Ricerc@Sapienza

Since the entry into force of the Stability and Growth Pact, European countries with “weak fiscal policy fundamentals” have been forced to introduce fiscal measures for controlling public spending to achieve and maintain the objectives required by the Maastricht Treaty. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 caused a strong reduction in GDP and investments, and an increase in social disparities. Consequently, the gap between European Southern countries (as well as Central Eastern countries) and the rest of the European Union became wider in several ways.

This paper establishes the conditions under which indeterminacy can occur in a Neoclassical growth model with international labor mobility. In the model, workers are supposed to move freely across countries without restrictions, and according to a Harris–Todaro mechanism that makes migration flows sensitive to differences among labor markets conditions. The paper shows that indeterminacy requires the marginal returns to immigrant labor to be diminishing, and no need for productivity externalities at a social level.

Information and communication technologies play a crucial role in the evolution of societies, transformation of industries and economic development. Growing demand for new products and services that require an increasing transmission bandwidth reinforce the view of Internet connection and next-generation networks as general-purpose technologies. Building upon a growth model with endogenous spillovers, the present chapter explores the impact on economic growth exerted by the diffusion of broadband connections in two different samples drawn from the OECD countries.

This paper proposes the adoption of an opportunity egalitarian perspective to assess and compare growth processes and their distributional implications. To this aim, a set of graphical tools are introduced that allow one to evaluate the role of growth and recessions in the evolution of individuals’ opportunities over time. These tools satisfy the ex post principle of equality of opportunity and represent an extension of the “opportunity growth incidence curve,” a framework proposed by the literature to evaluate growth according to the ex ante principle of equality of opportunity.

· The three decades following wwii saw sustained growth in the industrial world, favoured by a stable international economic environment. The two engines of investment and exports represented a powerful combination fuelling post-war growth. This mechanism broke down in the early 1970s, leaving only exports as the main driver. This paper explores the factors that interrupted the golden age of postwar capitalist development in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In this paper, we offer a comprehensive and updated review of the impact of fiscal decentralization on the economy, society and politics. Our first target is the examination of two crucial and yet unsolved issues in the empirical literature on decentralization: the proper measurement of decentralization itself and its potential endogeneity in econometric estimates. Then, we discuss the