This paper studies the effects on local public transport of the reform begun in the late nineties, using data from a recent Bank of Italy survey. There are still substantial differences across Italy’s regions, and the level of efficiency is far from the original aims of the reform. Although...

This paper compares the return to pre-crisis levels and the long-term performance of exports in the main Italian regions compared with some European regions with a similar production structure. The results show that the intensity and timing of recovery in the cyclical component of exports were...

The paper presents an overview of available statistics on the internationalization of the Italian economy. The different sources are compared in terms of completeness, consistency and compatibility, timeliness, relevance and frequency of revisions, presence of systematic biases and significant...

This paper studies costs and benefits of firm networks, and related industrial policies, with a focus on the �network contract� recently introduced in the Italian legislation. Incentives to networks creation could be useful to foster future mergers, but may prove ineffective as a...

In this paper we analyse a hypothetical welfare reform that would introduce a Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) in Italy, the only country of the pre-enlargement EU-15 where a programme of this type does not exist. First we compute the overall cost of a GMI under different assumptions about its...

The data collected by the IMF in the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS) provide a unique source for foreign portfolio asset holdings, with details on the breakdown by instrument and counterpart country. In the presence of sizeable cross-border positions in mutual funds, which are...

<em>Competition and transparency in public procurement: a survey</em> - Italy suffers of a chronic lack of modern infrastructures. The market for public works is as a whole not transparent and inefficient in terms of costs and time of completion of the works; greater competition could improve the...