KEY ISSUES Seizing the Window of Opportunity for Reform and Growth Context: Euro area-wide policies and national efforts have supported a turnaround in market sentiment and real activity. Italy’s performance since the crisis, however, has been among the weakest in the euro area. Real activity...

This paper presents an update to the Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC) on Fiscal Transparency Module for Italy. Some progress has been made vis-à-vis the 2003 ROSC update, especially toward strengthening the integrity of data. The reconciliation of above- and below-the-line...

During the 2003 Article IV Consultation mission, IMF staff reviewed developments in Italy's observance of fiscal transparency practices, with a view to updating changes in current practices, reviewing progress in implementing the initial report on observance and codes (ROSCs) recommendations,...

The inefficiency of the Italian judicial system has contributed to reduced investments, slow growth and a difficult business environment. The enforcement of civil and commercial claims suffers from excessive delays in court proceedings, resulting in a very large number of pending cases. The...

This paper proposes a stochastic volatility model to measure sovereign financial distress. It examines how key European sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads affect each other; specifically, the paper analyses the volatility structure of Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal....

In Italy, price-based competitiveness measures are not always an accurate predictor of trade outcomes. This paper offers a more comprehensive assessment of Italian competitiveness, focusing on the role of innovation and the evolution of Italy’s export market share. Overall, Italy maintains a...

The Selected Issues paper investigates options for improving the efficiency of the Italian judicial system and closing the regional performance gap. Better courts would bring about macroeconomic benefits, including increased employment opportunities, and higher productivity, investment, and...

This paper challenges the conventional view that foreign exchange risk premiums are small, not volatile, and unrelated to macroeconomic variables. For the Italian lira (1987-94), unconditional risk premiums—constructed using survey data to measure exchange rate expectations—are found to be...

This paper compares the experience with exchange-rate–based stabilization (ERBS) of four Western European countries with that of high-inflation developing countries. In general, the behavior of key macroeconomic variables—inflation, output, demand, the real exchange rate and the current...