Alumni | XXXIV CICLO | Grazini Chiara

Chiara Grazini (Viterbo, 1990) is Assistant Professor (Ph.D.) in Political Economy at the University of Tuscia (Viterbo, Italy). Previously, she was a post-doctoral research fellow in political economy in the same department. She graduated in Administration, Finance and Control in 2018 at the University of Tuscia, where she subsequently earned her Ph.D. in Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods in 2022. Currently, she teaches Micro and Macroeconomics for Circular Economy for the English master’s degree in Circular Economy, Macroeconomics for the bachelor’s degree in Economics, and Circular Economy and Regenerative Growth for the English Master’s degree in Security And Human Rights. She also teaches Globalization and Economic Development, an international course of the Economics and Communication for Management and Innovation inter-university master’s degree from the University of Tuscia and Sapienza University of Rome.

The research interests are human development and capability approach; well-being and multidimensional evaluation of poverty; eco-innovation, environmental regulations and research network; economic growth and income distribution in post-Keynesian models, particularly concerning environmental sustainability and ecological structural change. She is a member of the Italian Society of the History of Political Economy (STOREP). She has published in national and international journals, such as Moneta e Credito, Studies of Applied Economics and Structuralist Development Macroeconomics Bulletin.

Universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services is among the goals for the sustainable development of the United Nations; its achievement crucially depends on energy poverty, understood as the unavailability and unaffordability of energy services, a problem that is not confined only to developing countries. In Italy, it has affected 8% of households. For the countries of the European Union, the issue was brought to the attention through the “Clean Energy for All Europeans” package; in Italy through the National Energy Strategy (SEN) 2017. Despite the first studies on energy poverty dating back to the 70s, a full understanding of the phenomenon has been hindered both by the terminological confusion between “fuel poverty” and “energy poverty”, and by the absence of a shared measurement framework. This aspect is even more evident in Italy, where the problem was conceptualized only in the second decade of the new millennium. The expenditure approach, mainly used by the Member States for assessments at the national level, and in particular, the Low Income-High Cost indicator, which also inspired the Italian index developed by Faiella & Lavecchia (2015), ends up not grasping the broader elements of material deprivation and social exclusion of the experience lived by energy-poor households.
Taking as a reference the conceptual framework of Sen’s Capability Approach, which has been applied to the specific issue starting from the works of Reddy (2000) and Day et al. (2016), my research applies a multidimensional measurement framework to estimate the incidence and the severity of energy poverty in Italy in the period 2004-2018 on a panel data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU_SILC) survey of ISTAT. To examine the phenomenon, we implement both the compensative method of the Multidimensional Energy Poverty Index (MEPI) developed by Nussbaumer et al. (2012) and the no-compensative one of Partially Ordered Set Theory (POSET), which has never yet been applied to the study of energy poverty. To reduce the significant sensitivity of MEPI to the weighting method of privation variables, we use the Multiple Correspondence Analysis. In the fight against energy poverty, the role of Public Residential Construction is strategic, as recognized in the PNIEC 2019. This is the reason why these specific topics have been deepened through a case study on social housing in the Viterbo Province. The high diffusion of the phenomenon emerged from the data analysis: at least 99.76% of interviewed households have been reported experiencing energy poverty; 97.22% have been affected by at least two severe forms of energy deprivation, among which the inability to cool the house in the summer properly is particularly widespread (75.41%).

1. 1. Grazini C., Guarini G., Porcile G. (2024). Institutional change and ecological structural change. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 71, p. 354-368, ISSN 0954-349X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2024.08.004. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743016724000184
   2. Meloni C., Grazini C., Marino M., Rocchi B., Severini S. (2024). Are rural households poorer than non-rural households in Europe?. Journal of Rural Studies, 106, 103214. 
   3. Grazini C. (2024). Energy poverty as capacity deprivation: A study of social housing using the partially ordered set. Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 101843. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2024.101843
   4. Benedetti, I., Grazini, C., Guarini, G., & Laureti, T. (2023). The Impact of Business Digitalization on Energy Efficiency. Studies of Applied Economics/Estudios de Economia Aplicada, 41(1), https://doi.org/10.25115/sae.v41i1.9157. https://ojs.ual.es/ojs/index.php/eea/article/view/9157
   5. Grazini C., Guarini G. (2023). The impact of economic complexity and green policies on environmental efficiency. Revista Economia E Políticas Públicas, 11(2), 22–34. https://doi.org/10.46551/epp2023v11n0204.
   6. Grazini C. (2023). La povertà energetica come privazione delle capacità. Moneta e credito, 76 (301). https://doi.org/10.13133/2037-3651/17910
   7. Grazini C., Guarini G. (2023). Politiche e competitività internazionale in ambito ambientale: alcune evidenze empiriche in CiMET Policy Brief, ISSN 2281-5023. https://www.cimet.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Grazini-Guarini_8-2023.pdf.
   8. Grazini C., Guarini G., (2022). “Energy Transition and Social Inclusion: The Dynamic of Energy Poverty In Italy”, Structuralist Development Macroeconomics Bulletin, 2 (2): 24-32, DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.11208.60161.
   9. Garofalo G., Grazini C. (2020). “Il contrasto alla povertà energetica nel settore dell’edilizia residenziale pubblica: il ruolo del capitale sociale”, Cap. 8 pp. 210-214, in Rapporto annuale sull’efficienza energetica, ENEA, Dicembre. ISBN: 978-88-8286-400-2. 

• Garofalo G., Grazini C. (2020). “Il ruolo strategico del capitale sociale nella lotta alla povertà energetica: uno studio di caso riferito all’intervento di riqualificazione energetica nel quartiere ex Gescal di Tuscania”, pp. 82-85 in Rapporto annuale sulla povertà energetica 2020.