We analyze households’ economic freedom to determine their standard of living, characterized by their capacity to spend on housing, utilities, food, and transport: economic poverty is a lack of freedom due to budgetary constraints. We propose three new measures. The first is the classical...

This paper provides a detailed insight into the magnitude of price-level differentials among Italian regions, supplementing the data collected by Istat with information on house prices and rentals collected by Agenzia del Territorio and by the Bank of Italy and with estimates from other sources....

Following the introduction of euro banknotes and coins many Italians perceived a much sharper increase in the price level than the moderate rise registered by the National Institute of Statistics. The paper shows that the apparent contradiction between the public�s perceptions and...

This paper examines regional inflation divergence within the European EMU aiming at characterizing the properties of inflation differentials. The empirical evidence suggests that a process of price level convergence in the EMU is well on its way.

Three industrial organization (IO) models suggested by Dornbusch (1987) are here adapted to study the labor-cost effects on relative prices of tradable goods between the regions of a monetary union. The assumption of imperfect and segmented goods and labor markets makes the analysis best suited...