Uncovering the missing link between precarity and populist voting

Over the last decade, the economist Guy Standing has written on the emergence of a new class of citizens – the ‘precariat’ – who lack economic security and stable occupational identities. But can the concept of precarity also help explain the success of populist parties? Drawing on a new study, Lorenza Antonucci, Carlo D’Ippoliti, Laszlo Horvath and André Krouwel assess how precarity affects support for populist parties in France and the Netherlands

L’Unione Europea e l’euro: crescere o perire

Il lavoro considera l’impatto dell’attuale crisi causatadal Covid-19 sull’Unione Europea. La risposta di politica economica è stata, rispetto alla crisi dei debiti pubblici, di ben diversa natura. Rimane ora il compito di rimediare ad alcune carenze nell’architettura istituzionale dell’Unione, e di completare il processo di unificazione, soprattutto tramite la costituzione di una fiscalità comune. L’alternativa è il perdurare degli squilibri economici e sociali che hanno attanagliato soprattutto l’area dell’euro sin da prima della crisi, e il rischio di fallimento dell’intera Unione

The Impact of the economic Crisis on the Situation of Women and men and on Gender Equality Policies

Analizza l'impatto della crisi economica sul mercato del lavoro dei diversi paesi membri privilegiando una prospettiva di genere. Analizza altresi' l'effetto della crisi e delle politiche di austerità su alcuni aspetti della coesione sociale, immigrazione e povertà in particolare. Utilizza sia dati statistici aggregati che microdati (tratti dalle indagini Survey of ncome and Living Conditions e Labour Force Survey) adottando una varietà di tecniche statistiche

Surveillance of Summer Mortality and Preparedness to Reduce the Health Impact of Heat Waves in Italy

Since 2004, the Italian Department for Civil Protection and the Ministry of Health have implemented a national program for the prevention of heat-health effects during summer, which to-date includes 34 major cities and 93% of the residents aged 65 years and over. The Italian program represents an important example of an integrated approach to prevent the impact of heat on health, comprising Heat Health Watch Warning Systems, a mortality surveillance system and prevention activities targeted to susceptible subgroups. City-specific warning systems are based on the relationship between temperature and mortality and serve as basis for the modulation of prevention measures. Local prevention activities, based on the guidelines defined by the Ministry of Health, are constructed around the infrastructures and services available. A key component of the prevention program is the identification of susceptible individuals and the active surveillance by General Practitioners, medical personnel and social workers. The mortality surveillance system enables the timely estimation of the impact of heat, and heat waves, on mortality during summer as well as to the evaluation of warning systems and prevention programs. Considering future predictions of climate change, the implementation of effective prevention programs, targeted to high risk subjects, become a priority in the public health agenda

Poor Old Grandmas? A Note on the Gender Dimension of Pension Reforms

In the face of rapid population ageing, most OECD countries have undergone or are considering substantial reforms of their pension systems. This paper investigates the outcomes of a process of gender-blind pension reform, that is designing a pension system assuming an idealised (a-gendered) worker/consumer. The paper specifically deals with the case of Italy, in light of the extraordinary high number of pension reforms that took place there, and of their far-reaching and highly representative nature. We find that recent reforms in Italy have not been gender-neutral. Rather, starting from a situation providing strong incentives towards women’s commitment to unpaid work, reforms in 1990s tried to establish equal treatment of women and men, removing households’ financial gains from having only women doing all the unpaid work. Unfortunately, the short-run implications of this policy may be seriously worrying, as women may have not enough time to accumulate a decent pension annuity. A temporary counter-balancing policy may be needed if we are to avoid women’s poverty and dependence in old age. However, the most recent reform reversed the virtuous trend by establishing new positive discriminations in the eligibility criteria, thus preventing household’s expectations from departing from the old division of social roles.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Inequality, Consumption Emulation, and Growth

We develop a short-run neo-Kaleckian model to investigate the interplay of the functional and personal distribution of income and their impact on growth. Personal distribution becomes relevant in light of the institutionalist hypothesis of consumption emulation, which makes aggregate saving dependent on the concentration of wages and profits. A more equal distribution of wages and/or profits increases aggregate demand and the rate of capacity utilization. But the wage- or profit-led demand regime crucially depends on the difference between the propensity to save out of profits and that out of wages, as well as on the impact of changes in the profit and wage shares on the concentration of personal incomes. Preliminary evidence on Italy over the period 1980s–2010s highlights that demand regimes might be a relatively short-term and cyclical characteristic of that economy, with changes in the demand regime partly explained by changes in personal income distribution

Bibliometrics vs. Diversity in the Top Academic Career Positions in Economics in Italy

Following an international trend, Italy has reformed its university system, especially concerning methods and tools for research evaluation, which are increasingly focused on a number of bibliometric indexes. To study the impact of these changes, we analyse the changing profiles of economists who have won competitions for full professorship in the last few decades in Italy. We concentrate on individual characteristics and mainly on scientific production. We show that the identification of a univocal and standardized concept of “research quality” within the new research assessments has progressively imposed a strategy of “homologation”, especially for women. We find that women economists are at a higher risk of discrimination than their male colleagues and thus they are more likely to conform their research activities to the standardized profile imposed by the gender-blind application of biased bibliometric methods.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

L'economia dopo il Covid. Due possibili scenari

Gli effetti a lungo termine dei mutamenti indotti dall’emergenza pandemica dipenderanno da tre variabili: gli interventi di politica economica; i possibili cambiamenti delle regole del gioco, nell’UE e nei rapporti internazionali; i mutamenti nella cultura economica dominante, eventualmente sollecitati dalla crisi in cui ci troviamo. Su questa base, gli AA. delineano due scenari: uno più ottimistico, e meno probabile, caratterizzato da una consapevolezza critica verso la cultura neoliberista e da un significativo cambiamento delle regole della politica economica dell’UE; e uno, più realistico, di rimedi parziali o di superficie, che si accompagnerà al declino ambientale, a tensioni sociali crescenti, a spinte populiste e autoritarie

Asymmetric effects of macro policies on women’s and men’s incomes. An empirical investigation of the eurozone crisis in a gender perspective

We study how macro policies affected women’s and men’s incomes during the financial crisis in Europe. We consider the monetary stance, proxied by benchmark interest rates, and the fiscal stance, measured by the variation in public expenditures and public revenues, and investigate how they are associated to women’s and men’s labor and capital incomes, using microdata for 27 European countries between 2008 and 2016. We individualize household-level data by considering four scenarios of intrahousehold sharing of resources. We also explore how and to what extent macro-policies affect the distribution of labour incomes for men and women by applying a conditional quantile regression approach. Results highlight that the ECB’s expansionary policies had a positive effect on both labor and capital incomes for both men and women, while austerity policies had a mixed impact. Reductions in public expenditure had the effect of reducing labor incomes for both men and women, particularly at the median of the wage and labor distributions. In contrast, increases in public revenues benefited capital incomes, for all income quantiles