Productivity Growth in Italy: A Tale of a Slow-Motion Change (original) (raw)

The Labor Productivity Slowdown: The True Issue of the Italian Economy

American Journal of Industrial and Business Management, 2019

This paper deals with the issue of the weak growth in Italian labor productivity with particular reference to the period between 2000 and 2016. In analyzing the data relating to labor productivity, the influence of capital productivity and multifactor productivity were also considered. The analysis shows how the weak growth in labor productivity is due to some peculiar structural aspects of the Italian production system. At the end of the paper some comments are offered on possible policy interventions.

Reforms, Labour Market Functioning and Productivity Dynamics: A Sectoral Analysis for Italy

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Over the last two decades Italy registered notable improvements in the functioning of labour market. However, such improvements have been accompanied by a deterioration in terms of productivity and competitiveness. This paper provides some evidence in this respect evaluating to what extent labour market reforms might have influenced the poor productivity performance of the Italian economy over the period 1980-2008. We show that labour market deregulation had a negative effect on aggregate labour productivity through both the within and the reallocative components. Our results show that the increased flexibility in the use of temporary contract has led to a lower productivity (level and to a lesser extent growth rate) in all sectors, with a higher impact on those industries with a higher flexibility need. Conversely, the use of temporary contracts has a significant lower effect in industries with higher skill content. The negative effect of the reforms on the reallocative capacity is stronger in those industries with a higher flexibility need that are also the relatively lower productivity sectors in the period 1993-2008.

The productivity slowdown puzzle of European countries: a focus on Italy

With the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium in many European countries, and especially those of the Southern Europe, a structural change in the way the economy grows took place. In this essay we use the growth accounting methodology to measure the contribution of different factors to economic growth in some European countries and in the U.S. and to isolate the determinants of the European slowdown during the Great Recession. The focus on Italy suggests that the slowdown of the Italian economy is structural and affects both the non-ICT and ICT sectors.

Poor productivity: an Italian perspective

2018

Productivity growth has been slow in Western countries since the global financial crisis, but in Italy it has been stagnating for 25 years. Fadi Hassan and Gianmarco Ottaviano investigate inefficiency and misallocation in the Italian economy to draw broader lessons about what lies behind the 'productivity puzzle'.

Productivity and employment dynamics: new evidence from Italian regions

Economia Politica

When productivity growth accelerates job destruction and job creation occurs simultaneously. However the results for the whole economy depend on which effect eventually dominates. We investigate what occurs in Italy during the time span 1977-2003, when some waves of labor market reforms have been introduced towards more flexibility. We also investigate if there are any systematic regional differences in the employment/productivity dynamics and whether these dynamics experience any sort of spatial externalities. Findings suggest that overall in Italy job destruction effect prevails and that the labor market reforms have a negative impact on employment.

Multifactor Productivity and Labour Quality in Italy, 1981-2000

Temi Di Discussione, 2001

We investigate how the evidence for Italy from simple growth accounting exercises is modified by more accurate measurements of inputs. We describe the dynamics of total factor productivity in the last 20 years in Italy, and review theoretical and measurement issues that complicate the picture emerging from this simple exercise. We adjust the labour input for its composition and verify its impact on estimated multifactor productivity in the whole economy. We replicate the labour-quality adjustment for the industrial sector together with corrections for hours worked and capital utilisation. We find that a sizeable part of the observed growth of total factor productivity vanishes when these adjustments are applied. They are not sufficient, however, to overturn the evidence of a productivity slowdown in the Italian economy in the second half of the 1990s.

Italy’s Productivity Conundrum. A Study on Resource Misallocation in Italy

2016

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the patterns of misallocation in Italy since the early 1990s. In particular, we show that the extent of misallocation has substantially increased since 1995, and that this increase can account for a large fraction of the Italian productivity slowdown since then. We gather evidence on the evolution of firm level misallocation both within and between various categories of firms, in particular those based on geographic areas, industries, and firm size classes. We do so both for firms in manufacturing and for firms in non-manufacturing. Overall, looking at the distribution of firm productivity, we uncover a thickening of the left tail as the share of firms with low productivity has increased over the period. This implies not only a decrease in average firm productivity, but also an increase in its dispersion. We show that the increase in misallocation has come mainly from higher dispersion of productivities within different firm size classes an...

Supply and demand-side determinants of productivity growth in Italian regions

2016

The objective of this paper is to identify the long run determinants of productivity growth for the manufacturing sector of the Italian regions. Demand and supply-side factors are considered: on the demand side, we refer to the estimation of the Verdoorn effect, while, on the supply side, we explore the role of R&D expenditures and transport infrastructure endowments. Our estimation methodology consists of both pooled cross-section OLS and time series LIML estimators using data collected by CRENoS and Istat covering the period 1964-2009. We find evidence of a statistically significant Verdoorn effect. Labour costs, R&D and railway infrastructure have a positive impact on productivity growth. [JEL Classification: C23, O14, O32, O47]