Water is one of the most important natural resources that is necessary for the rise and development of any biological and human activity. Being water resource a necessary good for multiple uses, it generates a series of competitive demands whose degree of competitiveness becomes greater in the...

This paper investigates the nature of regional unemployment in Italy. Taking as a starting point the evidence of growing disparities in the 1977-2003 years, we assess whether regional unemployment rates are diverging from each other in a non-stationary way, i.e. as a result of pure hysteresis....

Following León-Ledesma and Thirlwall (2002a), this paper investigates the extent to which the natural rate of growth of the Italian regions is endogenous, in the sense that it is affected by actual growth. The estimation framework is based on one version of the cyclical relationship between...

Taking as a starting point the evidence of growing disparities in the 1977-2003 years, the paper investigates the pure hysteresis hypothesis for regional unemployment rates in Italy. Relying both on univariate and panel unit-root rests, we can confidently reject the unit-root hypothesis. The...

We estimate the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s potential growth rate in 2012 at 8.7% and at 9.2% for the average of 2008–2012, about the same as the average actual growth rate for this period. This rate is the natural growth rate, that is, the rate consistent with a constant...

From 1962 to 2013, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s)agricultural employment share declined from 82% to 31%. The transfer of workers out of low-productivity agriculture is a fundamental pillar of the PRC’s aspirations to progress and eventually become a high-income economy. We...

Building on standard growth-theory models, this paper provides an empirical investigation of the effects of crime on regional economic performance in Italy, as measured by labour productivity growth. Our analysis relies on a panel of annual data on the Italian regions and, contrary to previous...

This paper investigates the sustainability of current accounts in advanced economies, using a panel of 27 countries and annual data over the 1980-2008 period. We find strong evidence in favour of nonlinear but stationary current-account trajectories for 14 countries, while the remaining 13...

Inflation Targeting (IT) can be expected to play a role in structurally reducing nominal interest rates, by lowering a country’s inflation expectations and risk premium. Relying on a panel of 52 advanced and emerging economies over the 1975-2009 years, we carry out a formal investigation of...

Comprising specially commissioned essays, the Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of alternative theories of economic growth. It surveys major sub-fields (including classical, Kaleckian, evolutionary, and Kaldorian growth theories) and highlights cutting-edge issues such as the...