Fotogrammi

2022-12-13 Donato Masciandaro

Short-sighted Monetary Policy: A Winning Horse or a Scapegoat?

The Fed and the ECB are by now like the Pythia of the Oracle of Delphi: they speak little, and poorly. They must always be interpreted, with all of the related unknowns. It’s an opportunistic strategy, that increases the risk of stagflation. To understand why, let’s set some ground rules. We’ll start from the fact that both central banks want to fight inflation, and bring interest rates onto a path in which the remuneration of assets, both real and financial, and thus interest rates, is compatible with price growth of 2%, by 2024. To be clearer, the starting assumption means basing monetary ...

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2022-11-16 Roberto Ruozi

Financing the Ecological Transition

The ecological transition has been a subject of debate for many decades now, with much said and written. In reality, in recent years it has reached crucial importance for the economic and social development of our planet. It is in fact a very complex subject, that is difficult to define, especially in practical terms, and changes continuously while regarding various areas, including the decarbonization of the economy, the circular economy, the reduction of the use of plastic, urban regeneration, sustainable tourism, and adaptation and mitigation of risks due to climate change. The solution to ...

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2022-11-08 Donato Masciandaro, Gianmarco Ottaviano

Has Financial Fair Play Changed the European Soccer Industry?

Last summer, the president of the FIGC, Gabriele Gravina, spoke to Sky Sport to present the twelfth edition of the Soccer Report, developed by the FIGC Study Center, in collaboration with AREL and PwC Italia. The report had good and bad parts, we could say, even though there was a lot more bad than good. “The data in our Soccer Report is ruthless as always […] in 12 years we have accumulated aggregate losses of 4.1 billion euros; we have lost one million euros a day […] 79% of our clubs have closed their accounts with losses. In the last 12 years our world has practically doubled its debts, ...

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2022-10-25 Fabrizio Perretti

Work Less and Earn More: a Utopia?

The world of work always occupies a central position in the economic and political debate, and that pre-eminence was also evident in the recent election campaign. As stated in Art. 1 of the Constitution, our republic is founded on labor, so it should be no surprise that this question is central in the national debate. This occurred in particular after the pandemic, in which the world of work was going through evident transformations and changes – not only in Italy: the development of remote work, the wave of layoffs that has affected different professions, and the lack of labor in some sectors. ...

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2022-10-03 Donato Masciandaro

Monetary Normalization: The Lesson of Whatever It Takes

On July 26, 2012, Mario Draghi pronounced the words that would enter the Treccani Dictionary as an expression that “opened another, unprecedented horizon in European politics.” To shed light on the significance of “whatever it takes,” we can tell the story of the evolution of the monetary announcement as an opera in three acts. Act I: We are at the end of the 1970s, when the dominant problem for the policies of advanced countries is to defeat the Great Inflation. Economic analysis offered a recipe to obtain an effective monetary policy, that was based on two ingredients, mixed together: ...

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2022-09-21 Cecilia Attanasio Ghezzi

Beijing Returns to Coal

Last August, we saw the skyline of megalopolises like Shanghai and Chongqing go dark. Factors that assemble machines and electronic devices then distributed in the rest of the world stopped due to a lack of electricity. Long lines formed in front of recharging stations for electric vehicles, while river flow was reduced to the point of preventing navigation by boats of a certain size. Energy rationing affected above all the southwestern regions of the immense territory of China, where up until now, such measures had never been seen; in the region of Sichuan, in particular. This area gets 80 percent ...

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2022-09-07 Gianmarco Ottaviano

Gorbachev’s Ambivalent Legacy in Russia

In the Bible (Daniele, 2:31-35) King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of a colossal statue with a head made of gold, the chest and arms of silver, the stomach and hips of bronze, the legs of iron and the feet made partly of iron and partly of clay. A stone broke off the mountain and hit the statue’s feet, smashing them and making it collapse. According to the prophet the story is a metaphor for the succession of earthly kingdoms, destined sooner or later to collapse due to the weakness of the values on which they are founded. The Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991. At the start of that year it ...

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2022-09-05 Roberto Ruozi

A (Positive) Glance at the Future of Italian Banks

The economic situation in our country is fairly confused, making it difficult to develop forecasts for the future, even in the short term. Apart from the question of energy, that will have a considerable impact on our economy – and it is not known how it can be solved, with all of the potential consequences – numerous other indicators seem to suggest that we are beginning to return to a model of development that had disappeared for years, but has not been substituted by valid alternatives. The new and most important indicators that will characterize that model are inflation, “normal” levels ...

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2022-07-25 Cecilia Attanasio Ghezzi

Has Beijing’s Economic Dream Reached the End of the Line?

“Without [bank] deposits, there are no human rights,” “The ‘Chinese dream’ of 400,000 depositors was shattered in Henan.” The banners shown by the demonstrators in Zhengzhou, the capital of the region of the same name in Central China, went viral in just a few hours. It was July 10, 2022, and hundreds of men and women who demanded access to their savings were beaten up by not-better-identified plainclothes agents. They have been asking for compensation from the local government since mid-April. But in June, when they attempted to organize the first public demonstration, their digital ...

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2022-07-13 Elisa Borghi, Donato Masciandaro

Urban Governance, Economic Growth, and Civic Capital: History Counts, in the South As Well

What is the most common interpretation the media have given of the recent local elections? The answer: a major test of the strength of the center-left and center-right coalitions in view of the upcoming national political elections. No surprise here, provided that this perspective never makes us forget how important urban governance can be to influence the economic and civic growth of citizens; even after centuries. This is one of the most intriguing results of a recent current of academic research that takes the name of “persistence.” The idea is ultimately simple: the economic and social ...

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