Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche

In the past few years, the concept of resilience has captured the attention of academics, politicians and public opinion and has been identified as the source of recovery policies of local, regional and national economies. As a result, searching for the so-called resilient factor has led governments to manage territories and resources, combining sustainability and adaptation in an increasingly risky world. The purpose of this paper is to investigate resilience in response to natural disasters through the analysis of the recovery process of the city of Kobe destroyed by the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995. Japanese regions have always coexisted with significant external pressures often leading to environmental disasters and consequent relevant economic and social damage. Kobe has been an emblematic case because of its rapidity in urban reconstruction and speeding of economic recovery. Kobe and the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 represent a successful case of resilient city able to adapt to changing circumstances and to foster local development proposing a renewed image of a creative city.

This paper explores the contribution of the Capability Approach of Amartya Sen and other authors to policy making in the specific case of disability policy. After reviewing existing models, their translation into action and their limitations in this regard, the paper introduces a new ...

The international community of historians of economic thought is not essentially divided between ‘absolutists’ and ‘relativists’, or between ‘continuists’ and 'discontinuists Rather it is the specific content of the métier d'historien which makes the difference. This paper aims at highlighting and systematizing the features characterizing the work of innovative historians. Some of these features are represented by analyses concerning: 1 the intersections between pre-theoretical categories; 2 enunciative homogeneities/heterogeneities; 3 the formation and decomposition of social knowledge; 4 schools of thought These different research practices are then unified under the common label of ‘uckronies’ (possible albeit non-arbitrary histories). Lastly, some implications of this interpretation are examined. One of them is particularly important: i. e. the irreducible ambiguity of the historian of economic thought vis-à-vis the economist. On the one hand, the former may hermeneutically discover new and valuable ideas from an intellectual viewpoint, but, on the other hand, the ways in which these ideas can enrich economic theory are absolutely uncertain. This ambivalence, together with the ‘scandalous’ trans-disciplinarity of the concepts and instruments employed by the historian of economic thought, may explain the diffidence of the economists towards the new tendencies of historiography.

Analysis of reputation through quality premia models enhances the ability of explanation that the reputation concept has in the case of typical products. The commonly accepted meaning of reputation as simply renown becomes inadequate, and the information mechanism it ...