Search

This research aims to contribute to the literature on migrants’ entrepreneurship by investigating the determinants of self-employment for migrants in Italy. The analysis is carried out using a data set by the National Observatory for the Financial Inclusion of Migrants in Italy, developed and managed by the Centre of International Political Studies (CeSPI).Controlling for the macroeconomic context and for the migration plan, we find out that the main determinants of migrant entrepreneurship in Italy are related to migrants’ nationality, length of stay, ownership of a current account, gender, proximity of partner, and education. Moreover, our data show that, despite the aftermath of the crisis, the decision of starting a business is for men a matter of opportunity and not of necessity, and that being married increases the negative effect of being a woman on the probability of being an entrepreneur. Furthermore, data shows that the causal relation between risk taking and being an entrepreneur holds true for migrant entrepreneurs in Italy and that the difficulties faced in having qualifications and competences recognised push migrants into self-entrepreneurship., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Recent reforms of the Italian university system introduced a centralized national qualification competition (called ASN), necessary for accessing all academic positions in the country. Following a well-known international trend, the new mechanism is founded on rigid standardized indexes of “scientific productivity” based on bibliometric indicators. In economics, women’s lower success rate (35%) compared to men’s (44%) is often connected to lower productivity. We provide evidence matching all candidates’ CVs with their record of publications on EconLit, showing that women’s typical career profiles, e.g. in terms of type of publications, topics and methods of inquiry, were penalized regardless of scientific productivity. Our work aims not only at documenting, through a large scale natural experiment, the causes of the underrepresentation of women in academia (especially in top positions) and within economics, but also at raising the issue of new incentives and constrains that increasingly push women to uniform their careers and their research interests to those of their men colleagues., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In the face of rapid population ageing, most OECD countries have undergone or are considering substantial reforms of their pension systems. This paper investigates the outcomes of a process of gender-blind pension reform, that is designing a pension system assuming an idealised (a-gendered) worker/consumer. The paper specifically deals with the case of Italy, in light of the extraordinary high number of pension reforms that took place there, and of their far-reaching and highly representative nature. We find that recent reforms in Italy have not been gender-neutral. Rather, starting from a situation providing strong incentives towards women’s commitment to unpaid work, reforms in 1990s tried to establish equal treatment of women and men, removing households’ financial gains from having only women doing all the unpaid work. Unfortunately, the short-run implications of this policy may be seriously worrying, as women may have not enough time to accumulate a decent pension annuity. A temporary counter-balancing policy may be needed if we are to avoid women’s poverty and dependence in old age. However, the most recent reform reversed the virtuous trend by establishing new positive discriminations in the eligibility criteria, thus preventing household’s expectations from departing from the old division of social roles., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The aim of this work is to combine the analysis of social classes in Europe on the basis of the functional distribution of incomes with a gender perspective at household level. Building on a Classical political economy approach, we aim to explore the link between households’ sources of income (rents, profits, wages and State transfers) and income changes during the crisis. Furthermore, we emphasize the role of gender with concern to the amount of income received. The empirical investigation is carried out on the European Union Statistics onIncome and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) database, covering 620,017 households in 27 EU countries for three years (2007, 2010, 2012). Over the period 2007-2012, at household level, incomes have been differently affected by the crisis. Labour incomes have been hit hardest than capital incomes, mostly in GIPSI countries. Men-headed households have benefited from capital growth more thanwomen-headed households, characterized by lower amounts of wages, capitals and State transfers., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The aim of this paper is to offer a contribution to the analysis of the under-representation of women economists in academic positions in Italy, focusing on publications. In Italy women’s proportion of PhDs in Economics and Statistics has increased from 39 to 52 per cent in the last decade. Despite this progressive feminization of doctoral degrees in economics, the share of women working as academic staff in departments of Economics at Italian universities is still low: women constitute 28.1% of academic economists in Italy; in particular, women account for 16% of full professors and 27% of associate professors (data for 2010). The much-debated reform of the Italian university system (so called ‘Gelmini’ reform) is stressing the importance of ‘merit evaluation’ for academics and consequently it is supporting the use of bibliometric indicators for the purposes of selection. In this context, we aim to assess whether the systematic differences between Italian men and women in terms of academic career in economics, can be explained by their productivity in the last ten years. In order to do so, we first study, from a gender perspective, how the profile of economists who have become full professors in the last decade has changed in terms of individual characteristics and scientific productivity. Then, we study gender differences in the scientific output of academic economists since 2001, in order to find out about differences between men and women and completethe picture of the gender gap in career for economists in the Italian University., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

While we do not mean to imply that there are insurmountable or even clear distinctions between the social sciences, we claim that economists can still provide an original analysis of class, which should be regarded as complementary to those developed by sociologists. Following the tradition of British Classical economists, by a ‘economic approach’ we mean here the study of the production and distribution of income, that is of the conditions of societal survival and reproduction over time. From this perspective, a good deal of feminist literature has already shown the relevance of gender relations both at home and in the market.Thus, the aim of this work is to reopen the debate among economists (beyond the specific schools that already do) on the expediency of some form of joint class and gender analysis. We restrict the attention to the objective relations of production and distribution of income that is we abstract from individuals’ own understanding and representation of classes, or their identification within the class structure. Employing the EU-SILC database, we develop an example and tentative empirical application of our approach to the recent trends in the European Union. Amongour preliminary conclusions are the observations that the “99% vs. 1%” debate seriously risks misleading a well-founded class analysis, that within the household redistribution may matter more than usually expected, and that the on-going economic crisis is producing a loss of income mainly concentrated in the working class, though with some reduction of within-class inequality., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Recent economic literature on poverty may be broadly divided into two strands. One strand investigates the multidimensional nature of poverty. The other strand, employing the large availability of household surveys, investigates the micro and macro determinants of monetary poverty, analyzing the role played by individual and household characteristics and macro socio-economic factors. In this framework, a gender approach has often been limited to the analysis of the coefficient “woman” in standard regression analyses of the determinants of poverty. By contrast, feminist research has consistently stressed the importance of a more holistic conceptual and empirical approach to encapsulate gender deprivation. This paper aims at building a bridge between the two mentioned streams, by analyzing the gendered nature of multidimensional of poverty. Although gender mainstreaming is specified in the European Union policy framework as a key element of active inclusion policies, this approach to policy design and monitoring is still underdeveloped., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The aim of this paper is to sum up the main issues at stake in the European Union, concerning gender equality in social inclusion and social protection policies. As is well known “Equality between women and men” is one of the founding principles of the Treaty of the European Union. However, despite progress made over past decades, gender inequalities are still persistent in a number of spheres. Poverty is increasingly feminised and especially affects single mothers and elderly women. Gender inequalities, however, are also persistent among other groups facing social exclusion, for example immigrants, ethnic minorities and the disabled. This means that there are differences in the causes, extent, and form of social exclusion experienced by women and men. The paper, introduced by an overview of primary gender gaps, focuses on specific issues in the three policy areas where the promotion of gender equality would be particularly important: social inclusion, pensions, health and long-term care. Special attention is devoted to empowerment policies, integrating several welfare domains and distinctive approaches., info:eu-repo/semantics/published