RISULTATI RICERCA

Alla luce delle crescenti responsabilità manageriali che gravano sugli operatori sanitari, in primis i medici, nella formazione del personale sanitario sempre più spesso è richiesto lo studio delle discipline sociali, in particolare economiche. La presente pubblicazione fornisce gli elementi di conoscenza destinati sia agli studenti di discipline economico-sociali e sanitarie sia a coloro che sono operatori del settore e avvertono carenze nella loro preparazione economica.

Recently, great emphasis has been attached to the psychological aspects of human economic behaviour showing the limits of pure rationality in economic science (A psychologist like Kahnemann won the Nobel Prize in Economics). Traditional economists used to study individual wellbeing on utility basis and utility function has been linked to the disposal of goods and consumption. Easterlin was the first to emphasize that happiness is the aim of men and that only in particular situations is it linked with income and wealth. So the problem is: given that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right, comparable to life and freedom, what can the policy maker do to reach this aim? Which are the implications for economic policies considering this fundamental need of people? The aim of this article is to offer some reflections on this topic after a critical review of the limits of the tools of Economic Theory in explaining the inexistence of a direct correlation between income levels and happiness in developed countries.

Economics and happiness. The austrian theory of relational goods from menger to robbins - The paradox of happiness in economics has aroused a growing interest among scholars all over the world. In affluent societies, despite an increase in their income, many people do not declare themselves happier. One explanation is that economic growth can destroy some relational goods affecting happiness: family life, friendship, love, civil participation. Such an explanation is based on a historical interpretation: marginalism, denying the economic nature of relational goods, would have overshadowed the issue of happiness in economics. In this paper I intend to reconstruct the story of an attempt neglected but remarkable first made by Menger and Böhm-Bawerk and later by Wicksteed and Robbins: an attempt to solve the problem of human relationships in economics. JEL classification: B13; D60 Keywords: Austrian school; economics and happiness.

Economia e economia informale - Ethics and enterprises: a new and different approach to the theme The author re-reads the relationship between ethics and enterprises in the light of Polanyi’s thought, advancing an open proposal, which is methodological and implies a macro point of view, and which involves all the social subsystems. In order to define the nature of ethics it is important to consider that it is essential to the life itself of enterprises and, according to Granovetter, to reconsider the idea that the economic action (rational action toward the aim) is a social action. This perspective highlights a different interpretation of ethics, which depends on the consideration of the enterprise without society, of the enterprise as autonomous from society and of the enterprise in the society, that is, as part of a logic of action coherent with the values of society.

This paper discusses the significance of raising, in the modern economy, of the new, or digital, economy. The question is if new economy is a new paradigm or a renewing of an old paradigm of the economy. In the author’s point of view new economy is a mixture between old and new paradigms. Its impact on the modern economy has been too much emphasized by some scholars and by the set of economic operators in Ict. The consequences are well known. Ict has the cause and the victim of a speculative bubble. However, the new economy has some solid fundamentals and in this vision we can think that it could have an influence of the labour market. But this influence is bounded by some cognitive and cultural structures governing the modern labour market, so that transformations in this market will have necessarily a less strong impact.