Ricerc@Sapienza

The research, development and innovation programmes of the European Union play an important role for the development and competitiveness of the “old continent”. The aim of this paper is to briefly describe the policy that drives these programmes and give some insights on how they are assessed in order to measure the impact of public investment. In this work, we discuss the impacts on Gross Domestic Product and employment estimated by the European Commission for Framework Programme 7 with the results of a sample of 60 FP7 projects in three ICT domains.

Between 2012 and 2016, while the financial crisis was unfolding its effects in Italy and globally,
several divestments of Italian State-owned companies were carried out, leading observers to believe that a new
season of privatizations — similar to the one carried out in the 1990s — had finally been launched.
However, after the initial considerable divestments announcing the completion of privatization of large
public companies, the momentum faded away due to the strong Italian political instability combined with an

The aim of this paper is to report on the activity carried out by a research group organized at the
Faculty of Economics of Sapienza University of Rome1 to support stakeholders and policy-makers
facing the need to decide on complex issues. The activity of the group focuses on the provision of both
macro- and microeconomic forecasts of several variables of interest, ranging from GDP and employment
growth to inequality and poverty.