Despite the fact that in 2011 Italy will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its political unification, geographical disparities stand out as a prominent characteristic of the country. The paper estimates the trend of the cost-of-living differentials across regions in the half-century after the...

This paper focuses on vulnerability to poverty in Italy. We estimate the incidence of vulnerable households drawing from the ISTAT Household Budget Surveys for the year range 1985-2001. We classify as vulnerable those families with a higher-than-average probability of falling below the poverty...