Italian Economic Journal最新文献

Abstract

This paper provides a simple political economy model of hierarchical education to study the endogenous determination of the public education budget and its allocation between different tiers of education (basic and advanced). The model integrates private education decisions by allowing parents, who are differentiated according to income and human capital, to opt out of the public system and enrol their offspring at private universities. Majority voting decides the size of the budget allocated to education and the expenditure composition. The model exhibits a potential for multiple equilibria and ‘low education’ traps. Income inequality and the intergenerational persistence of educational attainments play a fundamental role in deciding the equilibrium. The main predictions of the theory are broadly consistent with descriptive cross-country evidence collected for 43 high-middle income countries.

The school-to-work transition in Italy is very long. In this paper, we measure the differences in the school-to-work duration for Italian graduates in the STEM and non-STEM fields using data from the ISTAT Professional integration of Graduates survey. We used different parametric and non-parametric approaches based on survival analysis. In particular, through competitive risk analysis, we control even the possibility that the job search ends with a transition to the status of inactivity, still very frequent among Italian people, especially women. Further, we compare STWT durations conditioned to several relevant characteristics. We find that the STWT has an average duration of 14 months for those who graduated in health sciences, 24 for other scientific fields, and more than two years for those graduating in a humanities field. Other significant differences arise when we account for gender, especially when we consider an exit from the STWT for inactivity, for region of residence, family background, and even for active participation in university activities. Further, the analysis highlights the existence of a dual labor market, with shorter transitions to stable and satisfactory jobs and longer transitions for jobs with opposite characteristics. The findings open up many policy implications. Actions that could help in reducing the duration of the STWT are: stimulating more young people, in particular women, to choose STEM disciplines; reducing the Italian territorial divide, reinforcing universities in the South and their connections with the productive system, incentivizing students to actively participate in courses, and other activities.

We develop an endogenous growth model to simulate the long-term impact of Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) on the persistent North–South productivity gap. Our model underscores public investment as a catalyst for sustained economic growth and highlights the reliance of local government quality on the surrounding social capital. In regions with low social capital, local investment management diminishes efficiency due to prevalent misappropriation. In contrast, centralized management enhances the effectiveness of public action in these situations. The NRRP's overall effect therefore relies on the government level to which investment management is assigned. Our quantitative exercises show that compared to centralization, decentralization weakens the NRRP's impact on the relative position of the South. However, even under our best scenario—centralized management—the NRRP only slightly reduces the North–South productivity ratio from 75 to 76.4%. Finally, our research highlights the pivotal role of a reform aimed at maintaining central control over Southern public investments well beyond 2026, when the NRRP's actions and governance are due to stop. This type of reform can potentially yield more substantial, positive, and lasting impacts on the South region.

EU fiscal rules have been suspended until 2024. European policymakers are considering whether to reinstate the existing fiscal rules or to define a new framework. Member States must have enough fiscal space. But the sustainability of public debt must be safeguarded. We use a nonlinear dynamic model to test if a primary balance adjustment rule can preserve debt sustainability in the presence of interactions between fiscal policy, economic growth, and interest rates. We find that a dynamic adjustment rule to changes in debt service can reduce the equilibrium debt ratio, even stabilizing the associated risk premium.

How does Italy position inside the European structure of trade relationships? How labour bilateral flows have changed over time? Which type of employment activity has been outsourced? Which insourced? Focusing on a three-country perspective, what are the employment bilateral relationships between Italy-Germany-Poland (descending periphery-core-ascending periphery)? To address these questions we develop a novel set of bilateral labour dependence indicators inside I-O production networks. Overall, we provide evidence of the reconfiguration of Italy as falling into the trap of GVC downgrading, with an increasing number of trade relationships in employment requirements, particularly in the most strategic productions, as insourced from abroad. The offshoring strategy conducted so far has resulted in a weakening of its internal production capacity and employment absorption, even more harshly when compared to other European countries.