This paper studies the distributive impact of institutional change in developing countries. In such economies, economic institutions, such as property rights systems, may act to preserve the interests of an influential minority, but this depends crucially on the level of political equality. For...

In the last decades, and particularly in the Nineties, the European Economy has been widely characterised by regional disparities. This paper aims to evaluate if different regional economic structures, such as productive mix and labour market composition, contribute to this disarities and to...

This paper analyses the impact of the speed of transition reforms on economic growth in transition countries in the context of the debate big-bang versus gradualist approach. It builds a new indicator for the speed of transition reforms based on a three-way principal component analysis. It shows...

This report summarizes the findings of a research project using firm level data on Italian and Turkish manufacturing industries. In this project we study the dynamics of firm survival and growth, and the spillover effects from foreign-owned to domestic firms. First, we investigate the...

Sebbene gli attuali scenari recessivi abbiano portato a un ulteriore ampliamento del divario di sviluppo dell’economia del Mezzogiorno dalle regioni centro-settentrionali, vi è un comparto di attività - quello delle energie rinnovabili - che ha fatto registrare in quest’ultimi anni tassi...

This paper examines the determinants of innovation and its effects on small- and medium-sized firms We use the data from the OPIS databank, which provides a survey on a representative sample of firms from a province of the Southern Italy. We want to study whether small and medium sized firms can...

Background: Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist index are frequently used in the hospital sector to measure efficiency. However, very few works are published for Italian hospitals, despite the fact that efficiency was the main driver guiding healthcare reform in the 1990s....

The deadlock in the Doha Round and the proliferation of regional and bilateral trade agreements has given rise to a new interest in the potential relationship between regionalism and multilateralism. This paper has two main aims. First, the formation of free trade agreements amongst symmetric...

The impact of international trade on the labour market is a topic of growing interest among economists. In the last two decades income distribution has strongly changed in the USA with a progressive increase in the difference between the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. Even though West...

In this paper we appraise the existence of a negative relationship between the wage level and the unemployment rate (the wage curve) across Italian regions, using data from the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and Wealth. The main advantage of this data-set is the availability of...