We analyze households’ economic freedom to determine their standard of living, characterized by their capacity to spend on housing, utilities, food, and transport: economic poverty is a lack of freedom due to budgetary constraints. We propose three new measures. The first is the classical...

The aim of this paper is the analysis of vulnerability within families in nine regions of Italy and represents the second part of a research on regional inequalities in income distribution. Poverty tends to be a multi-dimensional concept and the use of monetary income as a single measure of...

The aim of this paper is to explain the economic causes and consequences of the sharp decline in Italy’s fertility rate, the most dramatic decline in the world together with that in Japan. The main cause is shown to originate in the mid-seventies: a sudden increase in the unemployment rate...

Private insurance markets provide insufficient coverage for risks coming from natural disasters. We argue that in such markets the typical market failure is mainly due to reasons other than asymmetric information. More specifically, the low probability of a disaster, together with the height of...

La relazione presenta nella Parte I un quadro della struttura, sviluppo e crescita della spesa pubblica in Italia a partire dal 1951 nelle sue principali componenti funzionali e per livello di governo; ne analizza la dinamica in relazione alla crescita del PIL e al ciclo economico. Nella Parte...