Essays on sustainability, development and resource curse in a spatial perspective

The aim of this thesis is to study the impact of natural resources on the regional economic system in Italy, both in terms of growth potential and of sustainability, with a special focus on Basilicata region. It is a resource rich region, but, from an economic point of view, it is part of an underdeveloped area of a developed country. It suffers from the same structural and institutional problems of Mezzogiorno, in terms of low economic dynamism, infrastructural gaps with the rest of Italy, low institutional quality, etc. It offers thus a very interesting case to study the interaction between resource use, economic development and sustainability, the impact of this interaction on the local economy and the trade-offs that may arise. This thesis is composed of different but logically connected papers. We start from the analysis of the concept of sustainable development in its application to the regional level. The main aim of this part is to understand how the sustainability of development path should be assessed at this territorial level, through a critical review of vailable methods and indicators. them is evaluated in its ability to depict sustainability in a regional context. In the second paper we propose an original estimate of the Genuine Savings rate for the 20 Italian regions. In the framework of weak sustainability, this indicator it is shown to be particularly powerful, because it provides a measure of the sustainability of the whole system, and the interaction between natural an economic dynamics of a territory. In the third paper we analyze the impact of the extractive resources sector on the whole economic system, and try to verify if a "Dutch disease" phenomenon is occurring at the regional level. Finally,in the last part we propose a policy simulation through the use of a bi-regional SAM for Basilicata and the rest of Italy, with an economic-environmental model. Moreover, we simulate several royalties allocation scenarios, proposing an empirical extension of the Genuine Saving rate, in order to assess the social sustainability implication of the policy scenarios considered.