This paper describes some policy instruments set up by the IMF and the European Union in order to provide financial assistance to developing countries whose economies are affected by exogenous shocks from exports side. After briefly reviewing the IMF’s CFF and the EU’s STABEX, the paper...

This paper assesses the impact of R&D spillovers on production, for a balanced panel of 1203 Italian manufacturing firms, over the period 1998-2003. The estimations are based on a translog production function augmented by a measure of R&D spillovers, that combines the geographical distance and...

This paper assesses the impact of Research and Development (R&D) efforts on production in the North and Centre-South of Italy by using a panel of 1,203 manufacturing firms over the period 1998–2003. The estimations are based on a nonlinear translog production function augmented by a measure of...

This paper provides a contribution to the debate on the role of European Union cohesion policy in Italy. The focus is on the territorial effects of European structural funds from 1996 to 2007. The empirical analysis considers a neoclassical growth model which is augmented by the structural funds...

This study analyses how firms' internal variables and regional factors affect total factor productivity (TFP) of Italian manufacturing firms. Due to the hierarchical structure of our data, we employ a multilevel model that allows for a clear distinction between firm and region-specific effects....

Both a tariff and a production subsidy can be used to protect the import competing industry. Yeh (1971) has shown that if the country is large, a tariff will be superior to a production subsidy, assuming that the level of support required for the import competing industry is not greater than the...

We investigate the sources and determinants of output growth of Italian manufacturing firms. Applying stochastic frontier techniques, we decompose output growth into factor accumulation and TFP growth from 1998 to 2003. TFP growth is further decomposed into technological change, efficiency...

There is a substantial heterogeneity in productivity when comparing individual firms. However, even when heterogeneity is found, some questions still remain unaddressed. For instance, when focusing on EU nothing is known about the importance of firms' heterogeneity compared with that of...

This paper analyses the TFP heterogeneity of a sample of manufacturing firms operating in seven EU countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and UK). TFP data refer to 2008. The empirical setting is based on the multilevel modelling which provides two main results. Firstly, we...

In this study several matching procedures have been used to evaluate the impact of public R&D support received by Italian manufacturing firms over the three-year period 2004-2006. Data are from the Capitalia-UniCredit survey and estimations refer to a sample of 605 treated firms untreated are...