Payment systems track economic transactions and therefore could be considered important indicators of economic activity. This paper describes the available monthly data on the retail settlement system for Italy and selects some of them for short-term forecasting. Using a mixed frequency factor...

This paper investigate the effects of the prolonged double-dip recession on the productive capacity of the Italian manufacturing sector, employing three methods: a production function approach, a survey-based methodology and a statistical filtering of the industrial production series. We...

Between 2008 and 2013 productive capacity was considerably downsized in the Italian manufacturing sector. This paper analyses the micro-data collected for the Bank of Italy surveys to identify the main drivers of the reduction in the whole 2008-13 period and in four sub-periods (pre-crisis...