The Youth of the Inner Areas and the Italian NRRP. – The Italian NRRP provides considerable financial resources to promote a green transition and a digital transformation of people and territories. Young people living in the inner areas of Italy have an opportunity to overcome marginality and become key actors of development, making of diversity an asset rather than a source of inequality and epistemic injustice. Based on these premises, the research illustrates the youth policies and the strategies for inner areas within the framework of the Italian NRRP, then focuses on the peculiarities of young people living in inner areas. The analysis highlights the need to create new jobs in peripheral territories, to make migration an opportunity rather than a necessity. Specifically, it is important to approach the issue of employment in inner areas with the lens of youth policies, that is, by developing bottom-up approaches to discover latent and untapped potential to be used to achieve sustainability.

New perspectives on Covid-19 and epistemic injustices. – The Covid-19 outbreak is often associated with pollution and overexploitation of common global resources. Less attention, though with a few exceptions, has been paid to the social and human origins of the crisis. In fact, asymmetric power relations among social groups can determine the outbreak of crises and a reallocation of their related risks towards social and territorial peripheries. Research shows how the concept of epistemic injustice can take on systemic connotations, as the use of inappropriate or ineffective analytic tools can lead to practices that are perceived as just, effective, or efficient, but in fact lack these requirements. The negative impacts of such an eventuality would far outweigh the mitigating effect and magnitude of the ongoing redistribution processes and may fuel increasingly unequal power relations between insiders and outsiders. In this scenario, the rediscovery of an ethic of the common good is an essential element in the design and implementation of a collective way out of the crisis.

All roads leave from Rome

Recensione a 

Mariana Mazzucato, Non sprechiamo questa crisi, Torino, Edizione speciale per GEDI Gruppo Editoriale S.p.A. Pubblicazione su licenza di Gius. Laterza & Figli Spa, 2020.

Covid-19: which consequences on productive sectors? A focus on Italy. – The research illustrates the indirect effects of Covid-19 pandemic on the Italian production system. During the lockdown, many Italian institutions have carried out forecasts which have led to estimates of a negative impact of Covid-19 on annual GDP between 5 and 10%. The average impact on annual GDP, however, is the result of heterogeneous shocks affecting most sectors of economic activity. Laying on the evidence collected, policy recommendations are elaborated to manage the social and economic consequences of Covid-19 in Italy.

Europe amidst global challenges and idealistic drives

Rome’s Local Public Transport System: How to Trigger a Resilient Transformation Toward Sustainability? – The research presented in this paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the public vs private ownership by re-examining the case of Rome’s local public transport (LPT) system. After having illustrated the main reasons that led Rome’s citizens to ask for a referendum, the research provides a brief historical overview of Rome’s LPT system and discusses the main stylized facts presented in the institutional literature surveyed. Finally, the summary statistics are built using publicly available data. The results of the analysis highlight how ATAC’s inefficiency is only partially endogenous, as the “imported” territorial inefficiency is not negligible. This issue deserves more attention as, even if liberalization might enter a new golden age, the existence of structural inefficiencies might reduce the margins needed to incentivize private providers to enter the market, at least in those production segments more related to public interests.

Il concetto di sviluppo sostenibile continua ad arricchirsi grazie a nuove sintesi del dibattito in corso a livello internazionale e a nuovi spunti di riflessione provenienti da numerosi ambiti disciplinari, non da ultimo da due libri pubblicati di recente: uno a firma di Enrico Giovannini, dal titolo L’Utopia Sostenibile (Laterza, 2018), l’altro scritto da Francesco Rutelli, Contro gli immediati (La Nave di Teseo, 2017).