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

Valeria Virginia Checchi and Michele Polo
Additional contact information
Valeria Virginia Checchi: Bocconi University

Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, 2020, vol. 6, issue 2, No 6, 325-353

Abstract: 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 also in Sicily to a rapid expansion in the capacity installed. We analyse whether rents from wind investment may have attracted Sicilian mafia. We argue that the wind business is particularly attractive when a criminal organization invests in the regular economy. We find that the probability of observing a wind farm in a municipality is higher, once controlled for geographical and political factors, if there is a mafia family embedded, identifying a causal link from mafia presence to wind investment. Moreover, the involvement of mafia groups adapted to the changing regime in incentives around 2012, moving from large investments, direct involvement or the provision of intermediation services to small scale investments in the municipalities where the families are rooted. These results are consistent with the episodes unveiled in judicial inquiries in Sicily. We compare these results with the case of Apulia, where large wind investments have been supported by an environmentally committed regional government and where the judges did not find evidence of a massive penetration of the local organized crime in the wind business. We show that the location of wind farms in this region depends on favourable geographical conditions but is not correlated with the presence of organized crime, consistently with the negative evidence from judicial inquiries.

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)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40797-020-00126-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:italej:v:6:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s40797-020-00126-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40797

DOI: 10.1007/s40797-020-00126-z

Access Statistics for this article

Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti is currently edited by Roberto Cellini

More articles in Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti from Springer, Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().