A Comparative Perspective on Italy’s Human Capital Accumulation

This paper reviews the evolution of educational institutions and outcomes over the 150 years since Italy’s unification, and discusses their interaction with national and regional growth patterns. While initial educational conditions contributed to differentiate across regions the early industrial take off in the late 19th century, and formal education does not appear to have played a major role in the postwar economic boom, the slowdown of Italy’s economy since the 1990s may be partly due to interactions between its traditionally low human capital intensity and new comparative advantage patterns, and to the deterioration since the 1970s of the educational system’s organization.Education systems, tracking, economic growth, regional convergence

The determinants of teacher mobility. Evidence from a panel of Italian teachers

In the Italian system teachers are allocated to schools according to a seniority-based centralized system with no role of individual schools in attracting, selecting and retaining teachers. Largely because of the rather limited pay scale, seniority-based rights to move to a particular school and geographical location represent one of the main career opportunities for tenured teachers. This paper examines the main drivers of the resulting (voluntary) mobility of Italian teachers. We find that the teachers' place of birth (after securing a tenured position, teachers try find work near their place of birth) and several features related to the student mix and the social context of the school are very important. Teachers systematically try to move away from schools where teaching is likely to be more difficult, for example where the students come from a lower socio-economic background and have poorer educational abilities even though teachers could have a more important role in boosting students' human capital accumulation. The centralized allocation system does not appear to equalize opportunities among different school environments. Furthermore, the absence of any criteria other than seniority in regulating teachers' locational preferences produces high staff turnover and a widespread lack of motivation among teachers who, all too often, are simply waiting in one school until they can move on to another.The labour market for teachers, teacher mobility, geographical mobility, school characteristics

Labour market for teachers: Demographic characteristics and allocative mechanisms

The paper considers the teachers’ labour market in Italy. The quality and motivation of teachers are certainly among the determinants of pupils’ achievement, but they are difficult to measure, so we examine the composition of the pool of teachers and their behaviour to infer information about them. We look also at the institutional features that motivate the implicit contract that drives Italian teachers' behaviour, which essentially involves low salary and correspondingly low commitment and effort. In particular we examine the mechanism that allocates teachers to schools. For each school we construct three indicators; one indicating the level of turnover, which we interpret as a source of turmoil; one that refers to the mismatch between tenured teachers and their school; and a “revealed preferences indicator” that measures the schools’ quality as evaluated by the population of tenured teachers. We measure the association at the school level of our indicators with achievement as gauged by PISA 2003. Students scores are correlated negatively to the turnover and the mismatch indicators, positively to revealed preferences.Teachers labour market, Italian educational system

Earnings Dispersion, Low Pay and Household Poverty in Italy, 1977-1998

The paper presents estimates on the dispersion of earnings and the proportion of low-paid employees in Italy in the period 1977-1998, and it measures the differential impact of low pay and employment status on householdsÂ’ poverty. The estimates are computed from the micro-data of the Historical Archive of the Bank of ItalyÂ’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth. The distribution of net earnings narrowed from the late 1970s until the end of the 1980s, abruptly widened in the early 1990s and experienced little modification in the rest of the decade. The trend in the share of low-paid workers evolved in parallel with that of earnings inequality. Finally, the probability of being in poverty is more closely correlated with the number of household members employed, particularly other than the head, than with low pay.earnings dispersion, low-paid workers

Some unpleasant arithmetics of regional unemployment in the EU. Are there any lessons for EMU?

Several studies have documented the weak response of regional wage differentials and labour mobility following region-specific (“idiosyncraticâ€) shocks in the average of the EU countries. This has been often taken as evidence of the rigidity of labour markets in European countries, as opposed to the flexibility of the USA. However, as such shocks by definition average to zero, one cannot make an explicit link between the (lack of) adjustment at regional level and aggregate unemployment. Moreover, the emphasis on the reaction to short-run idiosyncratic shocks is unlikely to explain the permanent differentials across regions, which characterise the regional distribution of unemployment in many EU countries. This paper tries to provide a better understanding of the regional distribution of unemployment and why region-specific shocks can matter for aggregate unemployment. It does so by explicitly considering the possibility of asymmetric reactions, so that unemployment rises more in poorer areas suffering an adverse shock than it declines in richer regions experiencing a favourable shock. The reason behind such asymmetries is the presence of a wage floor in the poorer regions resulting from policy centralisation, as for instance in the case of a national unemployment compensation system, which provides benefits that are uniform across regions. If such a mechanism is at work, aggregate unemployment tends to be “inflated†by region-specific shocks that are inequality- increasing. After presenting an illustrative model of the mechanism, the paper proposes a simple measure of the resulting “excess unemploymentâ€, based on the difference between the average (national) unemployment rate and the unemployment rate of the median region. It also examines the relationship between regional asymmetries in unemployment and the dispersion of productivity across regions, taken as proxy of the inequality-increasing shocks. The evidence, while not entirely conclusive, justifies two tentative policy conclusions, which are particularly relevant in the context of EMU: a) to avoid centralisation of labour market institutions at the EU level that may end up inflating aggregate unemployment; b) to effectively deploy regional policies to combat inequality- increasing shocks.regional policy, unemployment, disparities

Indagini dirette e fonti amministrative: dall'alternativa all'ancora incompiuta integrazione

The focus of the paper is about the relationships between registers (an censuses) and surveys in the in the Italian official statistics. After a brief introduction on the historical background, marked by a polarization between the two strategies of data collection, the focus is on the 1980s and early '90s. Under the presidency of Guido M. Rey a new strategy is embraced, based on the integration of different data sources. The main accomplishments, and shortcomings, of this strategy are presented and discussed. The final part of the paper is devoted to a critical assessment of the still unsatisfactory state of the art today, and to broad suggestions for a reasonable way out

The regulatory reforms in Italian local public services: an overview and some lessons for the future

The paper summarizes the framework used in a research project on local public services carried out by Bank of Italy researchers. It discusses motivations, characteristics, results and general lessons of the project, whose sector-specific results are detailed in individual papers. The project was set up to analyze the effectiveness and outcomes of a set of reforms initiated approximately 15 years ago (but still unfinished in many respects). Studies of specific economically important and socially sensitive sectors were performed, to obtain an updated picture of the current framework (ownership structure, role of local authorities) and evaluate performance (market structure, costs and quality, profitability, environmental results). A set of horizontal studies (on the evolution of regulation, the spread of project financing, the growth of some large players) complemented the sectoral analyses. As a whole the project confirmed that the results of the reforms have been unsatisfactory. The paper also discusses some characteristics of the regulatory framework and market structures that could explain the reforms’ poor results: a) insufficient attention to sectoral peculiarities in the regulatory design; b) the approach used in determining tariffs that should have covered full costs; c) excessively fragmented regulatory authorities, which were set up at too local a level; d) insufficient separation between the different roles played by local authorities as regulators, majority shareholders of service providers and representatives of consumers’ interests.local public services, liberalization, regulation

Quality differentials in Italian Universities' freshmen: the case of Medical and Dental Surgery schools

The paper compares the quality of Italian Medical schools’ freshmen on the basis of the scores obtained in the locally conducted entry exams which are using a common national test frame. The test is quite selective (partly because of the reduced size of the intake yearly allowed): winners are people on average better than the average graduates of their own secondary schools and 15% of them have already had some college education in other fields. Among Universities there appear to be sizable and stable over time differences in the average quality of freshmen; while students from the South have on average worse results in the tests, those of them moving to Northern Universities contribute to the higher average quality of these Universities’ freshmen. Comparing, for Dental Surgery schools which have used both, local tests and a national test (the position in the national test governing the priority in the choice of the school where to enroll), it seems that the latter amplifies (shrinks) the difference between (within each of the several) Universities in the freshmen’s composition.college enrollment, freshmen quality, selection mechanisms

La valutazione del valore aggiunto della scuola

La qualità del sistema educativo è oggi una grande questione nazionale. Vi si connettono le opportunità di crescita economica – che per un paese come l’Italia dipendono dalla capacità innovativa, non dalla presenza di risorse naturali da sfruttare, e che sarebbe controproducente perseguire tramite una sistematica compressione dei livelli salariali. Ma anche le prospettive della coesione sociale – l’Italia caratterizzandosi come un paese in cui troppo spesso la condizione professionale e reddituale dei figli ricalca quella dei genitori, con una scarsa capacità del sistema scolastico, nonostante la sua natura e il suo finanziamento quasi esclusivamente pubblici, di spezzare tale immobilità intergenerazionale

The big players in Italian local public services. Constraints, opportunities and growth strategies

One of the objectives of the reforms and liberalization of the last 15 years in local public services was to reduce the traditional fragmentation of production. This was to be achieved through restructuring that reduced inefficiencies and made it more possible to exploit economies of scale, thereby stimulating the emergence of national “big players”. In this paper we analyze the evolution and current position of the largest operators that have emerged in the different sectors of local public services. The aim is to identify factors that have helped or hindered the growth process. Through an analysis of twelve among the largest businesses we identify four evolutionary paths. In our view the main drivers have been: a) a presence in the energy sector (mainly due to its high profitability); b) a favourable local political framework; and c) a tradition of efficient internal organization and independence of local politics.local public services, liberalization, growth strategies