The debate in Italy on the recent disappointing performance of GDP growth has focused on the increasing competitive pressure exerted by firms located in the developing countries and specialized in key product sectors of Italian manufacturing. This paper contributes by explicitly quantifying the...

This paper compares main European countries and the euro area specialization patterns. The analysis, that covers the period 1988-1997 and is based on a detailed sectoral breakdown, provides evidence to assess the degree of structural differences and convergence among European countries, which...

We study the effects of the world economic crisis which began in 2007 on the Italian productive system. National accounts data are supplemented with information gathered in spring 2009 from the Bank of Italy�s survey on industrial and service firms, and from interviews with about 70 of...

In the last decade the Italian economy has underperformed compared both with the previous decades and with the main European countries. It is widely acknowledged that this evolution reflects unresolved structural problems, which have become more urgent in view of the major changes in the world...

The unsatisfactory performance of Italian export volumes in the last decade has been attributed to three factors; the product specialization still centered around traditional sectors, the small firm size and the exceptional rise in export unit values. This paper analyzes the latter with the aim...

This paper combines the literature on financial crises with that on international immigrations by investigating whether the increasingly large flows of workers� remittances can help reduce the probability of current account reversals. The rationale for this stands in the great stability and...

This paper estimates a pricing-to-market equation for Italy over the period 1990-99 with the aim of assessing the degree of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT). As compared to previous works, we minimize aggregation and selection biases using export data on all products (about 700 from 4 digits of...