Francesca Silvia Rota (p), Giovanni Ferraris

Małgorzata Twardzik

Festivals and other cultural events are usually considered essential levers for urban promotion and development. The positive effects on the local economic fabric are at the center of numerous studies and refer to a wide range of events (large or small; folkloric or globalized; entertaining as in the case of performing-art events or disclosing as in the case of science-led festivals). Among the main positive effects that cities obtain from being the venue for these events, urban image, tourist attractiveness and internationalization, and economic turnover are the most highlighted aspects. Concerning more significant events (such as the Olympics and the International Expos) or other specialized events (such as sector and sports events), festivals and other cultural events have the advantage of being much more inclusive and embedded within the territory that hosts them.
However, festival-based urban politics also present gray areas and ambiguities, which suggest adopting a critical approach. Cultural events can mobilise relevant shares of people (tourists, visitors, volunteers, professionals) and catalyze the global attention of an even wider audience. Event media exposure, in particular, is often the primary stimulus that induces cities to apply as venues, quite independently from estimating the expected outcomes and risks for the local communities. In that sense, we can say that events may have a "hypnotic" effect on urban policymakers (Dansero and Segre, 2002) that consider them a win-win option to promote the urban image, support the local economy, increase the cultural offer and produce benefits in a diffused way. Nevertheless, let's take a medium-term territorial perspective, which considers what happens in the territories at a suburban scale (urban districts and neighborhoods) and extends the analysis some years after the end of the event. The positive effects may be smaller than expected. Otherwise, some uneven dynamics, both positive and negative, may also emerge. The paper discusses this paradoxical dimension of festival tourism from both a theoretical and practical perspective, presenting the results of an extended quali-quantitative analysis of the effects produced by the Eurovision Song Contest Festival on the city of Turin and its neighborhoods.

P. Lelio Iapadre (p), Fabrizio Colantoni, Riccardo Persio, Massimiliano Parco

Francesca Silvia Rota

Specialization or diversification? The theoretical and empirical literature on the economic growth of regions and local production systems has studied the links between a region's economic development and the structural characteristics of its specialization pattern. Several analyses have shown how gradual diversification of a region's economic structure can sustain its growth and reduce its vulnerability to external shocks. Others continue to emphasize the importance of specialization consistent with the region's comparative advantages. This study aims to contribute to this empirical literature by exploring the idea that the choice between diversification and specialization may depend on the economic size of the production system. The underlying hypothesis is that an effective diversification process requires a minimum endowment of productive resources, which makes the "critical mass" necessary to expand the region's basket of comparative advantages. Our results show that provinces that have concentrated their production structure in specific areas of comparative advantage over the years have improved their export performance. The same results also appear when controlling for the economic size of the provinces, with some difference in the significance of the results for the class of larger provinces.

Małgorzata Twardzik (p)

P. Lelio Iapadre

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Will the 2030s be the decade when sustainability breaks through? How should retailers combine operational excellence with social and environmental responsibility?