Bennett Institute Research Associate, Davide Luca, has won the 2018-2019 Quality of Government Best Paper Award together with his co-author Paola Proietti (Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy) for their paper: “Hosting to skim. Organized Crime and the Reception of Asylum Seekers in Italy”.
In their paper, the authors demonstrate how local mafia activity is associated with the distribution of asylum seeker reception centers across Italy.
The award committee were impressed by the novel sets of data and the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods used in the report.
The The QoG Institute commented: “Their work speaks to a variety of literature from regional development, to human trafficking, research on immigration and potentially voting studies as well. Their findings have implications related not only to national but also funding flows from the European Union. As such their paper represents an important and unique contribution that can carry policy implications in what is, admittedly, one of the most pressing challenges facing the EU and other parts of the world. Finally, through this contribution Proietti and Luca further our understanding about the consequences of low quality of government and weak state capacity at the national and local level and again provide clues as to where policy makers should focus in order to halt or reverse these trends.”
Read Luca and Proietti’s blog “Does organised crime distort policy for asylum seekers?”
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
