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Invidia e imprenditorialità. Alcune note sul ruolo delle emozioni nello sviluppo economico
Get PDFThe main hypothesis of this paper is that envy may play a role, although hardly quantifible, in the explanation of economic backwardness. Its main effect is to stimulate social reaction and opposition against entrepreneurial effort and innovative behavior which inhibit the development of a diffused entrepreneurial attitude in the population. This is more likely to happen in the transition phase from an agrarian economy to industrial development when income distribution becomes more uneven and envy still acts as a control device against social differentiation in a subsistence economy. More generally the paper argues that extending the framework of rational choice to include emotions may help to go deeper into the social mechanics of economic development
Human capital stocks and the development of italian regions: a panel approach
Get PDFGiven recent emphasis on externality to education, macroeconomic studies have a role to play in the analysis of return to schooling. In this paper we study the connection between growth and human capital for the Italian regions in a convergence regression framework. We confirm the usual result on Italian regional convergence that this process began to diminish or fail after about 1975. We include a measure of human capital in the convergence regression as a stock rather than a flows. We find this variable is significant if and only if we control for the size of the public sector. The public sector is itself strongly negative. Decomposing the human capital measure into its constituents, we find that average years of primary and secondary education act positively on growth, but that tertiary education acts negatively. When we estimate the convergence regression for the South and the North-Centre separately, we find no break in the pattern of convergence around 1975. Thus both areas seem to be converging according to a similar process, albeit to different levels of GDP per capita. The role of the human capital is strikingly similar in the two clubs. Finally, we find educating women leads to faster growt
Growth and sectoral dynamics in the Italian regions
Get PDFRegional differentials in per capita income and labour productivity in Italy is one of the most notable cases of regional inequality and have attracted attention from economists from all over the world since the 1950s. In this paper we first aim at yielding a comprehensive description of the pattern of regional inequality in Italy on the basis of a new dataset on the main regional variables for the period 1951-94. We use descriptive statistics and panel regression analysis, in order to allow direct comparisons with the impressive evidence available on a large number of national cases. Second, we offer our contribution to the debate about the sources of the persistence of a high degree of regional inequality in Italy. We concentrate on sectoral dynamics in order to assess how much of the initially high potential for convergence due to the dualistic structure of the poorer regions has been exploited, by which regions, under what regional policy regimes. Our analysis remarks that a limited convergence process has occurred over the years 1951-75; afterward the degree of inequality between Northern and Southern regions has increased again. Moreover, the regional distribution of per capita income presents a bimodal polarisation with a rich convergence club which includes most of northern regions, and a poor club made of a small group of non-adriatic southern regions. In the sectoral analysis we find that dual mechanisms play a role in aggregate convergence as long as the outflows of labour from the low productivity agriculture of the poorer regions are a source of expansion of these regions’ industrial sector. Once this migration from agriculture to industry ends in some of these regions, the impact of dualistic mechanisms on convergence weakens significantly. Industrialisation, or its failure, still appears to be the key to understand why some of the lagging regions converge and others do not
Bias and efficiency of single vs. double bound models for contingent valuation studies: a Monte Carlo analysis
Get PDFThe Dichotomous Choice Contingent Valuation Method (DC-CVM), both in the single and the double bound formulation, has been in the last years the most popular technique among practitioners of contingent valuation, due to its simplicity of use in data collection. The single bound procedure is easier to implement than the double bound, especially in data collection and estimation. On the other hand, it is well known that the double bound is more efficient than the single bound estimator. It remains to analyze the bias of the ML estimates produced by either model, and the gain in efficiency associated to the double bound model, in different experimental settings. We find that there are no relevant differences in point estimates given by the two models, even for small sample size, so that neither estimator can be said to be less biased than the other. The greater efficiency of the double bound is confirmed, although it can be seen that the differences tend to reduce by increasing the sample size, and are often negligible for medium size samples. Provided that a reliable pre-test is conducted, and the sample size is large, our results warrant the use of the single rather than the double bound model
Disembodied intersubjectivity. Social networks, space and experience
Get PDFThis paper is a preliminary account of my research on the connections between social networks and space. In the first place I will try to show how the introduction of space and time concepts can give some new ideas to network research enabling us, at the same time, to look at spatio-temporal modifications in a more concrete and operative way. On this purpose three important meanings of space, having different explanatory powers, are discussed: space as a constraint, space as a frame organising social relations, and space as a form of experience. Secondly I will suggest the concept of intersubjectivity as a possible interesting outcome of networks and space and time approach partnership. In particular I will briefly discuss how the link between networks and experience (in their relation with space) can be an interesting field of application of this challenging and controversial concept. Keywords: space; time; social networks; intersubjectivit
The empirics of regional economic growth in italy. 1951-1993
Get PDFIn this paper, on the basis of an original data base, we have gathered detailed information on the Italian regional growth over the post-war period using several statistical techniques. We have described the evolution of the disparities using, as a measure of regional economic growth, either per capita income and labour productivity, the latter variable also at the sectoral level. The evidence indicates that labour productivity convergence across the Italian regions was limited to the period 1960-75. This process has been mainly driven by a fall in the industrial dispersion and by a reduction in the share of agriculture. In the past 18 years the convergence process has completely stopped, indeed we have detected a slight increase in the dispersion, arising essentially from the industrial sector and from the southern non-Adriatic regions. Also per capita income inequality has decreased over the period 1960-75, but mainly among the north-centre regions and it has started to increase again from the mid-1970s. Now the degree of regional wealth inequality in Italy is still the highest within the EU. Per capita income tends to spread according to a two-peaks distribution with all the southern regions but one included in the low polarisation point
Spillover tecnologici nord-sud: una nota a Coe - Helpman - Hoffmaister
Get PDFIs the existence of a trade channel a sufficient cause for a successful technology transfer, or has this channel to be integrated by some specific feature of the receiving countries? Based on the work of Coe, Helpman and Hoffmaister (1997), where the effects induced by the stock of R&D in the industrialised countries on the total factor productivity of developing countries is estimated, we wonder if the potential of technology spillovers is strengthened by the specialisation in manufacturing. A preliminary empirical assessment, which uses exports in manufacturing as an indicator of specialisation, appears to confirm such a hypothesis
Technological enclaves and industrial districts. An analysis of the regional distribution of innovative activity in Europe
Get PDFThis paper explores the spatial distribution of innovative and productive activity across 109 regions of the European Union, thanks to an original databank on regional patents statistics. The main results worth highlighting are as follows. The technological activity in the EU appears to be highly concentrated, although concentration tends to decline over the eighties. This results from the huge differences between southern and northern Europe. As expected, there is a positive association between the regional distribution of innovative activity and labour productivity. Further, contrary to previous evidence on the United States, our data show a significant link between the specialisation in innovation and in production both at the country and at the industry level. This suggests that localised knowledge spillovers and agglomeration economies foster a local economic system towards a specialisation in both production and technology. More surprisingly there appears a negative correlation between technological concentration and aggregate productivity, that is the European regions which enjoy a more homogeneous distribution of their technological capability across different industrial sectors appear to be also characterised by a higher productivity level. This outcome may suggest the presence of positive inter-industry externalities that favour those regions which succeed in covering a broader range of technological activities
Un'analisi econometrica sul contenuto informativo della struttura a termine dei tassi di interesse tedeschi
Get PDFIn this paper the usefulness of spreads between long and short interest rates as indicators of future interest rates is analysed using monthly data derived from the estimation of the German term structure over the period 1983(11)-1994(12). The analysis is conducted using modern techniques of time series, as the cointegration analysis and the estimation of vector autoregressive (VAR) models. The results show that interest rate spreads contain considerable information about future short rate changes. This implies that interest rate spreads may be used as useful indicators for the future conduct of monetary policy
Human capital and growth in the European Regions. Does allocation matter?
Get PDFThe paper examines the relationship between the allocation of human capital among different activities and economic growth in the context of the European regions. A proxy of the allocation of the labor force to technical activities is constructed using data about occupations at the regional level and included in cross section growth regressions together with various educational variables (primary, secondary and higher education years and shares). The main results of the paper are the following: the educational variables become insignificant when country dummies are included in the regressions suggesting that, due to differences in the national education systems, they capture the effects of some omitted country specific variable; on the other hand a robust correlation emerges between the allocational variable and the regional rate of growth in the period 1981-91