Gisléia Duarte (p), Raul Silveira Neto (p)

Brazil experienced an accelerated urbanization process; while in 1950 the population living in cities was around 36% of total; in 2010 this percentage was around 84% (IBGE, 2012). This movement of people to the cities created an unavoidable strong demand for housing in the urban environment. On the other hand, the macroeconomic instability present since after military coup of 1964 created an environment of high inflation and interest rate, making very difficult the development of the credit market and the financing of housing demand. These two conditionings, together with the very high levels of poverty and income inequality prevailing in the country, resulted in very high share of families living in informal and irregular housing conditions and the development of slums. Understandable, this situation motivated the development of social housing policies and programs by the federal government, including the most recent program “Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV)". By using housing quality indicators, the article presents an evaluation of the expansion of Brazilian federal credit programs for financing house acquisition by low-income families. The results of the paper were obtained using official PNAD 2014 household survey and a strategy based on propensity score matching of eligible families. The set of evidence indicates that the federal policy of credit expansion appear to positively impact both physical house characteristics, such numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms, and infrastructure household services, such as access to potable water and sewer. Due to the potential influence of non-observables factors on the results, we precede a set of sensitive tests, including Ichino et al. (2008) and more recent Olster (2015) approach, and show that the obtained results of the research can hardly be explained by omitted variables.

Elena Lasarte Navamuel (p), Esteban Fernandez-Vazquez

During these last years the obesity problem has become a relative new health problem in Spain. Despite the problem of obesity has been treated through several health programs, obesity rates has increased (according with the FESNAD-SEEDO Consensus, 2011, 61% of the calories of the spaniards come from higly-procesed food). This issue makes that we reflect on the current policy approaches applied which have ignored the socioeconomic factors inherent to the obesity problem (Gracia-Arnaiz, 2017). These socioeconomic factors have increased during the economic crisis, the main one and the one which will be our concerning is the rise in the cost of living and the important differences observed between regions and cities. Our aim is link the rise in obesity with the most expensive and poorer regions following Deaton (2013) who declare that poor people have heavily constrained lives in terms of money and choices which involve health consequences. Using the 2014 Household Budget Survey microdata and the 2014 European Health Survey in Spain it will be tried to establish a significant relation between food prices obtained through the calculation of the unit values (Deaton, 1988) and Body Mass Index across the diferent regions in Spain and Different urban settings.
References:
Deaton, A. (1988) Quality, Quantity and Spatial Variation in Prices. American Economic Review 78 (3), 418-30
Deaton, A. (2013)
What does the empirical evidence tell us about the injustice of health inequalities? N. Eyal (Ed.), et al., Inequalities in Health: Concepts, Measures and Ethics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK (2013)
FESNAD-SEEDO Consensus, 2011. Recomendaciones nutricionales basadas en la evidencia para la prevención y el tratamiento del sobrepeso y la obesidad en adultos. Rev. Esp. Obesidad. 10(Suple. 1), 1–80.
Gracia-Arnaiz, M. (2017) Taking measures in time of crisis: the political economy of obesity prevention in Spain. Food Policy, 68(2017), 65-76.

Giulia Fini (p)

Through the last decades, airports have became spaces of great relevance in European contemporary urban regions. Their importance has grown in the last decades not only for the presence of transportation and logistics activities, but also for different kinds of functions (i.e. commercial, entertainment, services, multimodal transportation lines) that have been developed close to airport terminals. These act nowadays as territorial centralities and define wider attractive areas.

The evolution clearly defined by Guller & Guller from “airport” to “airport city” or “airport region” is a solid reality for many European contexts, even if it is possible to identify important differences in relation to the strategy of managing agencies, the proximity to the main cities’ cores, the areas planning policies, etc.
The development of airport cities therefore, raises dual opportunities and issues. On one side, a first topic is related to the importance of airports as functional and attractive poles within the urban regions: new places of urbanity and of an ongoing urban realm. On the other side, a second urgent topic is related to the environmental and economic conditions of these areas, often characterized by mixed urban-rural features and to the general consistency with the goals of regional and local spatial planning.

Considering a comparative approach (starting from the case of few European international airports, i.e. Amsterdam Schiphol and Zurich Kloten) the paper analyzes two Italian airports and their airport areas: Bologna and Milano-Malpensa. The paper has the purpose to examine the following questions within a frame concerning the relations among urban policies, contemporary urban conditions and airports’ spatial development processes:
1. To which extent do airports contribute to re-structure the urban spaces and offer new opportunities of urban condition at the metropolitan scale?
2. Are airports considered by authorities as key subjects for the construction of a spatial strategy and of a wider vision for the territory? Or is the airport’s evolution basically market oriented?
3. Is an evolution happening from mostly functional spaces to more articulated places, also in relation to the territory?

Some European cases are peculiar for the definition of an airport city’s vision and the implementation of a wider strategy. On the contrary, a clear planning vision for the management of these territories still seems to be lacking in the main Italian cases, even tough some interpretations and evolutions - as well as opportunities - can be underlined also for these specific contexts of urbanization.

Zhengtao Li (p)

In 2005, the Chinese Central Government put the reducing of air pollution onto the core policies list, making it as important as economic growth. Then controlling air pollution was made a Central Government priority in the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) . Air pollution, however, across the China is getting worse. This paper tries to clarify this by investigating the effects of municipal government’s air pollution concern on emissions of air pollutants by using Chinese municipal data from 2005 to 2013. A proxy of municipal government’s concern on air pollution was firstly developed by textual analysis of municipal governments’ annual work report. Then, government’s concern on air pollution was empirically linked to emissions from industrial air pollutants and examined by growth models based on panel data. We found the impacts of government’s concern toward air pollutants emissions were inconsistent in different years. “True concern” and “false concern” on air pollution were observed, respectively. The“true concern” was only significantly found in 2008 when the Beijing Olympic Games were hold. This shows the advantages of Chinese unitary political system in controlling air pollution that once Chinese governments concern air pollution very much they can make blue sky back very quickly. We conclude that Chinese municipal officials are still pro-economic growth, and this has not yet been fundamentally changed.