Blowing in the Wind: the Infiltration of Sicilian Mafia in the Wind Power Business

Valeria Virginia Checchi and Michele Polo

No 4, GREEN Working Papers from GREEN, Centre for Research on Geography, Resources, Environment, Energy & Networks, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy

Abstract: Public policies in the last 20 years have promoted in Italy the investment in renewable energy sources within the framework of climate change policies. Investment in renewables received generous incentives, leading to a rapid expansion in the capacity installed. Judicial inquiries have uncovered several episodes of involvement of Mafia families in the rich wind power business in Sicily. We test whether such involvement can be confirmed looking at the overall investment in the region. Using data on wind farm installations at the municipality level we show that the probability of observing a wind farm in a municipality is higher if in the local territory there is a mafia family, whereas wind speed is (surprisingly) not significant. Plants of small size, that require a simplified procedure managed by the local administration, are the predominant pattern of investment. Hence the episodes unveiled by courts are paralleled by a wider correlation of mafia family entrenchment in a territory and wind farm investment. We compare this result with the case of Apulia, the other Southern region where there has been a large investment in wind farms, supported by an environmental friendly regional government and apparently immune from criminal infiltrations. Applying the same econometric model in the case of Apulia we find that wind speed matters whereas the presence of the local criminal organizations does not affect the probability of observing a wind farm.

Keywords: mafia; wind farms; infiltration in legal businesses; Sicily (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K23 K32 K42 L94 Q20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.unibocconi.it/iefe/bcu/papers/GREEN_wp04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bcu:greewp:greenwp04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GREEN Working Papers from GREEN, Centre for Research on Geography, Resources, Environment, Energy & Networks, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy Via Röntgen, 1 - 20136 Milano - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Carlotta Milani ().