Trends in the labour market: Issues still open for the analysis
From Firenze University Press Journal: Statistica Applicata — The Italian Journal of Applied Statistics
Caterina Marini, Department of Economics and Finance, University of Bari Aldo Moro
Vittorio Nicolardi, Department of Economics and Finance, University of Bari Aldo Moro
The third millennium, the same that was welcomed with fabulous celebrations allover the world, began unexpectedly with important disruptions to the global equi-librium in all aspects of the human life, and the world economy is still strugglingto resist default and social fail, or recover from hard economic and social chal-lenges. In fact, the innumerable economic structural breaks that occurred sincethe beginning of the 21th century have marked a turning point in the developmentof most economies around the world, both advanced and emerging/developing: inorder, the US early recession and the Twin Towers attack in 2001 provoked globaluncertainty; the great and long US recession in 2007 caused a global financial cri-sis because of the subprime mortgage crisis; the EU economic and financial crisisin 2008/2009 as a consequence of the American downturn; the EU sovereign debtcrisis that started in 2009 and marked deeply the economy of some periphericEU countries causing the Greek default and severe control policies of debt in allcountries; the pandemic of SARS-Cov2 in 2020 tested again the global economystability and, finally, the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022 provoked a deep increaseof inflation all over the world.Among all the serious consequences that the above picture yielded, the labourmarket of most countries suffered the economic depression and Italy was not be-neath the others. In particular, for the period 2008–2013 the statistical data on theItalian labour market sketch an alarming depiction of the situation: the sharp dropin jobs; the increase of unemployment up to around 1.5million workforce, almosthalf in 2012; a rise of youth unemployment (+14.5%) that contributed 80% to thetotal unemployment rate over the period (+12.1%).Therefore, in Italy the long recession of the economy and the complex situ-ation of the labour market forced the Italian governments to address the problemto strengthen the manufacturing sector on one hand, and restrain the haemorrhageof jobs on the other. It is starting from 1997 that the Italian government graduallyreformed the antiquated regulatory framework of the Italian labour market, stillinappropriate to face the new economic challenges at that time. The cornerstoneof the problem was focused on the labour market and its functioning: job creation,living standards and social cohesion depend on its ability to well operate. There-fore, the labour reforms that were implemented since the beginning of the newmillennium turned the Italian labour regulation upside-down and the flexibilitywas the real challenge. It is important to consider that the economic context whenall the mutations happened is characterised by continuous changes into the globalproductive process, more vulnerable, competitive and variable than in past, and he Italian enterprises and companies needed to face the new globalised frame-work to save or gain important market shares. And in this context, a new regula-tion of the Italian labour market was extremely important to guarantee higher jobflexibility on one hand, and a well-defined juridical protection of workers’ rightson the other. Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that, towards the end ofthe 20th century, the job flexibility was not only a milestone for Italy but also animportant issue of the European agenda because rigidities of the labour marketswere an obstacle to the development of many European countries and debates overprobable solutions were in progress since the 1980s. However, it is not intentionof this work to report and analyse the juridical intentions of the Italian legislatorin his decisions of jurisprudence to revise the system of rules for the labour mar-ket. The framework of rules and norms that were approved in 18 years to updatethe Italian labour market is undoubtedly central to explain trends and magnitudes,but the economic statistical effects on the labour forces of the governmental in-terventions are under analysis, instead. In literature, the Italian labour marketis extensively analysed not only to depict the status of the Italian workforce butalso to evaluate the effects that the juridical and financial interventions have on itsdynamics.Some authors examine the effects that flexibility produces on the employmentrate and firm productivity. Battisti and Vallanti (2013), in their analysis on the con-sequences that the decentralised wage schemes and the temporary job contractshave on worker/firm performance, demonstrated that the large flexibility in theworking environment, namely the presence of many temporary contracts, impliesa reduction in workers’ motivation and effort, and lower probabilities of dismissalfor workers with permanent contracts. Boeri and Garibaldi (2007) similarly ar-gued that productivity experiences lower growth rates when firms hire temporaryworkers. Many researchers analyse the consequences of flexibility from the so-cial point of view and its impact on the household economy. Tomelleri (2021)analysed the relationship between the temporary employment and the individualearnings to estimate the impact of the labour market reforms on income inequal-ities. And, in regard to this aspect, Hoffmann and Malacrino (2019) proved thatthe employment period length is the most important element of the increase inthe Italian earnings. Many other scientists focused more on the impact that theItalian labour market reforms had on the Italian employment trends. And in par-ticular, the last reform still effective and approved in Italy in 2014, implemented in2015, named JOBS Act, is under deep investigation still now. Cirillo et al. (2017),for instance, tried to describe the first effects on the employment of the JOBS Act and the extraordinary economic and financial measures that were planned tostimulate employment and, although the availability of data was limited and in-formation aggregated, they concluded with first evidence of their negative effectson employment. Sestito and Viviano (2018) pointed out other important aspectsof the JOBS Act and proved that the new firing rules as regulated in its normativeframework stimulated the open-ended employment more than fixed-term. How-ever, the complexity of the analysis of the Italian labour market, a key issue in-deed, arises from the long reform phase that embraced 18 years since 1997 and,as we show next, experienced the overlapping of rules and economic-financialinterventions that complicates the comprehension of trends and outcomes fromthe demand side. Furthermore, the limited availability of open data, both officialand administrative, is a further complexity. Therefore, all researches conductedon the labour forces’ dynamics and employment/unemployment in Italy are com-plementary analyses with all the others. In this paper, we analyse the evolutionof employment in Italy from the juridical-economic perspective. In particular,through the utilisation of official statistical data and administrative microdata, we focus our attention on one of the Italian regions that is very active in terms of GDP, i.e. Veneto, and prove that the combination of several and variegated datasources as compiled by different subjects can allow to depict the labour marketas a whole and solve some issue still unsolved, both statistical methodologicaland legal/pragmatical. As we already pointed out in a previous work (Marini andNicolardi, 2021a), the administrative data are a precious source of information,but they are not exempt from many issues related to their nature: nonstatisticalbut administrative purposes; material and human errors; very large dimension,huge occasionally; variety of data primary sources; juridical because of the individual privacy. In particular, the availability of dynamic databases referring to thelabour market is not satisfactory for the most various analytical purposes. In fact,in most cases, the problem is caused by the general data protection regulation thatimpedes the use of many precious data and, therefore, the analysis of the real ef-fects of the labour market reforms. In theory, hence, there is a vast availability ofdata in many data formats, but they are not usable and mergeable with other databoth official and administrative of various types.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26398/IJAS.279
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/ijas/article/view/15905
