Crisis In Italy Research Articles

Exploring financial reverse remittances. A quantitative study in the Italian context

ABSTRACT While many studies examine the remittances sent by migrants to their home countries, little is known about the financial resources that flow from home countries to migrants abroad, also known as reverse remittances. Following an in-depth analysis of the limited existing literature, our study focuses on the practice of financial reverse remittances among migrants living in the Italian region of Lombardy to assess their incidence, their relationship with the migrants’ migration stage, and the occurrence of economic hardship. We build on a quantitative survey of 4,000 migrants carried out in 2014. Our research shows that overseas students, long-term migrants living with a partner, and, in general, migrants facing economic hardship and job insecurity are more likely to receive financial reverse remittances. The implications of our findings in light of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis in Italy are also discussed.

The pandemic crisis in Italy: an assessment through a new classifier of firm economic-financial solidity

The pandemic crisis in Italy: an assessment through a new classifier of firm economic-financial solidity

Resist or retreat? Beach erosion and the climate crisis in Italy: Scenarios, impacts and challenges

The ongoing erosion of beaches due to anthropic pressure, together with the effects of sea level rise are expected to have devastating effects on sandy coastlines. This paper identifies the Italian beaches under threat and their regional distribution, examining the implications for beach-dependent activities and coastal management, based on the integration of various projections and datasets. As a result, by the year 2050 erosion is expected to affect 70% of Italian beaches. One-fifth of the current beaches' surface is likely to be almost completely submerged by 2050 and 45% by the end of the century, with the regions of Sardinia, Campania, Lazio, and Apulia likely to lose more than half of their equipped beaches. Although beaches naturally tend to migrate landward when subjected to erosion, and such shift can be favoured by managed retreat measures, these solutions are severely limited by the increasing urbanisation of back beaches. Adaptation in Italy is almost exclusively based on coastal protections, which exacerbate overall erosion and undermine beaches’ natural resilience. A transformative and nature-based rethinking of the coastal management regime is needed to avoid the artificialization of a huge portion of the sandy coastline and increasing threats to coastal settlements and economies.

Immigrant Solidarity Amid the COVID-19 Crisis in Italy: Forms of Help, Intergroup Solidarity, and Recognition

AbstractItaly was the first Western country to be severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Within it, immigrants have played an important role as essential workers and throughout solidarity initiatives. The present article is based on 64 in-depth interviews with immigrants who engaged in solidarity actions directed toward the immigrant population and the host society during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analytically, it emerged that through solidaristic initiatives, immigrants articulated what we called ‘claims of recognition.’ Recognition here is considered in both its individual form, as interpersonal acceptance and esteem for single immigrants, and its collective form, as the social regard of immigrant groups as constituents of Italian society. Despite being perhaps 'elementary,' these claims aim to fight forms of both non-recognition and mis-recognition that are pervasive in Italy and aim to transform the symbolic 'fabric' of this country.

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Health Policy Crisis in Italy: is there a 'Chinese Connection'?

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Health Policy Crisis in Italy: is there a 'Chinese Connection'?

Migrants’ Equal Access to Social Benefits under EU Law: Fragmentation and Exclusion during the Covid-19 Crisis in Italy

Migrants’ Equal Access to Social Benefits under EU Law: Fragmentation and Exclusion during the Covid-19 Crisis in Italy

Governing Immobility in the COVID-19 Crisis in Italy: Non-conforming Behaviors of Migrants Confronting the New Old Processes of Othering

AbstractIn this article, we critically analyze how different confinement sites for migrants in Italy, such as reception centers, pre-removal detention facilities, hotspots, and quarantine ships, have functioned as tools for controlling migration during the COVID-19 pandemic. We specifically focus on the nonconforming behaviors exhibited by migrants within these sites. Our analysis aims to shed light on the mechanisms of control by examining acts of resistance undertaken by individuals, both consciously and unconsciously, and carried out either individually or collectively. We investigate how these specific government practices, as evidenced by these acts of nonconformity, have materialized a sense of "sacrificability" and institutional abandonment. By analyzing protests, their content, and dynamics, we delve into how the concept of necropolitical sacrificability applies to both reception facilities and detention facilities and we argue that this concept extends beyond the COVID-19 crisis, prompting an examination of how power dynamics and people's lives, once deemed sacrificable, continue to be influenced and vulnerable at a social and political level.

A regional input-output model of the COVID-19 crisis in Italy: decomposing demand and supply factors

We propose an empirically estimated inter-regional input-output model of the Italian economy designed for COVID-19 impact assessment, intended as a tool for public authorities facing comparable adverse events and requiring timely estimates of sectoral and regional economic impacts. We evaluate the contributions of demand- and supply-side factors to output losses in Italy during the pandemic, providing insights on the suitability of demand- and supply-side policies. Supply-side shocks, as a consequence of mandated closures, are the primary driver of output losses only during the nationwide lockdown of spring 2020. During the following stages, changes in final demand due to income losses and changes in mobility play a pivotal role at the aggregate, regional, and sectoral levels. While this result supports demand-side policies, the efficacy of such policies may be hampered when final consumption demand is low chiefly due to reduced mobility rather than income losses.

Risk Narratives on Immigration During the COVID-19 Crisis in Italy: A Comparative Analysis of Facebook Posts Published by Politicians and by News media

This work explores how the narrative on immigration changes when society is threatened by “real” risks, i.e., during the COVID-19 health crisis. We compared the frequency and engagement of over 348,684 posts published on Facebook between December 2019 and November 2020 by Italian politicians and news media. We identified two waves of “tangible crisis” assuming that in these two periods the risk stemming from COVID-19 was strongly perceived by the Italian population, contrasting our observations to the periods preceding the first wave and between both waves. Our findings suggest that the political discourse and risk narratives on immigration decreased during times of “tangible crises” for right-wing populist parties and news media. This happened at a time when key policies regarding immigration and regularization of migrants were highly discussed by the Italian government, receiving unexpectedly low reactions. This leads us to theorize that anti-immigrant communication decreases during times of “tangible crises.”

The role played by government communication on the level of public fear in social media: An investigation into the Covid-19 crisis in Italy

In situations of crisis, governments must acknowledge that communication is a major weapon in their armoury, and can be used to convince the public to accept sometimes stringent measures, while preventing a worsening of the situation by curbing any spread of panic. Theoretically, during a pandemic, fear can be contained at reasonable levels by governments counterbalancing uncertainty with information. However, there is no empirical evidence on how the flow of information during a crisis can influence emotional states among the population. In this process, social media appears to be a valuable tool for governments to observe emotional response in a population. In the light of this and within the context of the Italian government's social media campaign #iorestoacasa (‘I'm staying at home’) launched during the Covid-19 crisis, the current study utilises text analytics to explore the relationship between government and press communication, and the level of fear expressed by citizens through more than 200 thousand #iorestoacasa tweets. The results highlight how the content of the messages evolved in the early part of the outbreak and during the social media campaign. They suggest that in Italy the discussion regarding the efforts made by the European Council to find common solutions for dealing with the emergency has prompted a positive influence on public mood. Conversely, messages about people's individual vulnerability and the associated sense of an external locus of control correlated positively with levels of fear. This study opens new ways to support government communication during a crisis by monitoring public emotional response through social media.

The Italian Response to COVID-19

Almost three years after the outbreak of the pandemic, it seems to be possible to identify some trends and draw some concluding remarks concerning the legal response to the pandemic crisis in Italy. While the constitutional system was probably successful in safeguarding the core content of the rule of law, the question to be asked might well be another one. Namely, did the legal framework, based on the combination of the use of decree-laws and prime ministerial decrees, and greatly diverged from the Civil Protection Code, really prove to be the most suitable response, or, on deeper analysis, did it end up generating more problems than it solved?

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Health Policy Crisis in Italy: is there a ‘Chinese Connection’?

A recent report by the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) of the World Health Organization (WHO) brings to the international limelight the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from an animal or environmental spillover in the Huanan market and in other markets of the Chinese city of Wuhan. This Article has a Twofold Objective: On the one hand, to highlight the opportunity to study the possible link between the onset and spread of the pandemic in the regions of northern Italy and the thriving Chinese community that has resided there for decades through the flow of Chinese citizens traveling from the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport to the Malpensa airport in Milan, as reported by the Customs Agency and on the other hand, after briefly describing the characteristics of the Italian Health System, to highlight the presence of flaws in the Italian Health Surveillance system that must be reviewed especially with regard to the foreign communities residing in Italy.

'We will multiply the fires of resistance': The catalysts of dissent against institutional science and their interplay with refused knowledge communities.

Drawing on a 12-month virtual ethnography on the main online spaces of three refused knowledge communities (RKCs) in Italy, this study aims at contributing to the debate on emerging forms of science-related populism from a two-fold perspective. First, we identify and describe the main features and the role played by an understudied figure who we label the 'catalyst of dissent' - a public influencer who does not belong to the scientific community and contributes to the spread of science-related populist narratives within a grassroots ecosystem of resistance to institutional science. Second, our research highlights how RKCs - communities proposing visions of science and medicine denied acceptance or even consideration by institutional science - can appropriate some key resources produced by the catalysts. The analysis focuses on the interplay between the catalysts and three main RKCs during the pandemic crisis in Italy: The No-5G, the Free-Vax, and the 5 Biological Laws communities.

Fragmentation and intergovernmental conflict during the Covid-19 crisis. The complex relationship between national and regional governments in Italy

ABSTRACT The outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis has triggered political tensions involving different levels of government. Italy constitutes a paradigmatic example of such problems. The powers assigned to regional presidents as a result of the dynamics of presidentialization make them key players in Italy’s fragmented multilevel system. The article aims to demonstrate that the conflict between national and regional governments during the pandemic has been based mainly on polity reasons, that is regional governments’ ambition to strengthen their autonomy, rather than on policy arguments. The Covid-19 crisis in Italy has taken the form of an intergovernmental conflict over the balance of authority between central and regional governments. This state of affairs has complicated the attempts at establishing a satisfactory level of coordination between the levels of government, has resulted in a fragmented response to the crisis, and has triggered a systemic conflict between levels of government.

The Political Response to the COVID-19 Crisis in Italy: A First Assessment for the National Food System

The objective of this paper is to explore the policies that have been implemented and planned in relation to the impacts that the COVID-19 health crisis has had on the Italian food system. This is an evaluation exercise useful to understand what the directions imprinted on the food system will be in relation to some frameworks of particular importance at the international level, such as the 2030 Agenda, the Farm to Fork Strategy, the Biodiversity Strategy, the UN Food Summit, and the agroecological perspective. The article is divided into multiple sections. In paragraph 1.1 and 1.2, the shocks generated by COVID-19 in the global context and in the Italian national context are examined. In both, attention is drawn to changes in GDP, employment, poverty, and the food system. In paragraph 2, the methodological approach, based on the DPSIR model, is explained, as well as the materials used for the drafting of the work. From paragraph 3.1 to 3.4, all of the components (Driving Forces, Pressures, States, Impacts) of the DPSIR model are analyzed. In paragraph 3.5, attention is focused on all policy responses implemented during COVID-19, both on the Italian and European side. In paragraph 4, a detailed analysis of the Italian responses is made in order to fully understand the degree of influence on the Italian economy and food system. The analysis carried out, therefore, highlights the socioeconomic threats faced by the Italian government and the main measures adopted to counter them. Through a critical analysis of policies, it was possible to identify their criticalities and propose possible integrations, starting from the concept of “syndemia”. This concept was introduced in the 1990s by Merril Singer, and in this paper, it plays an important role because it takes into account the negative effects of the pandemic at the economic, health, and social levels and the importance of the sustainability of the food chain.

Albanian migrants’ career pathways and their responses to the challenges of the economic crisis in Italy

ABSTRACT This article explores the career pathways and work practices of Albanian labour migrants in Italy during the economic crisis. It shows how long-term migrants utilise resources accumulated from the early experiences of their (often) informal migratory pathway to address the crisis-induced structural and economic challenges. The questions we ask are: What career pathways have Albanian migrants followed while navigating the Italian labour market? What practices have they employed to respond to the challenges of the economic crisis? Through a biographical approach, we find that rather than victimising their own position, migrants have deployed different resources accumulated from the early stages of their migratory pathways, which they have combined to produce various practices of resilience, reworking and resistance against these new crisis-related challenges. Among them, return to informality and moral contract arrangements have become common practice. We argue that even though they considered informal contractual arrangements and other practices of resilience as provisional, the impact of these crisis-induced experiences is noticeable in the aftermath of the crisis as partially informal and, therefore, precarious arrangements have become established terms of employment for migrant workers. Our findings show that even permanent or naturalised migrants remain precarious and are not immune to the crisis-induced labour market restructuring.

COVID-19, Economic Policies and Public Debt Sustainability in Italy

We analyze the conditions for public debt-to-GDP ratio stability extending the Domar’s approach by including the interaction between the government’s reaction function and the private sector’s reaction function, and considering the impact of 2020–2021 pandemic shock and the monetary and fiscal policy responses, with simulations applied to the Italian case. The outcomes of the numerical simulations show the crucial importance of ECB extraordinary monetary policies, of the NGEU and, to lesser extent, of national expansionary fiscal policies adopted during pandemic shock; both European wide monetary and fiscal policies actually increase the sustainability area avoiding the high risk of sovereign debt crisis in Italy (and other peripheral Eurozone countries). The stabilizing effect of GDP growth, hopefully resulting from the NGEU policy, is also simulated in the paper.

A Teacher Training Project to Promote Mathematics Laboratory During the COVID-19 Health Crisis in Italy

The M@t.abel2020 project supported Italian teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic period, proposing activities based on the mathematics laboratory teaching method which are suitable for distance learning situations. The project resulted in the establishment of an online community of 1,500 teachers. In this paper we present an exploratory study based on an open-ended questionnaire assigned to teachers involved in the project, with the aim of analyzing the results of this training project in terms of mathematics teacher’s specialized knowledge. Results show that the project enriched teachers’ knowledge not only in terms of pedagogical content knowledge but also in mathematical knowledge.

Mobilization of expert knowledge and advice for the management of the Covid-19 emergency in Italy in 2020

This qualitative case study is part of the international research project ESCaPE (Evaluating Scientific Advice in a Pandemic Emergency) and aims at understanding how expert advice has been sought, produced and utilized in the management of the Covid-19 emergency in Italy in 2020. Italy was the first country after China having to face the devastating effects of the Covid-19 soon to be pandemic. The state of national emergency was declared on January 31st, 2020, and the Italian Government sought expert advice as an important resource in the management of the pandemic. The Covid-19 crisis in Italy witnessed the emergence of different expert advisory groups: some envisaged by the law; some instituted ad hoc and tasked to deal with specific aspects of the emergency; and others that were already in place before the pandemic but that came to play a crucial role during the unfolding of the outbreak. This case study relies on a mix of both primary (stakeholder interviews) and secondary data collection (official documents and communications by expert advisory bodies, ministerial decrees, and policy documents). Our research shows three main findings: (a) the near-complete overlap of technical advice and political response in the first phase of the pandemic in Spring 2020, with a key policy role played by the advice provided by the Technical and Scientific Committee (CTS); (b) a predominance of epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists over social scientists in the mobilisation of experts for the management of the crisis in Italy; (c) a shift in containment policies from an emergency-based, very strict, national lockdown in the spring of 2020, to proactive risk-informed colour-coded regional restrictions in the fall and winter of 2020. Our case study ends at the end of 2020 and provides an overview and encompassing representation of the mobilization of experts, and of selected types of evidence, to manage the unprecedented health emergency, in year 1 of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy. Our findings suggest that expert politics can lead to the confirmation of knowledge hierarchies that privilege hard sciences, and corroborate prior literature indicating that economic and social expertize has not been well integrated into public health expert advice, constituting a major challenge for policymaking during a health emergency.

Intergenerational differences and conflicts during the pandemic crisis in Italy

Introduction. The health, economic and social crisis caused by the Covid 19 pandemic in Italy has produced a wide range of consequences and reactions. It has favoured the re-emergence of intergenerational conflicts that had long been latent. The present article focuses on this phenomenon in depth and analyses the most salient results of a study conducted in the Emilia Romagna region. In this study, different generational groups were interviewed, from adolescents to adults and the elderly. Methodology. The study was performed in November 2020, in the days immediately after measures to contain the epidemic were introduced via governmental decree. Strict limitations to individual behaviour, school attendance and the possibility of exercising certain professions were announced. The opinions of young people, adults and the elderly were collected regarding: the Italian government’s decisions; the concept of health; social life; and behaviours relating to the respect or not of the restrictions. Based on the gathered data, the present work sought to highlight the generational specificities, commonalities and, above all, the elements of intergenerational conflict. Results. A picture emerged in which, alongside the shared admission that health – understood in its broadest sense of physical and psychological well-being – must be protected and defended, each generational group also considered its own demands as a priority. These demands were linked to the enjoyment of social life, to work needs and to their own specific health requirements. They also presented themselves as victims of rules and behaviours that were not very protective and that favoured, above all, other age groups. An excess of self-referentiality, which cut across all age groups, led to closing in on themselves and implosions, arousing conflicting positions. Discussion and conclusions. The reported opinions testify to the re-emergence of a hitherto underlying intergenerational conflict, stemming from the new generations’ difficulties regarding social mobility, but also from a culture of selfish hedonism. Until the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic, this hedonism had been manifesting itself as a consequence of an ultraliberalism that puts the dimensions of «having» before that of «being», and the «individual» before the «community».