This paper is about economists and their opinions on economic policies. Using a representative sample of Italian economists as a case study, we show that disagreement is large on both the causes of the economic difficulties in Italy and the economic policies to be implemented for a recovery....

Making use of the information from the World Value Survey (WVS), and operationalising a definition of national culture that encompasses both the relevance of specific cultural traits and the interdependence among them, this paper proposes a methodology to reveal the latent structure of national...

It is customary in the empirical trade literature to analyze specialization patterns of countries using Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) measures. This paper explores the pros and cons of the most commonly used RCA index: the Balassa (1965) Index of RCA. After describing the properties of...

In this paper we look at the similarity of trade structures in an integrating area. In particular, we analyse the export flows toward the EU market of four of the so-called "accession" countries of Central and Eastern Europe by comparing them to those of the pre-2004 members of the European...

This paper explores the structure of Italian revealed comparative advantages (RCA), focusing on the export structure itself, on its changes over time and on its degree of persistence. The analysis is developed with the use of visual statistical tools and non-parametric statistical techniques...