The paper provides an overview of the main statistics produced by the Bank of Italy: financial accounts, monetary statistics, balance of payments, household and business surveys. The volume discusses the problems related to the measurement of economic phenomena, how statistics can be used for...

This paper aims at analysing the role of institutional factors in fostering the agglomeration of SMEs in Italian industrial districts. The main findings are: the availability of strong family institutions and a social environment reducing individual opportunism have played a significant role in...

This paper aims at three main goals: a) choosing proxies of social capital available at territorial level; b) defining the current geography of social capital endowment; c) correlating our synthetic measure of social capital with economic phenomena (e.g. industrial districts distribution)....

In the last two decades the socio-economic literature has highlighted the importance of social capital (an ample set of social relations and cultural attitudes) for economic growth and the wellbeing of citizens. The literature broadly suggests a negative correlation between social capital and...