Consumption and production of proteins derived from animals have more significant environmental and health impacts than proteins derived from plants. This raises concerns mainly in consideration of the predictable increased consumption of animal proteins at the expense of vegetal ones due to growing income, especially in developing countries. Animal protein consumption, and particularly meat consumption, seems to start to decrease at a high level of income, which may suggest that economic growth solves or attenuates the environmental and health problems of animal food consumption. To test this possibility, the relationship between per capita income and animal and vegetal protein consumption is explored. Using a cross-country regression for 142 countries in 2017, animal-based protein, meat protein, and vegetal-based protein consumption are specified as dependent variables. In addition to per capita income, other potential drivers of protein choices, including ecological, demographic and social factors are controlled for. Apart from income, which still seems to be the most important driver of any type of protein consumption, the results suggest that protein consumption from animal sources and meat sources have different determinants. Though there is actually some evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between per capita income and animal protein consumption, the peak is at such high levels as to make economic growth irrelevant to curb animal protein consumption.

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While floods and other natural disasters affect hundreds of millions of people globally every year, a shared methodological approach on which to ground impact valuations is still missing. Standard Cost-Benefit Analyses typically evaluate damages by summing individuals’ monetary equivalents, without taking into account income distribution and risk aversion. We propose an empirical application of alternative valuation approaches developed in recent literature, including equity weights and risk premium multipliers, to a case study in Ecuador. The results show that accounting for inequality may substantially alter the conclusions of a standard vulnerability approach, with important consequences for policy choices pertaining damage compensation and prioritization of intervention areas.

The evolution of farm size and land use are important determinants of the efficiency and profitability of agriculture and the configuration of the territory. In this paper, a conceptual framework of the evolution of the number of farms and land use is presented, arguing that a major determinant of the change in the number of farms is the presence or absence of successors to ageing farmers and that these socio-demographic variables shape the evolution of the sector in terms of farm size, while they do not significantly affect the changes in the farmed area. This hypothesis was empirically tested with data drawn from individual farm records of the Italian Agricultural Censuses of 2000 and 2010—aggregated at the municipality level for an Italian region—by estimating regressions on the decrease rates of the number of farms, the utilised agricultural area and the total agricultural area. The results support the conclusion that the change in the number of farms was largely determined by the absence of successors in family farms and by the average operators’ age, unlike the change in the farmed area, for which natural land conditions were the main drivers.

Taxation for urban waste management has been reformed in Italy by the introduction of an environmental law in 2006. In the planning phase of waste management, externalities generated by new facilities remain widely unaccounted, with a consequent distortion for prices, often raising local conflicts. The paper presents a survey based on the choice modelling methodology, aimed to evaluate on a monetary scale the disamenity effect perceived by incinerator and landfills in an Italian urban context: the city of Turin. In a random utility framework the behaviour of respondents, whose choices are found to be driven by the endowment of information about technological options, socio-economic characteristics as income, education, family composition, and also by their health status was modelled. Furthermore, empirical evidence that the behaviour in residential location choices is affected by different aspects of the respondent life and in particular by the health status was found. Distinct estimates of willingness to accept compensation for disamenity effects of incinerator (Euro 2670) and landfill (Euro 3816) are elicited. The effect of health status of the respondents, their level of information about the waste disposal infrastructure, the presence of a subjective strong aversion (NIMBY) and the actual endowment and concentration of infrastructures are demonstrated to be significant factors determining the choice behaviour, but differentiated and specific for incinerators and landfills.