Stefania Gabriele

Functional income distribution can be an important driver of inequality. When the market remuneration of labour and capital is very uneven across individuals, as they have been in recent decades, the personal distribution of income tends to polarise, jeopardising social cohesion. This explains a renewed interest in functional distribution. Nevertheless, the role of self-employed income has been often misunderstood in estimating factor income shares. National accounts provide estimates of the compensation of employees and the operating surplus, but do not refer to self-employed workers as a specific productive factor, implicitly including their income in the ‘mixed income’ aggregate and in some other minor items. Most analysts estimate the income of self-employed workers by attributing to them the average unit compensation of the employees, although in fact this is not necessarily consistent with the GDP estimates. Other estimates take a fixed share of the ‘mixed income’, usually the same for every country. When national accounts are very detailed, as in the case of Italy, under some assumptions it is possible to accurately estimate self-employment income from sectors’ non-financial accounts. In this paper we analyse four estimation approaches for self-employed incomes, since only the total amount of ‘mixed income’ received by households is available for most countries. We analyse the data of the OECD countries focusing mainly on eight large economies: the US, Japan, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. The results are somehow unexpected. First of all, evaluating the income of the self-employed properly, the overall labour share is declining much faster than reported by the official data in some countries, and more countries showed a decrease in the 2000s. Indeed, the real unit compensation of the self-employed declined significantly in most of the eight countries (and in some of the others) after the mid or the end of the nineties, since self-employment has been used extensively to reduce the overall labour cost. Unit labour cost (ULC) also increased much slower (or even declined more) after 2000 in most countries, shedding new light on the pattern of international competitiveness and the drivers of inflation. The share of operative surplus of non-financial and financial corporations, properly recalculated, has exhibited different dynamics, whereas the component related to imputed rentals of owner occupied houses played an unexpectedly important role. Finally, the mark-up on variable production costs has been higher than expected and its evolution has been faster in most countries than what reported before, showing a lower sensitivity to the business cycle.

... REDISTRIBUZIONE FISCALE IN EUROPA STEFANIA GABRIELE, VERONICA POLIN pubblicazione internet realizzata con contributo della società italiana di economia pubblica ... Page 2. 1 Redistribuzione fiscale in Europa Stefania Gabriele * Veronica Polin ** 1. Introduzione ...

Functional income distribution can be an important driver of inequality. When the market remuneration of labour and capital is very uneven across individuals, as they have been in recent decades, the personal distribution of income tends to polarise, jeopardising social cohesion. This explains a renewed interest in functional distribution. Nevertheless, the role of self-employed income has been often misunderstood in estimating factor income shares. National accounts provide estimates of the compensation of employees and the operating surplus, but do not refer to self-employed workers as a specific productive factor, implicitly including their income in the ‘mixed income’ aggregate and in some other minor items. Most analysts estimate the income of self-employed workers by attributing to them the average unit compensation of the employees, although in fact this is not necessarily consistent with the GDP estimates. Other estimates take a fixed share of the ‘mixed income’, usually the...

In this essay we briefly retrace the route taken in Europe to react to the crisis, and some weak points of the adopted approach are examined, namely the fiscal multiplier estimates, the paradoxes of debt algebra, asymmetry in the evaluation of macroeconomic imbalances of Member States and the ambiguous concepts of potential output and structural deficit. We also consider the structural policies, aimed at encouraging recovery in spite of austerity, to show that the effects of the recommended reforms are actually uncertain.

Functional distribution is an important driver of inequality. When market remuneration of labour and capital are very uneven, as they have been in recent decades, personal distribution tends to polarise, jeopardising social cohesion. This fact explains a renewed interest in functional distribution. Nevertheless, in the estimates on functional distribution the role of self-employed income has been undervalued. National accounts provide estimates of the compensation of employees and the operating surplus, but do not refer to self-employed workers as a specific productive factor and implicitly include their income in the ‘mixed income’ and in some minor items. Most analysts estimate self-employed income by attributing the same average unit compensation of the corresponding employees to each worker, that in fact is not necessarily consistent with the GDP estimates.Other estimates take a fixed share of the ‘mixed income’, usually the same for every country. When national accounts are ver...

Since 2008 the global economy, following also the financial crisis, is facing a severe decline in economic activity and the economic estimates concerning the first quarter 2009 are even worse. The Italian Consumers Confidence Indicators (CCI), however, after a sharp fall beginning in 2007, is unexpectedly showing some signals of recovery since the end of summer 2008. It seems that

ABSTRACT Launched in January 2009, ANCIEN is a research project that runs for a 44-month period and involves 20 partners from EU member states. The project principally concerns the future of long-term care (LTC) for the elderly in Europe and addresses two questions in particular: 1) How will need, demand, supply and use of LTC develop? 2) How do different systems of LTC perform? This case study on Italy is part of the first stage in the project aimed at collecting the basic data and necessary information to portray long-term care in each country of the EU. It will be followed by analysis and projections of future scenarios on long-term care needs, use, quality assurance and system performance. State-of-the-art demographic, epidemiologic and econometric modelling will be used to interpret and project needs, supply and use of long-term care over future time periods for different LTC systems.

Many scholars recently highlighted the increase of individuals and families vulnerability in OECD countries. In Italy a clear sign of increase emerges observing the long-lasting worsening trends of subjective poverty and consumer confidence on personal condition indexes. Several factors can affect such trends. We analyse the role played by some of these factors since 1990 according to two perspectives: i)

This paper aims at providing an economic analysis of the intergenerational social mobility in Italy. The data come from ISTAT. We present absolute mobility and social fluidity tables. We also examine the cohort effect, finding for Italy an increase in intergenerational absolute ...

... Page 2. 1 Welfare innovations and federalism: the failure of reforming Long Term Care in Italy Stefania Gabriele 1 , Fabrizio Tediosi 2,3 ... levels of care – or at least of some transitory minimum standard objectives – seems to become unrealistic (Marano A, 2011). ...

The article aims at analysing the reasons why Italy failed to reform Long Term Care (LTC) policies, focusing on an aspect which has been overlooked: the interplay between LTC policies and the intergovernmental multilevel relationships. In the Italian LTC system, the main central intervention has been the regularisation of migrant care work, while the automatic growth of the cash benefits has accompanied the care needs evolution. Therefore the only institutional change has been a "gradual transformation". The causes of the failure to reform LTC have been mainly related to a strong fragmentation of the policy field, the existence of a universalistic cash benefit, the fiscal constraint. We argue that a further obstacle to reform LTC policies has been the weak and uncertain legislative framework of federalism. The uncertainty on the allocation and distribution of resources and the delay to apply the equalisation mechanism based on needs engendered a lame federalism that contributed to hindering welfare innovations and to increasing the institutional fragmentation. The analysis is partly consistent with previous literature, although it places less emphasis on the role of the constituencies and the scarcity of resources in influencing decisions, focusing more on the implications of the failure to fully realise the federalist reform. This focus shows that to implement institutional change in the welfare system, it is important to take into account the features of the federal governance, the intergovernmental relations, and to address the challenges that are connected to them.

... M. RAITANO AND S. GABRIELE, C. CISLAGHI, F. COSTANTINI, ... No. 18 Demographic Factors and Health Expenditure Profiles by Age: The Case of Italy, S. Gabriele, C. Cislaghi, F.Costantini, F. Innocenti, V. Lepore, F. Tediosi, M. Valerio and C. Zocchetti, May 2006 No. ...