The more you know, the better you act? Institutional communication in Covid-19 crisis management.

The plurality of communication channels and the spread of fake news are widespread phenomena in today's society. Those constituted a serious risk during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis management, increasing the confusion among the population. This research aims at assessing the effectiveness of institutional communication amid the management of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis in Italy. We first assessed the phenomenon by building a structured theoretical background stressing the concepts of risk communication, community engagement, and health literacy, highlighting the dynamic and continuously changing scenario of communication strategies, also due to the spread of social media and the mutation of conventional media outlets. We sent a questionnaire to a sample of citizens to assess the impact of three predictors, i.e., the perceived communication, the perceived knowledge, and the perceived information. Based on answers, we built an ordered logit model assigning continuous intervals as values for the dependent variables. The observed results enhanced the crucial role of the phenomenon of health literacy and the impact of asymmetric information on the effectiveness of institutional communication. Education played a fundamental role in understanding communication pillars and building an individual consciousness about health risks prevention.

Virtual water trade of agri-food products: Evidence from italian-chinese relations.

At global scale, the majority of world water withdrawal is for the agricultural sector, with differences among countries depending on the relevance of agri-food sector in the economy. Virtual water and water footprint could be useful to express the impact on the water resources of each production process and good with the objective to lead to a sustainable use of water at a global level. International trade could be connected to the virtual water flows, in fact through commodities importation, water poor countries can save their own water resources. The present paper focuses on the bilateral virtual water flows connected to the top ten agri-food products traded between Italy and China. Comparing the virtual water flow related to the top 10 agri-food products, the virtual water flow from Italy to China is bigger than the water flow in the opposite direction. Moreover, the composition of virtual water flows is different; Italy imports significant amounts of grey water from China, depending on the different environmental strategies adopted by the two selected countries. This difference could be also related to the fact that traded commodities are very different; the 91% of virtual water imported by Italy is connected to crops products, while the 95% of virtual water imported by China is related to the animal products. Considering national water saving and global water saving, appears that Italy imports virtual water from China while China exerts pressure on its water resources to supply the exports to Italy. This result at global scale implies a global water loss of 129.29millionm3 because, in general, the agri-food products are traded from the area with lower water productivity to the area with the higher water productivity.