This volume describes in considerable detail the structural features of the Italian economy. It is based on the results of a major three-year project analysing the Italian economy, and its primary focus is on the role of state and private economic agents. Italy has a huge and interventionist...

This paper analyses the main critiques addressed by the literature and the policy-makers to the 1997 Stability and Growth Pact. It further indicates to what extent the 2005 reform of the Pact meets those critics. It finally argues that the 2005 reform may be too little and arrive too late to...

This paper provides factual evidence on the extent of public intervention in the Italian economy. It further illustrates the internal contradictions and weaknesses of public action in Italy. New policy proposals to solve old structural problems of the Bel Paese are then discussed. Among them, a...

Unemployment in Europe is a worrying phenomenon not so much because it hits 18 million people, but because it almost exclusively affects particular population segments. Italy represents a textbook case of a European country where labour market imbalances only weigh upon certain social...

In the past four years, and under pressure from the EC authorities, most constraints on air transport prices in the European Community have been removed. This paper concentrates on the effects of increased competition on fare behaviour. It uses an unpublished 1990 dataset on eight fare...

This paper presents a microeconomic theoretical model of union optimizing behavior which is then used to test the relevance of the tax-push hypothesis for wage formation in nine Western European countries. Two factors—the compensation and the progressivity effects—are shown by the model to...

This paper uses comparative statistics in a simple three-period overlapping generations model to show that any pay-as-you-go mechanism for public retirement pensions, when adopted in a dualistic economic system, penalises the most dynamic demographic groups, i.e., the <MI>developing<D> rather than the...</d></mi>

The unemployment dynamics in the Mezzogiorno of Italy seem to corroborate the New Economic Geography predictions, whereby, under some specific hypotheses, a stronger economic integration can amplify the regional polarisation of unemployment rates in Europe. It is, however, unclear which features...