Paolo Onofri

Transizione demografica e mercati finanziari

In this paper we study some possible consequences of demographic ageing on the Italian economy, in particular the level of per capita consumption compatible with a balanced growth path, the level of saving and the demand for financial assets. First, with a neo-classical growth model accounting we derive the changes in percapita consumption and in the saving rate compatible with the reduction in the stock of capital implied by the shrinking labour force. Then, using the 1989-1998 Surveys on Household Income and Wealth of the Bank of Italy we compare these values with the future paths, induced by the demographic transition, of the household saving rate and the propensity to invest in financial and risky assets.

Modeling international interdependence: A review essay

The development of the early national econometric models, about forty years ago, was an attempt to provide economic advisors to policy makers with a quantitatively consistent apparatus that would act as a substitute for their traditional back-of-an-envelope style computations. Nowadays, policy makers pay great attention to international interaction among economic policies, and this interest has stimulated, during recent years, the development of several models focused on the interaction of national economies. Some of these models are so keen on the problem of interaction that they neglect problems of estimation, merely taking the values of the parameters from national models developed by others. This emphasis is usually justified by reiterating the commonplace that economic integration is growing . . . and so on and so forth. Actually the overall share of foreign trade for each of the three big areas of the world (U.S., Japan, and Europe) is not very large and, more surprisingly, it is similar: the order of magnitude is 10 to 12 percent of the GDP of each area. Of course, it has been growing during recent decades, but what has actually exploded is the foreign trade within Europe and between countries in the rest of the world. Moreover, time-series analysis for the industrial productions of European countries and the U.S. [see Campbell and Mankiw (1987)] shows that they are not cointegrated, while French and German productions, for example, or Italian and German productions, are. The slower development of the trade interaction among areas means that the main channels of international interdependence are still the world markets for both commodities and financial assets. The issue of interacting policies is not a new one. Friedman and Schwartz (1963, p. 361) report that in early 1931 foreign commentators were particularly critical of the monetary policy of the U.S., and Governor Harrison himself is said to have noted that ‘the evils to the world of continued gold sterilization . . . are so great as to make desirable a careful scrutiny of the Federal Reserve open market policy’.

Pension expectations and reality. What do Italian workers know about their future public pension benefits

We use 6 waves of the Bank of Italy’s Survey on household income and wealth (SHIW) to check the evolution of workers’ expectations on future pension benefits and retirement age from 2000 to 2012. Based on these two subjective evaluations, we compute a measure of expected pension benefit and compare it with a “true” measure of the same variable that we estimate on the basis of the pension rules in each year of the considered time lapse. By comparing subjective and “true” measures of the variable, we are able to measure the evolution over time of the “expectation error” and its distribution among different economic and demographic subsets of the population. Finally, we estimate a subjective measure of social security wealth and the degree of substitution between this variable and the private net worth of workers’ households, in order to quantify the effects of pension reforms approved in the period considered on wealth accumulation.

On the Sources of Fluctuations of the Italian Economy: a Structural «VAR» Analysis

The observation of a high degree of time dependence in macro-economic time series is the starting point of much of the recent empirical macroeconomics. This dependence is translated into a strong persistence of the impulses imparted to time series. Indeed, it appears (2) that many time series can be adequately represented as non stationary stochastic processes. In other words the traditional view of a deterministic trend, resulting from long term phenomena, vis-a-vis cyclical fluctuations around it, would be a misleading simplification because, in reality, fluctuations would contain permanent components due to non-deterministic trends. Consequently the evolution of the economic system would be affected by impulses of different nature (possibly including either changes of regimes of economic policies or changes in the “rules of the game”) which would shift the growth path through cyclical propagation mechanisms. These effects would impart a high degree of time persistence and would determine an hysteresis behaviour of economic time series.

Pension expectations, reforms and macroeconomic downturn in Italy. What can microdata tell us?

ABSTRACT We use different years of the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) to explore how Italian workers’ expectations regarding their future level of pension benefits and retirement age changed from 2000 to 2014. Comparing expected and statutory values for future pension benefits and retirement ages, we find that knowledge of the pension system and its rules are not evenly distributed among workers. Some sections of the population, in particular, younger workers, women and the self-employed, are less precise in estimating their future pension benefits. As for retirement age, a large share of the working population still has not completely assimilated the implications of the linkage with the evolution of lifetime expectations at 65. Expectations in the final part of the period observed are dominated by increasing pessimism, which may be related to the macroeconomic crisis of the Italian economy and to the approval of a severe pension reform in 2011. Checking whether a household’s total wealth is consistent with lifetime consumption, we find that households where the head overestimates the future value of the pension benefit accumulate fewer resources than the remaining part of the population.

Pension reforms, tax incentives and saving in Italy

The Economics of an Ageing Population studies the effects of demographic transition on the economies of industrialised countries. The authors demonstrate that an ageing population does not necessarily lead to a reduction in growth, providing that the working population are more productive and save a greater percentage of their income. They look in detail at the examples of Italy and Japan, two countries which have the fastest ageing populations in Europe and the world respectively.

Italian Budget Policy: A Long Run Overview

The aim of this work is to present an overview on Italian Public Administration accounts from the 1960s to the present days. We will look at how public expenditure and receipts have evolved over the years, responding to favourable or unfavourable economic circumstances and to policy makers decisions. Analysis will start in detail from the beginning of the 1980s (Section 3), with an eye to previous decades, in order to understand what determined the present economic scenario (Section 2). Section 4 will look at the 1990s and the beginning of the new century, splitting them into four sub-periods. Section 5 will conclude.

Italie: la dimension européenne

L’annee 1992 a marque une rupture structurelle dans la vie politique italienne et le debut d’une transition progressive vers une « Seconde Republique ». Les points de depart en ont ete l’evolution de l’ancien Parti communiste vers un Parti social-democrate (desormais nomme PDS), la montee en puissance d’un courant federaliste dans le Nord du pays, represente par la Ligue du Nord, la crise morale des partis en place (DC et PSI), embourbes dans differents scandales judiciaires mis en evidence par l’operation « mains propres ». En 1992 a commence, sous le gouvernement Amato, une periode de fortes restrictions budgetaires et de transition politique, culminant avec le cabinet Prodi en 1996.