Search results

Tourism sector is one of the main important sectors of the world economy. There are very close, complex and complementary relationships between transport and tourism, in both positive and negative ways. An increase in traffic due to world tourism growth can have adverse effects in terms of congestion, safety and security problems, pollution, etc. But transport is a key element in the tourism industry, facilitating and constraining the development of tourism. In other words, transport is the cause and the effect of the growth of tourism at the same time. There is a close connection between mobility and transport. Mobility is commonly defined as the quality of moving freely. At European level, the right of freedom of movement is ensured by the combined provisions of Articles 45 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFR) and Article 3(3) TEU. According to a social approach, the right of movement must be ensured on Community territory within the framework of economic, social and territorial cohesion. Air transport has been transformed from a niche phenomenon to a mass phenomenon thanks to improved mobility, cheap prices of tourists packages and the low-cost airlines, as a result of the liberalization of this sector.

The development of the tourism industry is closely linked to its sustainability. The need to reconcile economic growth and sustainable development is imperative and cannot be delayed.

Long-term sustainability requires a balance between three different dimensions: economic, socio-cultural and environmental sustainability. The competitiveness and sustainability of the tourism industry is, in turn, extensively dependent on the proper and efficient functioning of the transport system. There is no tourism without travel and transport or mobility. The tourism industry benefits when public transport is widely used by tourists.

The need of a well-functioning sustainable transport system rises in the maritime transport sector before the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (1972) that for the first time has paid attention on the durable long-term preservation of the ecological balance, taking account of the interests of future generations. In fact, at international level, the Civil Liability Convention was adopted in 1969 to ensure an adequate compensation for oil pollution damage (including loss profit of the seaside tourism), resulting from maritime casualties involving oil carriers.

The European Commission works on a number of legislative initiatives in this area for a long time, before the Single European Act of 1986 recognised the European Community competence in the field of environment. In the same year, the ‘official’ definition of sustainable development was developed for the first time in the Brundtland Report in 1987. According to this definition, sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In spite of the quick evolution in this field, the Brundtland definition remains still valid, but it has been supplemented by an integration with the aim to make it less anthropocentric and more ecocentric. According to the Lisbon Treaty, in force today, one of the main objectives of EU is to operate and co-operate to ensure sustainable development in Europe, maintaining a high level of environment protection. This Treaty considers sustainable development, regarded as economic prosperity, security and social justice, an objective pursued both in Europe and in external relations with third States. It demands that environmental protection requirements are integrated into the definition and implementation of the community policies and activities, with a view to promoting sustainable development. Therefore, one of the fundamental objectives of the EU is to promote sustainable tourism development in Europe.

Healthcare practitioners, according to legislations in most Western countries, may refuse to perform some medical activities that conflict with their moral and religious values. The Roman Catholic Church has declared in official documents that doctors should not perform or facilitate activities considered immoral such as abortion and euthanasia. The goal of this paper is to suggest new options for regulating conscientious objection of Roman Catholic healthcare practitioners.

In the last few years, the size of Linked Open Data (LOD) describing artworks, in general or domain-specific Knowledge Graphs (KGs), is gradually increasing. This provides (art-)historians and Cultural Heritage professionals with a wealth of information to explore. Specifically, structured data about iconographical and iconological (icon) aspects, i.e. information about the subjects, concepts and meanings of artworks, are extremely valuable for the state-of-the-art of computational tools, e.g. content recognition through computer vision. Nevertheless, a data quality evaluation for art domains, fundamental for data reuse, is still missing. The purpose of this study is filling this gap with an overview of art-historical data quality in current KGs with a focus on the icon aspects.

This study’s analyses are based on established KG evaluation methodologies, adapted to the domain by addressing requirements from art historians’ theories. The authors first select several KGs according to Semantic Web principles. Then, the authors evaluate (1) their structures’ suitability to describe icon information through quantitative and qualitative assessment and (2) their content, qualitatively assessed in terms of correctness and completeness.

This study’s results reveal several issues on the current expression of icon information in KGs. The content evaluation shows that these domain-specific statements are generally correct but often not complete. The incompleteness is confirmed by the structure evaluation, which highlights the unsuitability of the KG schemas to describe icon information with the required granularity.

The main contribution of this work is an overview of the actual landscape of the icon information expressed in LOD. Therefore, it is valuable to cultural institutions by providing them a first domain-specific data quality evaluation. Since this study’s results suggest that the selected domain information is underrepresented in Semantic Web datasets, the authors highlight the need for the creation and fostering of such information to provide a more thorough art-historical dimension to LOD.

This paper provides a historical case study, through the analysis of Luisa Spagnoli’s entrepreneurial life. Luisa Spagnoli was one of the most famous Italian businesswomen of the twentieth century, founder of “Perugina” chocolate factory and creator of “Luisa Spagnoli” fashion firm. The study aims particularly to examine the role of Luisa in the development of her businesses within the wider context of Italy of the 1900s, and to verify if and how gender has influenced the meaning and the shape of her entrepreneurial initiatives over time.

This study offers a historical analysis of entrepreneurial life of Luisa Spagnoli, developed through an archival study in a synchronic view. An interpretive historical method is adopted to deepen and better understand the links among personal, cultural, social and institutional domains.

This study contributes to the scholarship on businesswomen’s role in history and underlines the role of personal perceptions of female entrepreneurs to overcome external barriers.

The limitations of this study concern the nature of the analysis itself, which is a single-case study.

This analysis highlights the centrality of personal self-perceptions to face up to the difficulties of an unfavourable context, contributing to create the pre-conditions necessary to become an entrepreneur.

In this research a model for the rationalization of the assessment in a rent to buy contract has been proposed, in order to contextualize the economic amounts involved in the negotiation according to the specific market risk of the area where the property is located. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The model borrows the logical principles of operational research, in order to take into account the convenience constraints of the parties involved (seller and buyer) and to determine the minimum amount of the additional annual rent to be charged as down payment on the final sale price, compensating the investment risk. The procedure proposed for the risk assessment combines the discrete modeling of real option analysis and the exponentially weighted moving average method, in order to weigh appropriately the data available for the specific area in the analysis.

Considering the limit conditions of variability of the property market value at the time provided for the notarial deed, the proposed model returns two values (minimum and maximum) for a fixed contract duration and for a specific market area for the annual additional rent, which define the reference range to ensure the compliance with the convenience constraints of the parties involved.

In order to test the reliability of the developed methodology, the model has been implemented to the 24 “microzones” defined by the Italian Revenue Agency for the city of Bari (Southern Italy). The results obtained were then georeferenced, in order to create thematic maps of convenience for the subjects interested in the rent to buy formula. The developed maps define a useful support to be consulted in the negotiation phase between the seller and the buyer, allowing both to verify the investment conveniences within the limits of their disposable incomes and their needs.

The tabulated values of the down-payment amounts and the related thematic maps constitute a valid support for both the parties in the initial negotiation phase of the contractual conditions: in fact, if comparable data for the assessment of the market value and the market rent at the time of the stipulation of the contract are ordinarily available, the increase in the rent, to be charged as the annual down payment on the final purchase price, is generally entrusted to the contractual capabilities of the subjects involved, since there is no market reference that can direct an appropriate assessment.

The authors analyse a growth model to explain how economic fluctuations are primarily driven by productive capacities (i.e. capacity utilization driven by innovations and know-how) and productive inefficiencies.

This study’s methodology consists of the combination of the economic growth model, à la Solow–Swan, with a sigmoidal production function (in capital), which may explain growth, poverty traps or fluctuations depending on the relative levels of inefficiencies, productive capacities or lack of know-how.

The authors show that economies may experience economic growth, poverty traps and/or fluctuations (i.e. cycles). Economic growth is reached when an economy experiences both a low level of inefficiencies and a high level of productive capacities while an economy falls into a poverty trap when there is a high level of inefficiencies in production. Instead, the economy gets in cycles when there is a large level of the lack of know-how and low levels of productive capacity.

The authors conclude that more capital per capita (greater savings and investment) and greater productive capacity (with less lack of know-how) are the economic policy keys for an economy being on the path of sustained economic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to verify whether, besides the traditional organisational models mainly implemented by wine-making cooperatives, more modern and hybrid organisational forms can be profitably applied within an increasingly competitive wine market.

The study outlined in this paper deployed a mixed method. Specifically, an archived analysis, a survey and a descriptive case study (including visits, interviews and documentary analysis) were the methodological techniques used in this study, which were “in series but integrated” between themselves. In this paper, the landscape of Sicilian wine cooperatives is described by collating and processing different types of statistical sources, which have been integrated by direct surveys undertaken in 2017. Thereafter, the study focussed on a wine cooperative with a specific business model and a strategic edge by analysing its strategic choices and main structural and governance characteristics. Within this case study, a financial ratio analysis, which was based on 2011-2017 financial statements, was conducted to analyse the profitability, financial balance, capital structure and debt relationships of the wine cooperative.

The Sicilian wine cooperative system is still predominantly characterised by partial and vertical integration, implemented by cooperatives which elect to sell mainly bulk wine to wine merchants. In such a context, there is scope for other degrees of integration and strategic inter-firm alliances; the latter includes “vertical quasi-integration”. The study demonstrated how the wine cooperative under investigation is overcoming the structural problems of the regional wine sector and why it is retaining such a strategic alliance with one of the most important Italian wine conglomerates. Indeed, it has acquired greater strength and reliability since its collaboration with the aforementioned wine company. Thus, total revenue and the company’s market share of packaged wine have increased. However, there are still margins for improving sales’ profitability.

This study has territorial limitations but Sicilian wine cooperatives generally play an important role in the regional, Italian and European wine industries. As such, this research should be considered as an exploratory study, deserving further investigation into different strategic choices within the wine cooperative system by performing cross-case comparisons. Results may also be useful in orienting cooperative strategies in Sicily (or further afield) to small-to-medium wine cooperatives, often lacking specific abilities relating to the distribution, marketing and selling of their wine. Public agricultural policies may also be enlightened by these research pathways.

The authors contend that their study provides hitherto missing information relating to inter-firm strategic alliances, which wine cooperatives might implement to enhance their competitiveness and survive in the long-run.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how geomarketing statical tools (notably, gravitational models) can support healthcare organisations to improve the quality of their services.

Geomarketing tools were applied to the analysis of data (91,478 observations) concerning the performance of nuclear magnetic resonance.

Geomarketing models can support and enhance the planning of service provisions of healthcare organisations. Drawing the planning actions on the patient needs and actual behaviours allow the healthcare organisations to obtain better market performance.

The results support the health service planning activities related to covering the so-called “offer gaps”.

This is the first study to apply geomarketing to improve the quality of healthcare services.