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In order to be competitive on the market and promote food safety and sustainable products, firms need to understand the characteristics of the various groups of consumers, in relation to their sensitivity to the environment and to food safety. Because of the informational asymmetry between consumer and producer, and despite the recent EC Regulation No. 1169/2011 on the provision of information to consumers on food, which became fully operational after 2014 and which provides for greater labelling transparency, consumers make choices based on the quality perception of a product without reaching the desired level of food safety and without understanding the benefits of environmentally and socially friendly products. Firms that wish to adopt corporate social responsibility initiatives, in a competitive scenario, need to understand how consumers make choices. To this end, this study investigates the intrinsic and extrinsic attributes that affect food choice like environmental certification, water footprint and carbon footprint as well as ethical aspects; information on the interviewee's ability to read the label and any problem understanding it were also requested. A questionnaire was conducted on a sample of 238 Italian consumers using face to face interviews. The data generated in this way were submitted to a descriptive analysis and cluster analysis. The results presented in this paper may be useful for both producers in formulating their marketing strategies and for public institutions in planning education and information programmes to promote a clear labelling regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On a global scale, because of the population growth, agriculture has to take on the challenge of how to increase food production without compromising the ecosystems and the natural resources of the same agro system. A sustainable agriculture can take on this challenge, taking into consideration the consequences that the current strategy can have on the agro system ability to face efficiently the same challenge in the future. Only preserving the ecological assets, the availability of goods and ecosystem services, indispensable for the agricultural production, the agro system will be able to reconcile productivity and protection of natural ecosystems. The sustainability of the agricultural industry, in its broader sense, represents the ideal balance not just between economic and environmental requests, but also social ones, the latter regarding the life quality of operators. For this reason, meaning sustainability as the situation in which the achievement of goals concerning both the economic and the social dimensions occurs in the respect of the environment, some indicators, pertinent to these three dimensions and related to the Italian regional agricultural systems, have been selected in order to calculate, applying the Data Envelopment Analysis method, an efficiency index for each regional agricultural system. Although a sustainable situation is also efficient, the efficiency, defined in relation to the indicators of the economic, social and environmental dimensions, has not been sufficient to find any regional system that can be defined fully based on sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate social responsibility is "the voluntary integration of social and environmental concerns of firms in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders" (European Commission, 2001). It is based on three fundamental concepts: the voluntary nature of the initiatives, awareness and attention to relations with the market and thus with consumers and, finally, the involvement of all stakeholders. This suggests that being socially responsible means paying greater attention to the environment, to employment and to responsible consumers. What is the best strategy that a company can adopt to take on a responsible behavior? To this end, the paper analyzes the orientation to greening as a possible strategic leverage to adopt socially responsible behavior also capable of responding to the needs of society in terms of employment, environment and responsible consumption. The work goes on to focus on the agri-food sector, as a possible greening-oriented sector which could, through careful environmental protection policies, the creation of new "green" professionals and by supplying goods and services to meet the responsible consumption, be socially responsible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexity of the features of the well-being determines the need to define and study it through a comprehensive approach. Institutions such as the OECD and, in Italy, the National Statistics Institute in cooperation with the CNEL have intensified their efforts to identify, define and implement new indicators that can provide a comprehensive overview of all aspects (domains) that pertain to well-being. So, not only economic parameters but also parameters, according to the classification adopted by ISTAT and the CNEL, such as environment, health, education and training, employment and the reconciliation of life, social relations , safety, well-being subjective, landscape and cultural heritage, research and innovation, the quality of services and policy and institutions. In this study we have chosen to focus on the domain of education and training and to arrive at a summary measure of the 8 dimensions that characterize it, we have constructed a composite indicator . Everything was functional to achieve, using the 2008 data, a comparative study on the domain of education and training among twenty-two Italian territorial areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is now an indisputable challenge to the sustainability of human development. The effects of global warming, especially anthropogenic, affect all economic and productive sectors, stimulating a broad debate about the best and more suited tools and strategies to put in place to resist but also to overcome this challenge. European agriculture that is currently discussing on the trajectories post-2013, has a strong interest in the issue of climate change, not only because agricultural activities are directly dependent on climatic conditions, but because also agriculture contributes to the release of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere. Based on these considerations, the aim of this paper is to analyze the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the light of a new interpretive scheme of its future directions, in order to verify the actual effectiveness in the implementation of development strategies of the sector, able to ensure sustainability in its various dimensions: economic, social, environmental, territorial and generational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]