This paper provides an assessment of Italian aid policy during the period 1983-2006. In comparison with other donors (DAC and G-7), the main stylized facts are: persistently lower aid/GDP ratio, greater recourse to multilateral channels, a higher percentage of �tied� flows and...

Financial exclusion concerns 2.5 billion individuals and more than 450 million enterprises. The G20 countries are committed to the reduction of this phenomenon. The Bank of Italy has a fundamental role in the field of financial inclusion, both on a national and an international scale through...

More than three years since the events of the Arab Spring, the five North African countries � Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia are still going through a difficult transition. This study provides an overview of Italian trade and direct investment in the region. The main stylized...

This paper summarizes the results attained by the Eurosystem in harmonizing the statistics used for the conduct of monetary policy. Since the creation of the euro area, in January 1999, significant progress has been made in the harmonization of data on banks’ balance sheets, central banks and...

This paper analyzes the operation of the Eurosystem�s public and private assets purchases programmes for monetary policy purposes, quantifying the potential effect on the Italian economy. First we give an exhaustive account of the main transmission channels by which the purchases can be...

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...

The paper looks at the characteristics of Italian non-financial firms that accessed the bond market for the first time between 2002 and 2013. The results of logit estimations indicate that first-time bond issuers are significantly larger and more frequently listed on the stock exchange than...

We explain why the macroeconomic effects of shocks to inflation of the same size, but opposite sign, are not necessarily symmetric. All in all, the costs of deflation and disinflation tend to exceed those of inflation due to the presence of constraints in the economy, namely the zero lower bound...

In this paper we test for the potential bias in the estimated contribution of a supply restriction on lending to enterprises, as captured by the assessment of credit standards provided by the banks participating in the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey (BLS banks). For Italy, we combine the...

This paper asks whether and why advanced countries differ in their ability to export to China and India. We exploit a newly collected, comparable cross-country survey of 15,000 European manufacturing firms (EFIGE). The dataset contains information on firms� international activities and...