A unified approach to Hardy-type inequalities with Bessel pairs

In this paper, we provide suitable characterisations of pairs of weights $(V,W),$ known as Bessel pairs, that ensure the validity of weighted Hardy-type inequalities. The abstract approach adopted here makes it possible to establish such inequalities also going beyond the classical Euclidean setting and also within a more general $L^p$ framework. As a byproduct of our method, we obtain explicit expressions for the maximizing functions and, in certain specific situations, we show that the associated constants are sharp. We emphasise that our approach unifies, generalises and improves several existing results in the literature.