Books

Evaluating Infrastructure Investment

From Financial Viability to Social Welfare

The book explains how to evaluate infrastructure projects using Cost–Benefit Analysis (CBA), combining welfare economics with the practical realities of public decision-making. Aimed at graduate students and practitioners, it treats infrastructure as both an economic good and a political choice, shaped by uncertainty, externalities, and distributional effects. It argues that CBA should guide real ...

The Regenerative Society

A New Paradigm of Progress

In 2015, Andrea Illy found out that 50% of the world’s arable coffee land would become unavailable by 2050 due to climate change. This realization marked the beginning of a journey that led him to rethink the relationship between business and nature, growth and well-being.Conceived as a map, this book describes a possible transformation from the extractive paradigm that has dominated Western economies ...

Space Economy

The New Frontier for Development

According to the OECD definition, the space economy is the set of activities and use of space resources that create value and benefits for humanity through the exploration, understanding, management, and use of space. The space economy goes far beyond the space sector in a narrow sense, because it extends to the increasingly pervasive and changing impacts of products, services, and knowledge derived ...

Gen Z and the Future of Wealth

Sustainable Investing and Wellbeing for Our Next Generations

The world has never be so rich—at least financially. And so unsustainable—economically, socially, and environmentally. In fact, we are all living a “nemesis of wealth” (nealth), caused by our shortsighted choices of the past, just focused on ROE, NPV, and shareholders’ value. This “nealth” is now paying us back not only with loads of public debt, inflationary money, and debased cryptocurrencies; ...

Theory and Reality of International Trade

In recent decades international trade theory has not been very helpful, overall,in explaining the causes and effects of contemporary trade flows. This hasbeen due, first, to trade theory continuing to refer to the Ricardian principle ofcomparative advantage, which is based on a number of irrealistic hypothesessuch as full employment and trade balances’ equilibrium. And, second, to thefact that the ...

Money and Might

Along the Belt and Road Initiative

The book deals with the interplay between two strategies promoted by China in the 21st century to increase its integration into the world economy: Belt and Road Initiative-BRI and the internationalisation of the renminbi. They came about at different times and with complementary aims, with a great synergy between them. On the one hand, greater international circulation of the renminbi is indispensable ...

Recovery Pathways

The Difficult Italian Convergence in the Euro Area

The book analyzes the different phases that have characterized the evolution of the pol-icy framework and the economic governance of the European Union and the Euro Area since the end of the global financial crisis (2007-2009). This analysis, which is found-ed on a careful reconstruction of those "right" or "wrong" economic ideas that have "ruled" the European world until the pandemic shock (to paraphrase ...

Destination 2050

A Practical Guide to the Future The future is the wildest destination we can ever visit, a place and time so complex that it requires study and an exercise of the imaginationbefore leaving. But the future is also the result of our predictions. One way to start to positively influence it, then, is to try to imagine it as we would like it to be. This is the first step in making it happen. No one realizes ...

Psycology of the Associated Minds

These lectures are a crucial step in the long maturation of the thought of Carlo Cattaneo (1801-1869). They represent a change of paradigm, from the perspective of the individual, to that of the associated man, who in the course of history builds collective ways of thinking and acting, languages, religions, organizations, social systems and, in doing so, transforms both nature and society. In the ...

Fashion Industry 2030

Reshaping the Future Through Sustainability and Responsible Innovation Some key data about the future of the fashion industry highlight the need for immediate action. The increase of clothing consumption will generate an increase in the use of resources and generation of waste. On the other hand, the demand of LOHAS (Lifestyle of Health & Sustainability) consumers is increasing, also in luxury. The ...