Una politica industriale per il dopo-pandemia in Italia

Italy’s economy has been severely hit by the coronavirus crisis, after a decade of stagnation and decline in its capabilities and performances. The challenge of reconstructing the country’s economy requires a new industrial policy, in the context of Europe’s Green deal strategy and new initiatives of the «Recovery Fund». The national and European resources that are made available for addressing the crisis have to focus on key priority fields, including digital technologies, environmentally sustainable economic activities and welfare and public health services. There is also a need for new policy tools and institutions with the tasks of managing public investment, holding government shares in publicly owned large firms, and supporting new economic initiatives with a public investment bank

Neuromorphic Event-based Facial Expression Recognition

Recently, event cameras have shown large applicability in several computer vision fields especially concerning tasks that require high temporal resolution. In this work, we investigate the usage of such kind of data for emotion recognition by presenting NEFER, a dataset for Neuromorphic Event-based Facial Expression Recognition. NEFER is composed of paired RGB and event videos representing human faces labeled with the respective emotions and also annotated with face bounding boxes and facial landmarks. We detail the data acquisition process as well as providing a baseline method for RGB and event data. The collected data captures subtle micro-expressions, which are hard to spot with RGB data, yet emerge in the event domain. We report a double recognition accuracy for the event-based approach, proving the effectiveness of a neuromorphic approach for analyzing fast and hardly detectable expressions and the emotions they conceal

Strategic sectors and essential jobs: A new taxonomy based on employment multipliers

In this paper we propose a novel sectoral taxonomy integrating three different attributes of sectors, namely i) the strategic dimension reflected into their belonging to different classes of the Pavitt taxonomy, ii) the capacity to create jobs both internally and externally with respect to their sector/country, iii) the essentiality in satisfying basic needs. To accomplish the task we rely on the World Input-Output Tables and on the Socio-Economic Accounts database (Timmer et al., 2015) to build vertically integrated sectoral employment multipliers and we focus on Italy as a case study, a country which has undergone a deep structural transformation in the last twenty years, loosing productive capacity and also employment potential. The period of investigation goes from 2000 until 2014. We validate the patterns against other selected OECD countries. We finally propose an agenda for industrial policies identifying three specific sectors of intervention for the State, namely the pharmaceutical, the automotive and the care sectors

Weak sectors and weak ties? Labour dependence and asymmetric positioning in GVCs

Focusing on labour requirements incorporated into GVCs, in the following, we develop a novel, non conventional measure of learning capabilities, represented by knowledge embodied along the division of labour within global production networks. In order to capture the division of labour, and the ensuing division of embodied knowledge, we move from monetary flows of production, or value-added embodied, to labour embodied in the I-O linkages. We focus on mature economies as offshoring has been particularly in place there. After constructing a new indicator of Bilateral Net Labour Dependence, we estimate its relationship with a measure of performance of industries, namely, labour productivity, seeking to challenge the established findings generally reporting a positive effect of GVCs participation for sector-level productivity. Our conjecture is that being in a weak position in terms of (net) labour provision results in an overall weakening of the capabilities of the loosing productive structure. We corroborate the conjecture with a panel analysis of OECD countries and industries for the time period 2000-2014

Technological interdependencies and employment changes in European industries

This work addresses the role of inter-sectoral innovation flows, which we frame as technological interdependencies, in determining sectoral employment dynamics. This purpose is achieved through the construction of an indicator capturing the amount of R&D expenditures embodied in the backward linkages of industries. We aim to find out whether having a more integrated production in terms of requiring more technological inputs is related to a lower demand for workers within the sector. We refer to the literature on innovation-employment nexus, inter-sectoral knowledge spillovers and Global Value Chains, building upon structuralist and evolutionary theoretical considerations. We track the flows of embodied technological change between industries taking advantage of the notion of vertically integrated sectors. The relevance of this vertical technological dimension for determining employment dynamics is then tested on a panel data of European industries over the 2008-2014 period. Results show a statistically significant and negative employment impact of the degree of vertical integration in terms of acquisitions of R&D embodied inputs. Combining the role of demand, the double nature of innovation - as product and as process -, together with intersectoral linkages, this work shows that the dependence of a sector from innovation performed by other ones - a proxy for input embodied process innovations - exert a negative effect upon employment

The labour share along global value chains: Perspectives and evidence from sectoral interdependence

This article proposes a novel framework to investigate how globalisation affects workers' share of value added. We explore functional income distribution by looking at industrial interdependence and thus identifying GVCs as the unit of analysis; we then track inputs composition and their labour share evolution along the value chains. First, we find widespread heterogeneous patterns across value chains components, accounting for the direct, domestic and foreign requirements of the chains, inside an overall declining trend. Second, we study the evolution of the vertical labour share along development stages. Finally, by means of a shift-share analysis, we investigate what drives such decline in the vertical labour share: albeit country-sector idiosyncratic factors accounted by the within-input component contribute the most, between-input reallocation - GVCs restructuring - matters particularly to detect the role played by foreign contributions. In essence, we provide evidence of a recombination of inputs toward emerging economies and service-based activities. Such recombination negatively impacts upon the overall labour share dynamics. Overall, our methodology contributes to better understanding the process of fragmentation of production and international division of labour by developing a series of novel and fine-grained indicators; in addition, it allows to study the ensuing implication for functional income distribution

Italy and the trap of GVC downgrading: Labour dependence in the European geography of production

How does Italy position inside the European structure of trade relationships? How labour bilateral flows have changed over time? Which type of employment activity has been outsourced? Which insourced? Focusing on a three-country perspective, what are the employment bilateral relationships between Italy-Germany-Poland (descending periphery-core-ascending periphery)? To address these questions we develop a novel set of bilateral labour dependence indicators inside I-O production networks. Overall, we provide evidence of the reconfiguration of Italy as falling into the trap of GVC downgrading, with an increasing number of trade relationships in employment requirements, particularly in the most strategic productions, as insourced from abroad. The offshoring strategy conducted so far has resulted in a weakening of its internal production capacity and employment absorption, even more harshly when compared to other European countries

Chromosome numbers for the Italian flora: 6

In this contribution, new chromosome data obtained on material collected in Italy are presented. It includes three chromosome counts for Bupleurum baldense Turra, Colchicum lusitanum Brot., and Euphorbia gasparrinii Boiss. subsp. gasparrinii