The Stability and Growth Pact sets a medium-term target for fiscal policy of a budgetary position "close to balance of in surplus". This addition to the deficit rule defined by the Maastricht Treaty has been interpreted as an attempt to reconcile the objective of sound public finances with the...

This work provides an empirical analysis of the development of Italian provinces over the period 1952-1992, investigating the existence of convergence and/or divergence processes, identifying groups of provinces characterised by similar growth patterns and examining the role played by various...

Post-war Italy provides an interesting case to test for recent contributions on economic growth which play down the relevance of physical capital per se and stress its complementarity with infrastructure and less tangible factors such as finance and human capital. In truth, behind the remarkable...

Direct and country-specific measures of technical progress are used in order to analyse the effects of technology shocks on output fluctuations in the G7. Technology shocks are measured as the unpredicted component in the dynamics of innovation, on the basis of patent statistics provided by the...

Unit roots in output, an exponential 2 per cent rate of convergence and no change in the underlying dynamics of output seem to be three stylized facts that cannot go together. This paper extends the Solow-Swan growth model allowing for cross-sectional heterogeneity. In this framework, aggregate...

This paper presents an endogenous growth models with intertemporally dependent preferences and "Ak" technology. We derive sufficient conditions for a balanced growth path to be an equilibrium, provide a full characterization of the equilibrium dynamics of the economy, and explore the...