We study the relation between service off-shoring and productivity growth in the manufacturing sector of a set of European economies in 1995-2005. We document that those countries resorting more to service off-shoring in 1995 experienced faster productivity growth in ICT/R&D intensive industries...

In this paper, we model business investment distinguishing between ICT (communication equipment, hardware and software) and Non-ICT (machinery and equipment, and non-residential buildings) components and taking into account asset specific characteristics potentially affecting the reactivity of...

Many measures of the impact of Information and Comunication Technology (ICT) on growth have been provided for the United States; much fewer analyses have been proposed for European countries, due also to scarcity of disaggregated data. In this paper we make use of very detailed sectoral data for...

The aim of this paper is to identify the stage of IT adoption in individual European economies, and to analyse the determinants of IT investment in a panel of EU countries. We first analyse the dynamics of IT investment expenditure in 15 European countries from 1992 until 2001 and, by means of a...

There is now a large consensus that both the production and the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have contributed substantially to the aggregate productivity revival in the United States in the late 1990s. The technological revolution has now involved also Italy; therefore...

The Italian economy is often said to be on a declining path. In this paper, we document that: (i) Italy's current decline is a labor productivity problem (ii) the labor productivity slowdown stems from declining productivity growth in all industries but utilities (with manufacturing contributing...

Among the reasons underlying the slow economic convergence of some regions towards the national and the European Union average, the strong gap in technological endowment and innovation capacity has been indicated as one of the most important factors. The requirements of the current ‘knowledge...

This paper explores the economics of Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on its potential as a new General-Purpose Technology that can significantly influence economic productivity and societal wellbeing. It examines AI's unique capacity for autonomy and self-improvement, which could...

In this paper, we investigate the environmental regulation-productivity nexus for 14 OECD countries over the years 1990-2015 and discuss its main policy challenges. Our findings support the hypothesis that environmental policies generate positive productivity returns through innovation as...

This paper provides a description of Istat’s new Macroeconometric Model MeMo-It. This is the tool used by Istat to produce bi-annual medium-term forecasts of the Italian economy since May 2012. The key model’s features are illustrated and compared with other modeling approaches used in the...