We assess the employment impact of the Lisbon Strategy, examining long-run growth in total, female and old-age employment rates from 1994 to 2009. The Strategy had some impact, especially for old-age workers, but no improvement ensued from its mid-term reassessment.

How to stimulate growth and support job creation are two critical challenges that countries and localities confront and limited resources require lateral thinking about how actions in one area, such as employment and training, can have simultaneous benefits in others, such as creating new jobs...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the evolution of labour-market performance in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) over the last decade, considering the robustness of the claims made in an important OECD follow-up study. Design/methodology/approach...

Using data from the Bank of Italy’s Household Survey we find that a wage curve exists in Italy after the 1992-93 wage reforms for annual and monthly wages but not for hourly wages. Consistently, after the reforms we find a negative elasticity of annual hours and months worked with respect to...

This paper considers a sample of 228 Italian organisations providing communal services with the aim of measuring their technical efficiency using the DEA (Date Envelopment Analysis) method and of testing the existence of efficiency differentials among nonprofit, forprofit and public...

We analyse the impact of business incentives on the technical efficiency of Italian manufacturing firms. Using DEA allows a novel treatment of the omitted-variable and sample-selection bias. Through DEA one carries out direct comparisons between similar observations akin to those carried out in...

<em>Structural Funds, Productivity and Employment: a Study on the Italian Regions</em> (by Gianluigi Coppola, Sergio Destefanis) - ABSTRACT: Objectives In this paper we study the impact of the European Structural Funds on the convergence process of the 20 Italian administrative regions. We consider the...

Relying mainly on the use of the "OECD Diagnostic Tool", we highlight the skill demand-supply imbalances existing across the Italian territory, as well as some of their determinants. Having clarified that the promotion of the matching between skill demand and supply is an essential element of...

In this paper we show how the nature of economies of scale can be assessed using a set of procedures based on non-parametric frontier analysis. Through these procedures it is possible to characterise qualitatively the nature of returns to scale for each observation, yielding important...

In the present work we argue that in order to appraise the explanatory power of the existing explanations of dualism in the Italian economy it is important to examine their empirical predictions relatively to the territorial dispersion of some efficiency measures. Applying the non-parametric FDH...