RISULTATI RICERCA

Over the last decade the Italian university system has been subject to a remarkable reform. The number of courses has increased over time; registrations of new students have been rising more than 13 per cent, despite the Italian unemployment rate of graduates remains above the European average. In this new context, characterized by a growing competitive pressure, this paper tries to understand which today are the main determinants in the demand for academic education in Italy. For this purpose, we use data collected from a national survey by ITD-CNR in the first half of 2008, by means of a web questionnaire (consisting of 44 questions) filled in by students attending their high school final year. These data have been used in order to estimate two binomial logit models, which reveal that inertial factors are the main determinants of the demand for academic education in Italy, both for those students aimed to certainly continue their career, and for those who are irresolute. Families’ social and cultural background seems relevant for resolute students, whereas it is not much significant for undecided students. Students’ individual skills modestly affect the demand for academic education from students aimed to continue their career, whereas individual skills seem to be very relevant for more perplexed ones. Finally, the economic constraints show an absolute lack of statistic relevance.

The design and regulation of highway tariffs may be quite different depending upon the objectives pursued by the State. If the aim is to protect consumers, tariffs should be tied to the concessionaire’s profit and revised frequently. Instead, fixing the tariff in advance for the entire period of the concession is a better solution if the State’s purpose is to maximize the sum obtained from assigning the concession. Features and merits of the two regulatory systems are discussed, including the problems raised by new investments and unexpected events. The price cap appears to be an intermediate solution which fails however to promote productivity and cost reductions, while making regulation more difficult. In the light of the above, the paper describes the evolution of tariff regulation in Italy, from the origin to present time.

This paper provides a specific application of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) theory in order to explain the correlation between income and household waste generation. The model highlights an inverted U-shaped path of income-refuse relationship that verifies the existence of EKC depending on the effort of household recycling and consumption. The existence of delinking can derive by income and other socio economic variables that affect the shape of the curve. This model would be a particular application of the theory of delinking with the intent to be empirically implemented.

The compliance with the «principle of fiscal equivalence», i.e. the coincidence between the areas of the economic and the political jurisdiction, is a basic requirement for the efficient provision of public services by a local government. The mobility of people is an important factor preventing this requirement from being met and generating a serious case of externality: as a result of mobility, indeed, many people come to consume the services provided by a given local government (e.g. the central municipality of a metropolitan area), although they belong to other political jurisdictions, in which they are voters and taxpayers. From the distributional viewpoint this implies an additional burden on the budget of the municipality in question, and ultimately on the finances of its resident citizens. The idea of devising some way to prevent such burden from arising seems to deserve a great deal of attention. This paper tries firstly to provide an outline of the inefficiencies generated by the mobility of people in the framework of a decentralized state, and in the second place some suggestions about the use of the Italian local revenue schemes (taxes, public prices and grants) - both existing and envisaged in the current project of reform - to meet the demand for equalization arising from the distributional outcome of such inefficiencies.

The potential implications of using the family as opposed to the individual as the unit of taxation are not clear. This applies both to work incentives and distributional outcomes. In this paper we evaluate the effects of a hypothetical reform of Italian income taxation both on labour supply incentives and on redistribution of income between families with different composition and income levels. In particular, we analyze the potential effects of a shift from the current system of individual taxation to a system of family taxation similar to the French family-splitting approach by implementing a tax-benefit model. Based on data from the Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth, our simulations show a reduction in the degree of progressivity and a disincentive for the labour supply of additional earners within the family.

Interest in the «district» form arose, in Italy, in the context of the debate on the role of small businesses in the Italian and international economy, and intensified during the decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, when the increasing efficiency of new types of industrialization began to make itself felt. Attention focused on the industrial district as an organizational model of systems characterized by numerous local small and medium-sized businesses capable of offsetting the disadvantage of the smaller production scale by developing a system of external economies. Such businesses were thus able to manage complex processes of decomposition/integration of the production cycle through units specialized in individual stages of production within a social context that could absorb the impact of pronounced division of labour. The potential of the district prompted observers not only to endeavour to identify industrial districts within the Italian economic system, but also to analyse their functioning in order to determine their characteristics in terms of efficiency and competitiveness on local, domestic and international markets. This paper, set within the above-described perspective, aims to analyse the Tuscan district system as an example of a flexible and lean specialisation, with particular reference to the Province of Lucca, taking into account the background of change, evolution and downturns that influenced the Italian economy from the first oil crisis (1973) up to the Treaty of Maastricht (1992). Additionally, emphasis is placed on a comparison with the interpretive model proposed by Giacomo Becattini, whose assessment is shown to succeed in encompassing the ongoing economic transformations and is particularly effective in depicting the specificity of the Tuscan case, destined to survive the pressures of international competition. In the present author’s view the district, far from constituting a recipe valid exclusively on a local scale and during expansionary phases, represents an effective answer to a scenario increasingly - and more and more intensely - affected by economic transformations that can have a major impact.

The essay focuses on local development and governance. It examines the questions posed by the evolution of industrial districts and the new policy for local development, the so-called Instruments for Local Development. The analysis highlights a complex and contradictory relationship between the theory of local development, and in particular the notion of Marshallian Industrial District, and the new policy for local and regional development. Calling the new conceptual framework and legislation «negotiated development planning» engenders a fundamental ambiguity. It suggests a sort of continuity with the previous national policy of economic planning, but is instead defining a fundamentally different approach to government intervention in the economy.