Assembling information from several sources and a drawing on specially designed new survey, this paper finds that the shortfall in the supply of child care facilities remains large with respect to potential demand but is less severe with respect to the effective demand by households in Italy....

The paper summarizes the framework used in a research project on local public services carried out by Bank of Italy researchers. It discusses motivations, characteristics, results and general lessons of the project, whose sector-specific results are detailed in individual papers. The project was...

This paper provides a survey of a number of studies conducted in recent years, above all at the Bank of Italy, aiming at assessing the quality and the efficiency of public services in Italy. We consider services provided by the central government (education and civil justice), regional...

Since the late eighties the Italian National Health System, in particular hospital care, has undergone deep reforms. This paper evaluates the technical efficiency of Italian public hospitals in light of the main features of the hospital system at a regional level. The evaluation was carried out...

Over the last decade two reforms have affected the Italian hospital system, one introducing market mechanisms, the other concerning the tools of planning and expense control assigned to the regional governments. The paper summarizes these institutional changes and describes the evolution of the...

The paper compares the quality of Italian Medical schools� freshmen on the basis of the scores obtained in the locally conducted entry exams which are using a common national test frame. The test is quite selective (partly because of the reduced size of the intake yearly allowed): winners...

Investment in public research in Italy is below the European average as a percentage of GDP. Nevertheless, in relation to expenditure and the number of researchers, the output is high, and the quality of research, conducted in universities and research organizations, is close to that of such...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the effects of the expansion of tertiary education supply on the educational choices of young Italian high school graduates. A quasi-experimental setting given by the reform of the tertiary education system implemented in 2001 is exploited. The reform was...

We analyse how the labour market implicitly evaluates Italy's higher education system by estimating differences in employment and earnings across universities. We use our estimates to produce three rankings of universities based, respectively, on employment, earnings and employment-weighted...

PISA 2012 included an optional computer-based assessment (CBA) focusing on mathematics, reading skills and problem solving. Italian students performed better in the CBA than in the paper-based assessment (PBA). This was not due to any specific features of the student samples in Italy and in the...