Globalization and public administration: a complex relationship

The paper examines the relationship between globalization and public administration through economic theory principles and an example. Starting from the consideration of early concerns about globalization, it argues that although the size of government has rarely declined, its power has been eroded, making room on the one hand to the quest for global public goods, while on the other hand urging for more local public goods and decentralization. University education, mainly publicly supplied in Italy as well as in many European countries, exemplifies the awkwardness of introducing best practices in a context of asymmetric information with many idiosyncratic features.globalization,university education,public goods,public administration

The European Union's Institutional Design

The paper offers a theoretical appraisal of the various steps follow by the countries involved in the EU integration process. It shows that the extent to which the leaps to higher cohesion level in common policies have been achieved by the linkages between different games such that the common policies prove to be mutually advantageous across countries

Income distribution, standard of living and capabilities: a cross-sectoral analysis.

The aim of the paper is to investigate how agricultural relative incomes have changed in recent years, since the CAP has switched its emphasis from price support to rural development. The distributional implications of agricultural and rural policies are indirectly evaluated looking at the dynamics of earnings and wages in agriculture, as well as at the rural household incomes described through monetary and non monetary variables, so to proxy their living standards. Our concern is not particularly on the agricultural policy tools, as much as on the evaluation of their end results. A comparison spanning through time and across countries is performed on the basis of the information provided by the ECHP and EU-SILC surveys. The paper seeks to unravel the differences between rural and urban population in the different European areas and offers a description of how successes and failures varied, keeping the CAP in the background.Income distribution, Standard of living Earnings in agriculture., Agricultural and Food Policy, D31, E24, J31, N50,

Wage Inequality in Europe: the Role of Labour Market and Redistributive Institutions

This paper aims at a deeper understanding of the determinants of wage inequality, the most important component of income inequality, in the European countries. We investigate on how wage inequality is affected by government regulation in the labour market and by the redistribution operated by the social protection system, also controlling for the impact of the effect of skillpremium related to technical change. To explain the continuously rising wage inequality in Europe, two regression models of wage inequality are employed each one using a different databases. In the last period, the overall degree of governance of the labour markets does not substantially change, but a different balance between decreasing labour market regulation and increasing redistribution manifest across Europe. While job and wage protection has been eased, income redistribution was strengthened, though its size differs across four clusters of European countries, depending on the majority voting preference for “risk insurance”. Overall, institutional substitution between labour market regulation and income redistribution seems to back the upward trend in wage inequality

Do Preferences in EU Member-States Support Fiscal Federalism?

The aim of this paper is to assess preferences with respect to fiscal federalism in EU member-states. In particular, we address the question of whether each EU country would - if the decision were taken by 'majority voting' - or should – if the decision were takenby a social planner – favour centralisation or decentralisation of mutual risk insurance. Our analysis implicitly assumes that each EU median voter or each EU social planner takes the composition of the fiscal federation as given, leaving aside the issue of how manyand which countries take part in the optimal EU fiscal federation. With majority voting, the median voter 'individual' and the median voter 'region' in each EU country are decisive. In this situation, the national (federal) government level for redistribution is preferredif the national ratio between median income and mean income is lower (higher) than the EU ratio. In contrast, were the decision taken by the social planner, the choice in favour of centralisation(decentralisation) would be derived from the maximisation of a social welfare function. In terms of European regions, the index of 'jurisdictional distance' indicates that social welfare ismaximised by (de)centralised redistribution whenever intra -national income dispersion is greater (smaller) than inter-national income dispersion. The results show that, for the large majority ofEU member-states, when one of the two decision-makers prefers centralisation (decentralisation), the other has the opposite preference; moreover, the chosen government level is in most cases thesame for interpersonal redistribution and inter-jurisdictional redistribution: what is good for the individual is also good for the nation.Income Distribution ; Public Choice ; Fiscal Federalism ; European Economics

Financial cycles, credit networks and macroeconomic fluctuations: multi-scale stochastic models and wavelet analysis

This project focuses on the macroeconomics of financial cycles. Usually defined in terms of self-reinforcing interactions between perceptions of value and risk, attitudes towards risk and financing constraints, which translate into booms followed by bust, the recent empirical literature has recurred to two approaches \u2013 turning point analysis and frequency-based filters - applied to measures of credit and asset prices to pose a number of stylized facts. First, financial cycles tend to display a greater amplitude and a lower frequency in comparison to business cycles, with peaks associated with systemic crises. Second, financial cycles depend on policy regimes and on the pace of financial innovations, leading to a wide cross-country heterogeneity and a time-varying degree of global synchronization. The latter point is clearly related to the structural transformations occurred in financial systems over the last three decades, like the cumulative integration of traditional banking with capital market developments and the increasing degree of interconnections among financial institutions. However, to date very little is known about determinants and mechanisms behind financial cycles, and on how they interact with business cycles and medium-to-long-run macroeconomic performance. In this project we plan to research along three dimensions: i) measurement issues, in order to provide a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of co-movements between financial and real variables across a sample of financial developed countries, both over time and at different frequencies; ii) theoretical issues, aimed at exploring under what circumstances the network of interconnections among financial intermediaries and between intermediaries and non-financial borrowers might evolve cyclically, contributing this way to regulate the incentives agents have in taking risks, and to set the importance of credit and financial frictions in accounting for time-varying misallocations of resources; iii) policy issues, given the role assigned by international supervisory bodies to a proper characterization and knowledge of the financial cycle as a prerequisite for the macro-prudential regulation of banks, and the scope of monetary policy in promoting financial stability in addition to the typical mandate of price stability. Our task requires the employment of a new approach to macroeconomic analysis, diverse analytical tools and one unifying economic principle. As regards the latter, our focal point is the notion of risk externalities, across financial institutions and between the financial sector and the real economy. The set of tools we plan to employ spans from wavelets methods to multi-scale models in continuous time, and from strategic network formation to agent-based computational techniques. All these tools are instrumental in building and estimating macroeconomic models characterized by interrelated markets operating at different time scales

Measuring Economic Well-Being in a Multidimensional Perspective

The paper aims to identify structural differences among European countries concerning inequality of living conditions and opportunities, and quantified by well-being indicators, so to: 1) compare living standards across countries and 2) find out whether a trend may be singled out

Disuguaglianze di genere in una pandemia: un approccio economico

L’evidenza empirica più recente indica che le diseguaglianze di genere durante la pandemia da Covid-19 si sono accentuate. Questo lavoro, dopo aver esposto la concettualizzazione e la misurazione delle diseguaglianze di genere, esamina i principali meccanismi economici e comportamentali che, portando a una maggiore diseguaglianza, in seguito alla pandemia rischiano di azzerare i diritti faticosamente conquistati dalle donne.The latest empirical evidence shows that gender inequalities have been increasing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Starting from how inequalities are defined and measured, this paper addresses the issue of economic and social mechanisms which – by increasing gender inequalities, after the pandemic – are likely to jeopardize many of the rights conquered by women

Innovation and wage polarisation in European industries

By linking different innovation indicators and education to the polarisation of wages by skill level within industries, the paper aims to find out the importance of sectoral structure: industry analysis analysis of levels of polarisation (not change) so to test the relevance of technology and educational factors in polarisation of wage