As the global economy faces a new, sharp energy shock amplified by the war in Ukraine, this study analyses developments in Italy’s energy trade balance, both in the long run and from a comparative perspective, in order to appraise any noteworthy changes in the country’s external dependence....

This paper provides new Bank of Italy indicators of price competitiveness for 62 countries. We refreshed the approach adopted by the Bank in the 1990s but later discontinued in 2005 due to the cumbersome statistical requirements in order to accommodate the significant extension of the original...

Using significantly under-exploited data from institutional sector accounts, we assess the main drivers of both firms' and households' investment in Italy over the past two decades. We estimate a vector error correction model separately for firms and for households. Our findings support the...

This paper offers the first quantitative assessment of labour productivity dynamics within Italy's industrial sector over the period 1911-1951 and of their links with competition policy. By relying on a newly compiled dataset and on fresh labour productivity estimates, we find that the earlier...

Italy's economic growth over its 150 years of unified history did not occur at a steady pace nor was it balanced across sectors. Relying on an entirely new input (labour and capital) database by us built and presented in the Appendix, together with new Banca d'Italia estimates of GDP by sector,...

The paper provides a qualitative assessment of the role mainstream economic theory had in orienting Italy's banking legislation from its political unification (1861) to the introduction of the 1936 Banking Act. Five regulatory regimes are considered. Whilst market discipline and self-regulation...

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, three “regulatory cycles” can be identified in Italy. In the underlying model, each financial crisis gives rise to regulatory changes, which are circumvented in due time by financial innovation, that can then contribute to the outbreak of a new financial...

A comprehensive analysis of price and cost competitiveness warrants an assessment of a range of alternately deflated nominal effective exchange rates. Here, we focus solely on the price-competitiveness indicator currently published by the Bank of Italy (Felettigh et al., 2015), which is based on...