Francesco Sarracino

Dottorando - XXI Ciclo

e-mail: f.sarracinogmail.com

Curriculum Vitae

Interessi di ricerca

Benessere soggettivo e capitale sociale; sicurezza alimentare e prevenzione delle carestie; internazionalizzazione dei servizi e effetti sull'occupazione.

Titolo (non definitivo) della tesi: Social capital, economic growth and well-being

Paper

I paper sono stati compilati, presentati ed accettati nel programma di dottorato, ma non sono stati sottoposti ad una procedura formale di referaggio

November, 2006: Explaining famines: a critical review of main approaches and further causal factors;

Famines are not a new element in human experience. All along people have always suffered from starvation, but this was mainly linked to the general poor conditions in which people lived. Nowadays, famines are no more acceptable because of different reasons, mainly since mankind has finally reached the ability to produce enough food for all its members. Moreover, you have only to think that at the same time as the poorest part and the vast majority of the world starves, the richest ones suffer over-feeding. Many different theories have been proposed to explain why famines happen: from Malthus's theory to food availability and intervention decline; from Sen's entitlement failure to complex humanitarian and political emergencies. Each of them points out particular aspects in order to understand why famines happen, trying to find out what to do in order to prevent these shocking events. Several international institutions and agencies, non governmental organizations and governments, are strongly involved in trying to solve this question. Some steps forward have been made, but in many countries, especially in sub Saharan Africa and South Asia, people still suffer famines. In order to contribute to improve the models reviewed in this paper, three different cases of famine in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe in 2002 are considered. Existing models result useful to interpret famines, but on their own they can not fully explain modern famines. Then a further proposal considering market failures is advanced. It seems much more plausible that the interaction between different models can better contribute to the explanation and the prevention of new famines.

June, 2007: Subjective well-being in Low Income Countries: positional, relational and social capital components

Economics has always been interested in people's well-being and its maximization, nevertheless recent studies show that hardly this aim is achieved. Recently, the so-called happiness economics is proposing a paradigmatic shift moving the focus of its research towards subjective well-being. So long, different theories have been advanced to explain what really makes people happy or satisfied with their life, but they are mainly focused on developed countries. Present work tries to identify positional and relational determinants of subjective well-being in low income countries using data from the World Values Survey. Focusing on low income countries can have notable effects on these economies allowing to better evaluate the effects of possible development policies and above all to identify policies socially and environmentally more sustainable than those proposed and adopted so far by developed countries.

May, 2008: Offshoring impacts on employment: some evidence for Italy

The recent and amazing development in ICT contributed to a renovate wave of offshoring, that is to say the relocation of activities abroad to support domestic production. In particular, broader branch of productive tasks, more and more from the service sectors, became eligible for offshoring raising new anxieties from the public, policy-makers and, obviously, academics. Present research is aimed at assessing the impact of service offshoring on employment in the Italian industry differentiating for people with different skill-levels. In so doing, we used a panel data-set from Input/Output tables and from the EU-Klems data-base between 1995 and 2003 on 30 sectors. Results are encouraging and suggest that service offshoring reduces employment in manufacturing firms, while enhancing it in service sectors. Furthermore, we find evidence of a probable substitution effect between high- and middle-skill workers.