Based on updated datasets of value added and of labour and capital inputs, this paper provides a reassessment of the proximate causes of Italy's economic development since its political unification in 1861 to 2016. Italy's pre-WWII economy featured weak productivity growth, with the exception of...

As the global economy faces a new, sharp energy shock amplified by the war in Ukraine, this study analyses developments in Italy’s energy trade balance, both in the long run and from a comparative perspective, in order to appraise any noteworthy changes in the country’s external dependence....

This paper provides new Bank of Italy indicators of price competitiveness for 62 countries. We refreshed the approach adopted by the Bank in the 1990s but later discontinued in 2005 due to the cumbersome statistical requirements in order to accommodate the significant extension of the original...

We analyse the evolution of capital and labour (mis)allocation across firms in five euro-area countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) and eight main sectors of the economy during the period 2002-2012. Three key stylized facts stand out. First, in all countries except Germany,...

The study outlines the main challenges when setting up a “current account (CA) model” in order to measure external imbalances. This model is a reduced-form relationship between the CA balance and a set of CA fundamental and policy drivers, from which a CA “norm” may be derived and...

A comprehensive analysis of price and cost competitiveness warrants an assessment of a range of alternately deflated nominal effective exchange rates. Here, we focus solely on the price-competitiveness indicator currently published by the Bank of Italy (Felettigh et al., 2015), which is based on...

This study first assesses recent misalignments of the real effective exchange rate (REER) of the euro area and of the Harmonized Competitiveness Indicators (HCIs) of its main economies, based on a quarterly Behavioural Equilibrium Exchange Rate (BEER) model. Next, it draws a comparison with...

While there is a vast macroeconomic literature that singles out the main drivers of capital accumulation in advanced economies during and after the global financial and sovereign debt crises’ recessionary phase, there is much less research seeking to identify both models and variables that...

We investigate the role of corruption in the business environment in explaining the efficiency of within-sector production factor allocation across firms in nine Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in 2003-2012. Using a conditional convergence model, we find evidence of a positive...

This paper documents the recent innovations to the Bank of Italy methodology underlying the estimation of price-competitiveness misalignments , first put forward in Giordano (2018); it also provides the most recent misalignment estimates for the euro area and for its four main economies, based...