The Italian case can be considered as an internationally relevant example to suggest a critical reflection on the evaluation criteria adopted in research assessment exercises, pointing at the need of clear and shared guidelines based on transparency and accountability and aiming at preserving...

We analyse Italy’s research evaluation exercise to discuss the issue of evaluating re-search in economics. We claim that evaluation and its criteria, together with its linkage to research institutions’ financing, are likely to affect the direction of research, in a problematic way. We claim...

The Economic Study aims at assessing the impact of ICT within the Public Sector (PS) to Public Sector itself and to society. In particular, it provides the theoretical underpinning of the tangible elements presented in the Measurement Framework. The basic tenet of our model is that eGovernment...

By considering the case of Italy we show that despite much rhetoric and expectations about the fact that women have gradually overcome men in terms of educational attainments, they still lack behind in terms of the main skills and competencies that can profitably be used in the market. On the...

We define public administrations (PAs) as productive units, and analyze the recent trends in PAs' productivity applying Sylos Labini's productivity function model. At the microeconomic level, we propose a model of government action for the production of public goods. At the macroeconomic level,...

While we do not mean to imply that there are insurmountable or even clear distinctions between the social sciences, we claim that economists can still provide an original analysis of class, which should be regarded as complementary to those developed by sociologists. Following the tradition of...

Recent economic literature on poverty may be broadly divided into two strands. One strand investigates the multidimensional nature of poverty. The other strand, employing the large availability of household surveys, investigates the micro and macro determinants of monetary poverty, analyzing the...

Active ageing strategies have so far strongly focussed on increasing senior workers employment rates through pension reforms to develop incentives to retire later on the one hand, and labour market policies on the other hand. Most measures are based on the dominant male trajectory of work and...

This article aims at illustrating a theoretical approach to the analysis of the dynamics of productivity in the public sector, and at presenting a preliminary application of it to the estimation of the impact on productivity of the recent development of e-Government processes in a number of OECD...

This chapter deals with the empirical testing of the potential trade-off between flexibility and productivity growth by using firm-level data. The model of reference relies on various works by Sylos-Labini, The model is estimated on data from the 9th “Indagine sulle imprese manifatturiere”,...