A comprehensive analysis of price and cost competitiveness warrants an assessment of a range of alternately deflated nominal effective exchange rates. Here, we focus solely on the price-competitiveness indicator currently published by the Bank of Italy (Felettigh et al., 2015), which is based on...

We explore three alternative methodologies drawn from economic history literature to compute macroeconomic total-economy estimates of Italy's mark-ups since 1861, based on the new historical national accounts presented in Baffigi (2013) and Giordano and Zollino (2015). Two key features of...

We provide an in-depth analysis of Italy's export performance relative to the other main euro-area countries over the last two decades, using both macro and micro data. We argue that the relatively unsatisfactory performance of Italian goods exports until the eve of the 2008-09 crisis is the...

Using significantly under-exploited data from institutional sector accounts, we assess the main drivers of both firms' and households' investment in Italy over the past two decades. We estimate a vector error correction model separately for firms and for households. Our findings support the...

This paper documents the recent innovations to the Bank of Italy methodology underlying the estimation of price-competitiveness misalignments , first put forward in Giordano (2018); it also provides the most recent misalignment estimates for the euro area and for its four main economies, based...