Abstract
The official data indicate a much less severe impact of the international crisis on employment and on the incomes of wage-earners and pensioners in Italy than might have been predicted. But the standard measure of unemployment agreed at international level has some shortcomings. For one thing, the “objective” definition of unemployment is a poor fit with the Italian labour market. And for another, the considerable increase in labour hoarding and the emergence of “semi-employment”—the alternation of brief periods of work with periods of unemployment or economic inactivity—make the state of the market hard to assess. The paper offers a more in-depth examination of the impact of the crisis, using labour force survey data to count labour underutilization, funded and unfunded labour hoarding, the discouraged, and semi-employed workers. The picture that emerges is one of a “long wave” of available labour underutilization: the Italian labour market has to cope with an increase in joblessness broadly conceived of about 1,400,000—more than twice the rise in official unemployment. This wave will inevitably last for years to come, until the pools of implicit and explicit unemployment are reabsorbed and jobs are created for those now unoccupied and the new entrants. So now is the time for reform of unemployment benefits, not just to provide income support for those caught up in the long wave of joblessness, but also to permit quicker reorganization of production. The reform will have to highlight the diverse interests and roles of government and of the social partners, within the framework of a new development and industrial policy.
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Notes
- 1.
The 13th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (1982) listed eight examples of such actions.
- 2.
For a strongly critical account, see Carmignani (2009).
- 3.
To be sure, this indication is set out only indirectly, more as a common practice than a scientifically based recommendation: “The recent period specified for job search activities need not be the same as the basic survey reference period of one week or one day, but might be longer. The 13th ICLS did not specify the length of the job search period. It left its determination open to countries. In practice, most countries define the job search period in terms of the last month or the past 4 weeks” (Hussmanns 2007).
- 4.
“The purpose of extending the job search period somewhat backwards in time is to take account of the prevailing time lags involved in the process of obtaining work after the initial step to find it was made. During these time lags persons may not take any other initiatives to find work. In particular, this may be the case of persons who can only apply for employment with one potential employer (e.g. judges) and are awaiting the reply to their application for a job” (Hussmanns 2007).
- 5.
- 6.
For a sample of these studies, see the references in Di Laurea et al. (2006).
- 7.
For a comparative analysis of programmes for labour redundancy in seven European countries from both the legal and the economic standpoint, see Carabelli and Tronti (1999).
- 8.
For a critical presentation, see Taylor (1970).
- 9.
The reflux into inactivity, however, is the dual behaviour of the attraction mechanism, stylised in the 60s by Tella (1964), for which the empirical evidence shows a strong correlation to the employment cycle.
- 10.
All the data from the Istat labour force survey in this article refer only to the working-age population (15–64).
- 11.
For the time being, as far as we know, no estimates of this phenomenon based on administrative data are available.
- 12.
A similar rate is produced and diffused quarterly by the Bank of Italy in its “Bollettino Economico”. For the construction details of their “rate of available unutilized labour”, see Brandolini, Cipollone and Viviano (2006).
- 13.
We have to note that the ILO itself suggested the concept of “usually active population”, enlarging the temporal horizon of the classic definitions (see Hussmanns, Merhan and Verma 1990).
- 14.
Actually, each individual who enters the survey sample is interviewed in two consecutive quarters, skipped for two quarters, and then interviewed again for two more quarters—a total of four interviews in 15 months, a sampling formula dubbed “2-2-2”. We elected to hold the interviewing period to a year, hence to three observations, because a year is a clear reference and permits comparison with the traditional indicators expressed as yearly averages. Moreover, limiting the period to just one year enables us to include half the survey sample, while keeping the whole 15 months would cut it to a quarter, making the estimates less reliable.
- 15.
For a stock-and-flow econometric analysis of the labour supply in the Italian labour market, see Di Laurea et al. (2006).
- 16.
On this point see, among others, Tronti (2010).
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Tronti, L., Gatto, R. (2012). Measuring the Long Wave. Unemployment, Discouragement and Semi-Employment in Italy, During and After the Crisis. In: Parodi, G., Sciulli, D. (eds) Social Exclusion. AIEL Series in Labour Economics. Physica, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2772-9_9
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