The education system in Italy is mainly public and highly centralised concerning both financial and regulatory aspects. However, there are significant disparities in school spending and students' performance across regions. The aim of the paper is to provide a first attempt for the Italian case...

Background:Italy is a country showing low math achievement, especially in the Southern regions. Moreover, national student assessments are recent and rigorous policy evaluation is lacking. This study presents the results of one of the first randomized controlled trials implemented in Italian...

Nature is an important resource which can enhance Italy’s territorial competitiveness. Nature reserves cover about ten per cent of the territory and are even more concentrated in Southern Italy. In order to draw upon such an asset effectively, an overall strategy should be applied to the...

Data from the 2003 OECD-PISA Survey for Italy reveal a striking difference in the relationship between students' competence (as measured by PISA score in Mathematics) and school grades across regions: a competence level granting bare sufficiency in the North yields excellence grades in the...

The debate on progress in Italy is affected by the backwardness of the Mezzogiorno. The recent fiscal federalism reform hence raises new questions on how to attain more comparable living conditions for residents in regions that currently differ in levels of development and access to basic...

In the past decade, growing concern for fiscal developments and the performance of the public sector has urged several countries to make a closer link between government budgets and measurable indicators on the quantity and quality of services delivered and on their impact on socio-economic...

We study how the relationship between students' cognitive ability and their school grades depends on institutional contexts. In a simple abstract model, we show that unless competence standards are set at above-school level or the variation of competence across schools is low, students'...

In questo contributo si analizza l’efficienza delle strutture periferiche del Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche sociali. Come altre amministrazioni centrali dello Stato, il Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche sociali presenta una struttura organizzativa articolata territorialmente in...

Recenti riforme hanno modificato la domanda scolastica primaria e secondaria superiore. Tramite un modello basato sulle previsioni demografiche provinciali più recenti, si analizzano 18 scenari di domanda per il periodo 2010-2027 stimando il fabbisogno di docenti pre e post-riforme, per...