The volume collects the essays presented at the conference "Social capital, economics and political economy" held in Rome on 27 June 2014. The first session analyzes definition and measurement issues about social capital. The second and third sessions examine its determinants and economic...

Putnam (1993) argues that (i) center-northern Italy has developed faster than southern Italy because the former was better endowed with social capital; and (ii) that the endowments of social capital across Italian territories have been highly persistent over centuries. This paper provides an...

In this paper we propose and validate cheating in standardized tests as a new indirect measure of social capital. Given the low-stakes nature of most of the tests examined here, we interpret the widespread presence of cheating as a signal of limited trustin central education authorities....

This paper studies the characteristics of the cultural sector in Italy and its interactions with the production system as a whole. After stating a clear definition of the cultural sector, we analyze the demand and supply of culture in Italy, at a regional level. We carry out descriptive analysis...

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the size and the industrial and geographic distribution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in Italy. The discussion is organized into two sections. The first, based on OECD list of countries in "ICT Intensity Groups", show...

Italy's economic growth over its 150 years of unified history did not occur at a steady pace nor was it balanced across sectors. Relying on an entirely new input (labour and capital) database by us built and presented in the Appendix, together with new Banca d'Italia estimates of GDP by sector,...

The paper analyses the sharp divergence in the nineties between capital formation in the main euro area countries, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other. We have used data from the OECD's International Sectoral Data Base (ISDB), which includes data comparable across a certain...

We examine the growth performance of six emerging economies (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Turkey) in the last two decades and examine whether domestic structural constraints are affecting their present and future growth potential. In order to assess better the determinants of the...

The paper surveys the literature on the measurement of innovation activity and evaluates the position of Italy with respect to the other major European countries. Innovation has been measured from different perspectives: the environment in which firms operate, firms' commitment, its outcome....

The paper explores the long run evolution of Italy's performance in technological innovation as a function of international technology transfer, reconstructing the different phases and dimensions of Italian innovative activity, tracking the transfer of foreign technological knowledge through a...