Shaping urban and rural contexts for healthier lives: environment as a key driver for promoting health - SURVIVE link
The project aims to develop a dashboard called Health Local Monitor (HLM) to monitor the population's health status and its environmental determinants at the suburban level. Promoting healthy living environments necessarily passes through awareness that the determinants of health lie mainly outside the control of the public health sectors. Healthy living is the result of several factors that may produce health inequalities across socio-economic groups. As shown by WHO and other organizations, inequalities should be reduced for equity reasons and for sustainable development. Inclusion, income distribution, and access to services are critical for post-pandemic recovery and fundamental goals of the NextGenerationEU (NGEU) Plan. The dashboard proposed will allow describing the health status and its determinants in different environmental contexts and for different demographic and socio-economic profiles of individuals. We will exploit an original and comprehensive database collected at the suburban level derived from administrative archives and ad hoc surveys. The study on health, well-being, and urban environments will complete the "hard" data with subjective ones. Furthermore, the inclusion of questions in the Quality of life in European cities, European Social Survey, and Eurobarometer surveys will allow for multilevel and cross-city comparability.
Communicable diseases and economic activity: individual behavior, social interactions and macroeconomic outcomes
This project aims at disentangling the numerous channels through which different forms of public policy can be used to reduce the harmful economic and societal implications of communicable diseases by targeting different objectives, from the single individual up to the society. For doing this, we consider a range of critical infectious diseases (e.g., emerging infections with pandemic potential and traditional infections, including vaccine preventable and sexually transmitted diseases) in order to identify the most effective policy in specific circumstances, accounting for the health and economic peculiarities of different infections, in terms of their transmission characteristics and impact, distinguishing between short- and long-term effects and their consequences on different groups within the population. To address these issues, the project will analyze the mutual relationship between economic activity and communicable diseases at different (individual, social and aggregate) levels, considering specifically the role of social interactions. Methodologically, we will rely on a multidisciplinary approach based on theoretical and empirical frameworks to assess the desirability of alternative policy options from both normative and positive perspectives. In particular, we will rely on an array of methods aiming at characterizing both individual behavior at a microeconomic level and its aggregate effects at a macroeconomic level in order to run counterfactual and scenarios analysis of the implications of different policy measures on the national (Italian) and international levels.
Silver Economy in Europe link
Covid-19 outbreak has affected mostly people in the second half of their lives, at risk of isolation and loneliness, and whose well-being has deteriorated severely. In this context, the research project aims at assessing the suitability of European cities to elderly people, identifying needs for their well-being that existed before the Covid-19 pandemic but have become more and more important nowadays. To reach our purpose, we employ the Perception Survey on the Quality of Life 2019 representative of the population of 83 European cities in the sample, with a total of 58,100 complete interviews. Regression analyses allow us to identify what elements of cities are perceived to be the most relevant for the elderly. These city-related aspects were crucial before the pandemic, and we think they have to be strengthened afterwards. Team members: Maria Laura Parisi and Carolina Foglia. This project is financed by the Regional Studies Association