Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis paper aims at describing the concept of territorial capital, understanding its importance, originality and limitations in local economic endogenous development. After providing a critical review of this concept, a qualitative analysis conducted in a province of the South of Italy attempts to illustrate the nature and operation of territorial capital through the lens of small firms' owners and managers. The analysis reveals that the valorization of territorial capital is a factor of competitiveness which is also able to generate non‐economic values. However, not all places have the right preconditions to trigger a process of endogenous development effectively. In such cases, a more integrated approach, which combines both endogenous and exogenous forces, and targets complementary elements of territorial capital at the same time, is required to uncap the local development potential fully.

AbstractThe contribution to human and social capital accumulation is one of the most important socio‐economic benefits of public investment in Research Infrastructures. Sure enough, these large scientific enterprises are exceptional incubators of human and social capital, especially for early‐career researchers who have the opportunity to gain new skills and expand their network of contacts in highly prestigious and challenging workplaces. This paper explores the contribution of spending a period of study and/or work at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN to the expected future lifelong salary of early‐career researchers. Previous studies are here extended by using three sources of data: primary data collected through a survey to CERN Alumni, a survey to team leaders who supervised early‐career researchers at CERN, and secondary data salary information. Findings show that an experience‐based learning process at CERN is instrumental in developing skills that are needed by the economy and reveal an expected salary premium between 5% and 11%. Such human capital effect seems more important than a pure networking and reputational effect.

This paper investigates the role of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in the context of the European Union (EU) Cohesion Policy. After presenting the EU policy framework and the CBA guidelines adopted by the European Commission, we perform an empirical analysis drawing from a dataset of around 1000 major project applications, submitted during the period 2007–2013 by 22 European countries, and representing almost €180 billion of investment. A distinctive feature of the current CBA approach adopted by the European Commission is that applications for funding must provide a forecast of both the project's financial rate of return (FRR) and economic rate of return (ERR). While the former represents the financial profitability of the project from a private investors' perspective, the latter reveals its socio-economic benefits for the whole society. The difference between ERR and FRR mainly depends on the use of shadow prices, the inclusion of externalities and other nonmarket effects in the estimation of ERR, whilst the FRR is based on market prices. We find that, on average, the FRR is slightly negative ($-2.9$%) and the ERR is positive (16.2%). ERR and FRR are positively correlated on average with differences across sectors. We discuss these findings and suggest further research needs.