regional image for purchase probability. As the predictive value of Southern Italian image does not contribute to the explanation of purchase probability, the present work corroborates the hypothesis of region-specific tendencies in the relationship between regional Italian image and consumer behaviour. Thus, this work provides a fundamental understanding of the regional composition of the Italian country image. It therefore serves practitioners as a decisional basis for the utilization of origin-related product information.

The present bachelor thesis aims to map the linguistic situation on the island of Sardinia and the language policy towards the minority languages present there. In the first half of the thesis, I describe the minority languages spoken by the local population and briefly discuss the historical circumstances surrounding the development of each of them. I also focus on the Ligurian dialect spoken here. I also briefly mention some of the differences between standard Italian and the regional Italian of Sardinia. The second half of this thesis is then devoted to the laws that protect minority languages and the concrete steps of the regional language policy that will take to promote or revive minority languages.

This paper offers a detailed analysis of the expression guarda te lit. ‘look you’ in regional Italian of Veneto. Firstly, we show that guarda te is a discourse marker that can have two distinct interpretations associated with different syntactic behaviors and prosodic contours. Secondly, we explain the evolution of guarda te as a discourse marker in terms of a process of syntacticization. In particular, we argue that guarda te has different interpretive and syntactic properties depending on the structural position it occupies in the clausal spine within the Speech Act layer above ForceP.

This conversation analytic study describes the uses of ciò ([ʧɔ]) in talk-in-interaction. This discourse marker is documented as a linguistic resource in several Venetan Italo-Romance varieties still widely spoken in the Veneto region, and it is also frequently used in the regional Italian spoken in that area. The data come from informal telephone calls and from family dinner conversations in both Italian and Trevigiano ([trevi'zaŋ]), which is a dialect spoken in the Treviso area. Preliminary results show that ciò (derived from the imperative form of the Venetan verb ciór / tór / tòr ([ʧor] / [tor] / [tɔr], ‘to take’)) is mainly mobilized as turn preface, often preceded by other particles. However, ciò is also found within the turn and, in a limited number of cases, in turn-final position. From a sequential point of view, in our data ciò occurs almost exclusively in responsive turns. This study shows that a conversation analytic approach yields a much more comprehensive understanding not only of specific structures of spoken languages but also of the complex relations existing between different linguistic varieties in Italy Basato sui principi teorici e metodologici dell’analisi della conversazione, questo studio descrive gli usi in interazione di ciò ([ʧɔ]), un segnale discorsivo presente in diverse varietà italo-romanze ancora ampiamente diffuse in Veneto, ma frequente anche nell’italiano regionale parlato in quest’area. I dati provengono da telefonate informali e da conversazioni in famiglia, in italiano e in dialetto trevigiano ([trevi'zaŋ]). I risultati preliminari mostrano che ciò (dalla forma imperativa del verbo veneto ciór / tór / tòr ([ʧor] / [tor] / [tɔr], ‘prendere’) è usato principalmente all’inizio del turno di parola, spesso preceduto da altre particelle. Tuttavia ciò si trova spesso all’interno e, in un numero limitato di casi, anche alla fine del turno. Dal punto di vista sequenziale, nei nostri dati la presenza di ciò è riscontrabile in maniera pressoché esclusiva in turni di risposta. Questo studio dimostra che un approccio metodologico di tipo analitico conversazionale può dare un utile contributo alla comprensione non solo di strutture e fenomeni caratteristici del parlato ma anche delle complesse relazioni esistenti tra varietà linguistiche diverse in Italia.

This chapter is dedicated to characters who are represented as being Italian or Italian American since they speak Italian-accented English interspersed with Italian words. The chapter explores how the Italian identity of such characters is dealt with in dubbing, showing that it is often emphasised by resorting to Italian regional accents or dialects, thus localising the films and making reference to Italian stereotypes. The Italian identity is maintained by resorting to a strategy of adaptation, domestication and regionalisation, using a more specific Italian variety.

This article questions the long-standing assumption that heritage Italian can be characterized as italiano popolare on account of a number of similar non-standard features. It is argued that this is a problematic comparison due to some methodological lacunae in research into heritage Italian and that a systematic corpus-based analysis is needed in order to reveal its underlying sociolinguistic dynamics. This study focuses on a corpus of Italian spoken by the Italian community in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) and presents a multivariate analysis of a set of morphosyntactic simplification features that have been labelled as typical of italiano popolare. It will be shown that the features of heritage Italian clearly correlate to a set of traditional language contact variables (e.g., contact with the home language and intergenerational transmission). This variation pattern shows that heritage Italian can no longer be connected to italiano popolare in the original sense of the term (viz. an interlanguage or diastratically lower regional Italian).

There is evidence today that, depending on different regions, Italians pronounce certain phonemes in different way. For example, the grapheme in zio ‘uncle’ and zitto ‘quiet’ in Northern Italy is always pronounced as [dz], while in the South we hear [ts]. The situation is very similar with the grapheme , which has two different outcomes, [s] and [z], depending on diatopic variable and distributional context (Berruto; Benincà ; Sobrero; Telmon; Canepari). These particular types of pronunciation and articulation can be explained by several factors: dialectal influence on Regional Italian, incoherence of the orthographic system for certain phonemes (with some of the phonemic distinctions being graphemically undistinguished) (Maraschio; Cignetti and Demartini), phonemic (non)functionality and problematic phonemes in Italian language (Muljačić). In this paper we will try to examine the significance of each of these factors that have influenced the variation in pronunciation of Regional Italian as well as the usage of the problematic phonemes in Italian language in the future. On one hand, this paper will compare studies on different articulation and perception of Italian phonemes depending on regional variability (Regional Italian), especially for the problematic phonemes in Italian language. On the other hand, we will analyse the possible influence that the incoherent orthographic system has on the loss of distinctive functions in pronouncing those phonemes (today and in the past). In this way we will try to understand what is going to happen in the future with the (non)articulation/perception of certain phonemes of Standard Italian and how this will affect the phonemic system of Italian language., U radu se objašnjavaju razlike u izgovoru talijanskog regionalnog jezika (italiano regionale), koje su primarno prouzročene dijalektalnim supstratom. Većina dijalektalnih govornika prvih generacija difuzije talijanskog standarda usvojila ga je kao drugi jezik. Stoga su i u izgovoru bile jače prisutne njegove regionalne razlike. Danas je to ipak drugačije, no varijacije u izgovoru i dalje prirodno postoje. Uzimajući velik broj (113) fonetičkih karakteristika regionalnoga talijanskog (iz Telmona), došli smo do zaključka da su neke od tih varijacija sekundarno prouzročene i netransparentnom grafijom i vrlo lošim fonološkim statusom ponekih fonema koji stvaraju veće, odnosno makroarealne razlike na cijelom talijanskom teritoriju. Kako bi se standardni jezik ponajprije osuvremenio te donekle unificirao u izgovoru, predlažemo rješavanje nekih postojećih problema: (1) osuvremeniti i ujednačiti nekoherentni grafički sustav, često temeljen na etimologiji; (2) riješiti fonološke probleme (nefunkcionalne parove prilagoditi prema najnovijem modelu (većinskom) izgovora); (3) predložiti paralelni sustav koji uzima u obzir regionalne varijetete koji bi bili prihvaćeni u gramatikama kao ispravni oblici usmenog jezika.

In questo lavoro si analizzano i toscanismi presenti nel Dizionario di fraseologia dell’italiano regionale (DFIR). Dato che si tratta del gruppo più importanti di fraseologismi regionali contenuti nel DFIR, si realizza uno studio di tipo trasversale secondo le tipologie di unità fraseologiche, secondo i loro componenti interni e le marche d’uso usate nel corpus sul quale è stato costruito il DFIR. Il risultato è una visione più ampia e critica del concetto di toscanismo, in quanto l’uso del marchio toscanismo nei dizionari odierni si confronta a volte con una visione arcaicizzante dell’unità fraseologica., The aim of this presentation is to analyse the Tuscanism of the Dizionario di fraseologia dell’italiano regionale (DFIR). Since this is the most important group of regional idioms contained in DFIR, a crosssectional study according to the types of phraseological units and their internal components is made. The result of our research is a broader and more critical concept of Tuscanism, since the use of the brand “Tuscanism” in the phraseological units present in contemporary dictionaries is compared sometimes with an archaic vision of the phraseologism.

Physical education in primary school contributes to the educational process of a person and can be considered a public health measure. Numerous studies have confirmed its benefits of increasing levels of physical activity, disease prevention and health promotion. The aim of this study is to present the results of the triennial SBAM regional program aimed at monitoring 8- year old children in the Apulian region of Southern Italy from 2013 to 2016. Thus, the program included 17,102 children in the first year, 16,104 children in the second year and 14,847children in the third year. SBAM is a multi-component program and includes different integrated action plans: physical education, active transport (pedibus), and methods for developing healthy eating habits. For each year, three motor tests (standing long jump, shuttle run 4x10, and medicine ball throw), a motor coordination test and two self-reports for evaluating self-efficacy and enjoyment were proposed to all children. The results show gender and group differences (normal-weight vs. overweight-obese) in both motor tests and self-reports (p

This article aims to build on established scholarship by highlighting a little-studied area of fashion production, that of the regional Italian dressmaker. Using one woman's wardrobe as a lens through which to consider established patterns of consumption, this article examines the role of the sartoria or dressmaker in post-war Italy. After a brief discussion of the reputation and dynamics of the related but more exclusive Italian couture, the author defines the characteristics of clothing produced by Italy's regional, small-scale dressmakers and their importance within Italy's fashion system. The author draws conclusions based upon close examination of one woman's wardrobe, created by the Turin workshop Sartoria Grimaldi and now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum's permanent collection. A selection of this wardrobe was researched and exhibited for the first time in 2014 within the Museum's major exhibition ‘The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945–2014’.

Earlier studies on Standard Italian describe polar questions as being characterised by a terminal rise, as opposed to a terminal fall for statements, where a low/falling accentual movement precedes the terminal part of the contour in both sentence types. The same is generally claimed for the Northern and Central Italian varieties (including Florentine, i.e. the variety from which Standard Italian stems), whereas Southern accents are characterised by an accentual rise followed by a terminal fall, being therefore the primary cue for question in non-terminal position. However, a closer look at the existing literature on regional Italian question intonation reveals that such a geographical distribution of intonational features across Italian accents is not that clear-cut. A reason for this discrepancy might be the different speaking styles – here intended as the broad spontaneous vs. read distinction – of the spoken productions analysed. The aim of this paper is to call into question the claim that a terminal rise preceded by an accentual low/fall is the most widespread intonational feature for marking questioning across Italian accents. The goal is to provide a clearer picture of question intonation in Italian by looking at the distribution of the rise as either on terminal or non-terminal position across a large number of varieties, where speech materials have been elicited with the same methodology, and they are therefore homogeneous with respect to speaking style. Intonation analysis has been carried out on spontaneous yes–no questions extracted from the Map Task dialogues collected in the CLIPS national corpus (Corpora e Lessici di Italiano Parlato e Scritto – Corpora and Lexicons of Spoken and Written Italian) covering 15 varieties of Italian. Results of this analysis on the Northern, Central, and Southern polar questions reveals that the accentual rise prevails, and that the distribution of the rise across varieties is independent of the geography.

This article examines the mechanisms involved in the formation of regional Italian from the perspective of contact linguistics. Varieties of regional Italian containing elements of both local dialects and Standard Italian (SI) are spoken throughout Italy; this paper focuses primarily on Salento, a southern region characterized by a strong bilingual environment. The aim is to investigate the interaction between a dialect and a standard language, as well as the concrete linguistic mechanisms involved. The historical background of the acquisition of SI and its diffusion throughout the national territory are considered crucial moments in language transmission. Sociolinguistic characteristics of speakers are also analyzed, as are three types of constructions: change of verb transitivity, use of polyvalent complementizer, and gerunds. The analysis confirms that the spoken variety of Italian, regional Italian, is a result of contact-induced change of SI influenced by the local dialect, Salentino.

This paper discusses the 1911 International Exposition in Rome and illustrates how this patriotic celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Italian Sate utilized symbolic landscapes of architecture and archaeology to promote nationalist sentiments of italianita and romanita centered on the young capital of Rome. Through modern art exhibitions at the Valle Giulia, scientific conferences at the Castel Sant’Angelo, archaeological exhibits on the Roman Empire in the Baths of Diocletian, and regional Italian pavilions in the Piazza d’Armi, exposition officials offered a complex representation of Italian national identity that was modern yet ancient, cosmopolitan yet bucolic, European yet regional, and imperial yet developing.

Apresentamos neste artigo o resultado de uma pesquisa sobre a situação atual dos italianos regionais, quanto ao uso de palavras diferentes para o mesmo significado. Essa fonte de riqueza lexical, observada do ponto de vista dos dialetos, é um tema de grande relevância que deve permitir aos alunos incorporá-la, desde o início de sua aprendizagem da língua.

Interest groups have responded to European integration with varied and multi-level adjustment strategies. This article examines the Europeanization of national and regional Italian business associations as they respond to the challenge of EMU and deeper economic integration. A panel survey and analysis of available data indicate that European considerations are plainly evident in interest group goals, strategies, activities, and organization, and that interest group attention to European issues has been increasing. The research does not find neatly ordered patterns of interest group activity in Europe, but rather, a complex mix of pressure group strategies, including multi-level lobbying, consistent with multi-level governance models.

While the Anglo-Saxon tradition is encapsulated in the corpus of nursery rhymes called Mother Goose, Italy presents a greater variety of traditional nursery rhymes. Even the naming conventions used for these nursery rhymes show the difficulty in distinguishing between the various genres. Folklore experts, who have been collecting the greater part of regional Italian folktales and poetry from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, have coined the following definitions: “minor folk literature,” “children’s folklore,” “children’s life,” and “children’s games and pleasantries.” The terms most commonly used today are: ninne nanne, nenie or cantilene (lullabies or singsongs), when they are intended to make a baby go to sleep; tiritere and filastrocche (nursery rhymes), when they are used by adults to entertain children; conte and filastrocche (counting rhymes), for pieces invented by children and used to count out, jump rope or as part of their games. But within these same genres, there is an even greater regional variety, due to the use of local themes, structure and references, as seen in the traditional fables collected in Italy’s twenty regions. As an example, in the region of Abruzzo, one of the more common themes is that of the flock of sheep led to the base of the mountain to graze and the fear the shepherds have of losing them to wolves that inhabit the area, as in the following piece

This research tries to interpret the results of the empirical analysis of urban land value variations from 1977 to 2012 in the regional Italian capital cities based on the well-known theory of urban land rent. The historical series to be analyzed were obtained as the difference between the market value of a property and its cost of production. The paper shows, in quantitative terms, how differential and absolute rents will be translated into the dynamics of land values in relation to local specificities. The analysis of urban land rent evolution and the comparative study of the phenomenon compared to urban geography highlighted the difference among the various urban systems investigated and the criticalities generated by processes of transformation that have affected some Italian urban contexts. The difference is essentially explained by the different weight of macroeconomic variables, related to national and international contexts, and microeconomic variables, closely related to local demand and supply, in the process of rent formation.

Recently introduced rapidly mutating Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat (RM Y-STR) loci, displaying a multiple-fold higher mutation rate relative to any other Y-STRs, including those conventionally used in forensic casework, have been demonstrated to improve the resolution of male lineage differentiation and to allow male relative separation usually impossible with standard Y-STRs. However, large and geographically-detailed frequency haplotype databases are required to estimate the statistical weight of RM Y-STR haplotype matches if observed in forensic casework. With this in mind, the Italian Working Group (GEFI) of the International Society for Forensic Genetics launched a collaborative exercise aimed at generating an Italian quality controlled forensic RM Y-STR haplotype database. Overall 1509 male individuals from 13 regional populations covering northern, central and southern areas of the Italian peninsula plus Sicily were collected, including both "rural'' and "urban'' samples classified according to population density in the sampling area. A subset of individuals was additionally genotyped for Y-STR loci included in the Yfiler and PowerPlex Y23 (PPY23) systems (75% and 62%, respectively), allowing the comparison of RM and conventional Y-STRs. Considering the whole set of 13 RM Y-STRs, 1501 unique haplotypes were observed among the 1509 sampled Italian men with a haplotype diversity of 0.999996, largely superior to Yfiler and PPY23 with 0.999914 and 0.999950, respectively. AMOVA indicated that 99.996% of the haplotype variation was within populations, confirming that genetic-geographic structure is almost undetected by RM Y-STRs. Haplotype sharing among regional Italian populations was not observed at all with the complete set of 13 RM Y-STRs. Haplotype sharing within Italian populations was very rare (0.27% non-unique haplotypes), and lower in urban (0.22%) than rural (0.29%) areas. Additionally, 422 father-son pairs were investigated, and 20.1% of them could be discriminated by the whole set of 13 RM Y-STRs, which was very close to the theoretically expected estimate of 19.5% given the mutation rates of the markers used. Results obtained from a high-coverage Italian haplotype dataset confirm on the regional scale the exceptional ability of RM Y-STRs to resolve male lineages previously observed globally, and attest the unsurpassed value of RM Y-STRs for male-relative differentiation purposes. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

The aim of this paper is to explore a specific case of contact-induced pragmaticalization undergone by some adverbs meaning ‘already’ in Piedmontese Regional Italian, French, and some neighbouring varieties. This pragmaticalization process resulted in the development of a new, discourse-related function of the adverbs under scrutiny, which, in contemporary spoken varieties, can be used in interrogative contexts in order to ask for the repetition of information that the speaker knew, but cannot remember at the time of speaking due to a failure in recall.

We make here the review of Paolo D’Achille’s L’italiano contemporaneo. The author deals with a lot of themes concerning contemporary Italian in this book: the situation of Italian language today (the fact that it is spoken along with dialects, its main characteristics, the italiano standard and the italiano dell’uso medio or neostandard); the onomastics (the first names, the ergonyms…); the lexicon (the basic Italian, the loan words…); the phonetics and the phonology (the Italian phonemes and the question of the consonant’s length, the structure of the syllable…); the inflected morphology (the system of the pronouns and the system of the verb and their innovations…); the lexical morphology (the formation of the words by derivation, by composition…); the syntaxis (the dislocations, the interrogative phrase, the coordination and the subordination…); the spoken varieties (the main characteristics of spoken Italian from a phonetic and morphosyntactic point of view, the regional Italian, the Italian spoken by young people…), the written varieties (the Italian of literature, the Italian of the newspapers, the Italian of the semicolti…) and the varieties of the italiano trasmesso, that is to say the Italian “spoken from distance” (by telephone, at the radio, in the films or at the television) and the Italian “written from distance” (the Internet sites, the e-mails, the chats and the sms). Paolo D’Achille takes particularly into account the notion of variation in his description of Italian language and thus gives of this one a complete view. We sum up and analyse each chapter of the book. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.24.6152

Popular portrayals of Italian-American ethnicity frequently rely on images of abundant meals of pasta, tomato sauce, meatballs, garlic bread and strawwrapped bottles of red wine. Until fairly recently, few people, including thirdand fourth-generation Italian-Americans, felt a need to take issue with the authenticity of this red, green and white cuisine, feeling that it represented some fundamental truth about ‘traditional’ Italian culture (Waters 1990). 1 In fact, the food traditions immigrants brought with them from rural Italy were as varied as the local customs, dialects, and religious feast days celebrated in the old country’s numerous villages. In Chicago, it actually took about 80 years from the time the erst Italians arrived for the foods now thought of as quintessentially Italian-American to become a dominant culinary form ‐ longer than the food paradigm now imagined as ‘traditional’ Italian-American has existed. Yet food did become, despite formidable obstacles, a unifying force between the various regional Italian immigrant groups. From the establishment of a Northern Italian presence in Chicago in 1850, to the erst major wave of Southern Italian immigration in the 1890’s and until the Italian population peaked and began to decline around 1930, a cuisine based on Sicilian and Southern Italian roots gradually became the culinary paradigm in a majority of households in Chicago’s numerous Little Italies, whether they were Northern or Southern, Sicilian, Calabrian or Piemontese. Why do Italian-American eating habits matter? A tradition of research in anthropology, folklore, and sociology that stretches back into the 1930s suggests that food serves as a locus for collective memory, social organization and ethnic identity-building. 2 As historians rethink concepts of ethnic identiecation, the labour of food production and the leisure of its consumption represent a critical point for analysis of the ways in which immigrants from differing regional groups came to perceive themselves as part of distinct American ‘ethnic’ groups, with common traditions, heritage, and ways of eating. For many immigrant groups, particularly those from rural backgrounds, food’s capacity for eexible usage in the selection and invention of traditions which represent the community as a whole can help reconcile, as it did in the Italian case, some of the more intransigent political and economic divisions within the community. Although most non-Italian Americans conceived of Italian immigrants as

Is there a relationship between bank monitoring models and the level of shadow economy? This paper develops a model of optimal lending technology to study the relationship between local underground economic activity and banks’ lending choices. In turn, as the aggregate level of informality and tax evasion increase, it becomes more profitable for banks to screen and supervise borrowers using more costly in-depth monitoring technologies. A large dataset of regional Italian data confirms these conjectures.

OBJECTIVES: To study aluminum (Al), manganese (Mn), and lead (Pb) influence on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) development. METHODS: A total of 34 patients (10% of the regional ALS population) and 25 controls of an Italian region were enrolled. Metal concentrations were determined by atomic absorption spectroscopy. RESULTS: Serum Al concentrations in patients and controls were similar and lower than those provided by the Italian Society of Reference Values. No differences were observed in serum Mn concentrations, while, as expected, blood Pb levels were significantly higher in patients with ALS than those in controls. CONCLUSIONS: Results confirmed the association between high Pb blood levels and ALS; on the contrary, Al and Mn did not differ significantly in patients and controls, suggesting that Mn and especially Al may play a less important role in the ALS pathogenesis.

ProSisMu (acronym of the Italian translation of Seismic Protection of Masonry structures) is an Italian project ideated by the synergy of the ERREGI group, a company which works in the civil and architectural engineering field, and the scientific contribution of the University of Rome Sapienza, Department of Structural and Geotechnical Engineering, recently approved to be financed by the regional finance company FILAS, Lazio Italy. The problem of seismic protection of historic masonry structures is always current in Italy, a country reach of history and of an extensive cultural heritage. The tragic seismic events happened in this territory, the last significant one refers to the L'Aquila earthquake in April 2009, together with the necessity of restoration and preservation of the cultural heritage, faced the necessity of a systematic analysis of the kind of structural damages induced on masonry structures. This work aims to illustrate the program of the project which shall be realized in the next two years.

We performed MBL2 genotyping in 47 CF patients—cared of at the regional CF Centre of Trieste—trying to establish a correlation within allelic variants of MBL2 and modification of patients' clinical outcome. FEV1 values were significantly lowered and a significantly earlier age at onset of Pseudomonas aeruginosa colonisation was found in CF patients with at least one MBL2 variant.

The main aim of this paper is to look for a causal impact of transport investment activity on employment and on GDP through an empirical analysis, and to understand whether or not investments are really important for the economy. The results of the empirical investigation demonstrate the existence of such links and that the impact of transport investments can indeed bring about changes in the economic system, although one must consider that the nature of investments is a strategic factor to have desirable effects and that other variables, such as technology, have a greater importance in the short term on the economic system. The examples for this investigation have been implemented by using national and regional Italian data, although results may be easily extended to other areas, both sectorial and geographical.

The biological structure of the regional Italian populations, defined by gene frequency distributions of erythrocytic markers, was analysed according to the strong migratory movements of the Italian population over recent decades. The analyses were conducted by means of principal components analysis on a sample representative of native and resident populations. This vastly larger resident population was subdivided into two groups, representing before and after the more marked migratory movements. The analysis shows that, with the exception of Sardegna, there is a trend toward greater overall homogeneity among the regional populations. The north-south distinction has tended to diminish. But while the northern regions have become more homogeneous with regard to each other, this difference between southern regions—especially those exclusively influenced by emigration—has been accentuated.

Frisch's (1959) conjecture on the behavior of the income elasticity of the marginal utility of income is tested by means of regional Italian data. Results offer some support to the empirical validity of the conjecture.