Giovanni Solinas

Which European Model for Elderly Care? Equity and Cost-Effectiveness in Home Based Care in Three European Countries

Long term care for the elderly is growing apace in developed economies. As growth is forcing change in existing production and delivery systems of elderly care services, the question arises as to how different systems compare in terms of cost-effectiveness, equity or quality. Based on an in depth survey carried out in Denmark, Ireland and Italy – the GALCA survey – this articles compares prevailing arrangements of home based long-term care in these three countries, focussing on the overall cost-effectiveness of the provisions as well as on employment equity for the care workers. Comparison between alternative types of provisions within each country suggests that home based care is generally, although not consistently, more cost-effective than care within institutions. Comparison of home care provisions across the three countries suggests that the Italian and the Danish systems are the most cost effective, but the Danish system is more equitable, overall. These latter findings are partly explained by progressive replacement in Italy of unpaid family carers with low cost immigrant workers directly employed by the families and often cohabiting with the elderly, the migrant-in-the-family model of long term care. This new model has spread across Southern Europe and raises complex issues of equity and sustainability from an employment perspective.

Integrazione dei mercati e riaggiustamento nei distretti industriali

The article deals with the behaviour of the industrial districts in the changed situation of competition on the international markets, starting from an analysis of the varieties of behaviour of the districts through the 1990s. The districts differ according to their productive specialization, their level of vertical integration and size of the firms, their markets of reference and sales organization, their degree of openness and internationalization, and their capacity to produce new products. Their behaviour also differs in their response to integration processes in the world markets. This topic is investigated in the central part of the article, where its implications in the debate on Italy’s industrial decline are assessed. The conclusion offers some proposals for industrial policies at national and regional level.

A Fuzzy Way to Measure Quality of Work in a Multidimensional Perspective

This paper focuses on the definition and measurement of quality of work (QL) by using a multidimensional approach, based on fuzzy logic. The multidimensional nature of quality of work has been widely acknowledged in economic and sociological literature and attempts at measuring its different dimensions can be found at European level in the work carried out by the European Foundation for the Improvement of living and working conditions. The European Commission and the International Labour Office have also identified different dimensions for quality of work and proposed new indicators to measure them. In this paper an attempt is made to maintain the complexity of the quality of work concept by using a technique that allows measurement without introducing too strong assumptions and makes the rules for judging the different dimensions of QL and their interactions explicit.

Non-Standard Employment and Quality of Work: Towards New Forms of Measurement

In the wake of an intense season of research in the 1960 and 1970s, of which perhaps the key European point of reference was the Tavistock Institute of London, in the following two decades, the studies by historians, sociologists and economists into the conditions and the quality of work underwent a substantial setback.

Quality of work and elderly care - Preliminary experiments

This paper focuses on the definition and measurement of quality of work (QoW) using a multidimensional approach, based on fuzzy logic. The multidimensional nature of quality of work has been widely acknowledged in economic and sociological literature and attempts at measuring its different dimensions can be found at European level in the work carried out by the European Foundation for the Improvement of living and working conditions. The European Commission and the International Labour Office have also identified different dimensions for quality of work and proposed new indicators to measure them. In this paper an attempt is made to maintain the complexity of the quality of work concept by using a technique that allows measurement without introducing too strong assumptions and makes the rules for judging the different dimensions of QoW and their interactions explicit.

Distretti industriali, imprese multinazionali e catene del valore

The paper reconsiders the key issue of the industrial district and the multinational enterprise as two alternative or complementary drivers of local development in the light of new empirical evidence. That evidence derives from the results of two surveys of the determinants of linkages between local firms and foreign affiliates. The surveys were conducted in the Italian province of Modena in the past few years; Modena is well-known internationally for its leading industrial districts, which specialise in both traditional and high-tech manufacturing industries. The evidence shows that local firms and foreign affiliates are actively engaged in a dense local production network where foreign affiliates can play a crucial role in enhancing the position of local firms in global value chains.

In Favour of Machines (But Not Forgetting the Workers): Some Considerations on the Fourth Industrial Revolution

This chapter aims to guide the reader in the analysis of some of the main themes proposed by the debate related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). First, we discuss the impact of the 4IR on employment by reviewing the results of the relevant economic literature, drawing some suggestions for future research. Second, we review some of the policies developed by governments to support the digital revolution. We argue that while Industry 4.0-type policies are common to all advanced countries, policies in favour of digital technologies in the service sector are more fragmented, difficult to implement, and face a stronger resistance from workers. We finish the paper with a discussion of the main policy issues related to the workers and the labour market, with a focus on robot tax, shared robot ownership, and universal basic income. We conclude by emphasizing that while policies in favour of machines are widespread and supported by wide social consensus, effective polices in favour of workers are much weaker and still unable to mitigate the negative effects of the digital revolution.