Economic growth vs. land quality: a multidimensional approach in Italy

Abstract

This paper evaluates the recent economic dynamics in Italy and their implications for a specified environmental topic - land quality and its vulnerability to degradation. As opposed to the traditional economic literature, centred on GDP level and changes, a multidimensional concept of 'economic growth' was developed in the present study by considering several variables (share of agriculture and industry on the total production, labour productivity by sector, per capita value added) within a Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This analysis was carried out with the aim of assessing diachronically the spatial association between (and, possibly, to clarify the implications of) the economic growth and the distribution of the vulnerable lands to degradation across nearly 700 Italian districts in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s. The geographical gradients and the socio-economic factors supposed to have a prominent role in this relationship were analysed by dividing the investigated area into three geographical belts with different environmental characteristics. PCA results indicate that the traditional north-south economic gap has not been significantly reduced throughout the last 10 years. Furthermore, coastal-inland and urban-rural gradients were revealed as crucial in the environment-economic transition. Finally, the implications of this nexus on land quality were discussed.economic growth, local district, multidimensional analysis, land quality, geographical gradient, Italy,

A conceptual framework for the analysis of engineered biodiverse pastures

“…Alternatively or concurrently in other Mediterranean European countries, the degradation of ecosystem functions is linked to the opposite driver: rural abandonment (Weissteiner et al, 2011;García-Ruiz and Lana-Renault, 2011), which may take the form of cessation of agricultural activities or extreme extensification by conversion to minimum labor-and capital-intensive systems. This latter factor has been identified as a main driver for degradation of ecosystem services in Portugal (Pereira et al, 2004;Pereira et al, 2009;Teixeira, 2010), Spain (Cammeraat et al, 2007;Dunjó et al, 2003;Lesschen et al, 2007;Ruecker et al, 1999), Italy (Bathurst et al, 2003;d'Angeloa et al, 2000;Geeson et al, 2002;Salvati and Zitti, 2011), Greece (Juntti and Wilson, 2003) and France (Aronson et al, 2009). To establish a baseline for the future of ecosystem services from grazed landscapes, and depict the main drivers of change in the present, we use the Portuguese case.…”

Latent Drivers of Landscape Transformation in Eastern Europe: Past, Present and Future

“…Institutional fragmentation of responsibilities in land-use planning also promoted urban sprawl [35,36]. The size of local government units may be important in the relationship with collective or individual actors (e.g., investors, landowners, stakeholders) [21,37,38].…”

Complexity in action: Untangling latent relationships between land quality, economic structures and socio-spatial patterns in Italy

“…Our results suggest a ‘turning back’ to the economic geography of land resources when analysing the environment-economy relationship at the local scale [31]. We have demonstrated that a multidimensional approach is particularly suited to grasp the latent interconnection between the different components of socio-environmental systems.…”