Italy’s system of social protection has come under criticism for being fragmented and excessively skewed toward pensioners and “insiders.” After setting up a consolidated presentation of the social security accounts, this paper provides an empirical assessment of the effectiveness of 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...

This paper provides a synthesis of existing and new empirical perspectives on the structure of the Italian labor market, using data at different levels of disaggregation. The analysis indicates that aggregate data mask considerable disparities in labor market outcomes across regions and...

The world is recovering from the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. The recovery will probably be shallow and government deficits could remain very large over the next few years in a number of countries. The crisis has a negative impact not only on central...

Sound information at sub-national level and benchmarking of regions across national borders has increased in importance in the policy agenda of many countries due to higher integration driven by institutional processes and economic globalisation. Geovisual analytics techniques help illustrating...

To account for differences among rural and urban regions, the OECD s established a regional typology, classifying TL3 regions as predominantly urban (PU), intermediate (IN) or predominantly rural (PR) (OECD, 2009). This typology, based essentially on the percentage of regional population living...