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Employment of disabled people in the private sector. An analysis at the level of Italian Provinces according to article 13 of law 68/1999

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Abstract

Law 68 of March 12, 1999, whose aim is to regulate and promote the employment of disabled people, has contributed significantly to the employment of persons with disabilities, and consequently to their social inclusion. In particular, article 13 of this law offers exemption from national insurance contributions to private institutions that employ disabled people. In this paper we propose a two-step analysis to assess the effectiveness of this law at the level of Italian Provinces for the year 2005. In the first phase, we verify by means of data envelopment analysis which Provinces are ranked among the most efficient ones in the application of article 13 of law 68/99. Then, through the use of cluster analysis, we examine differences among Provinces in terms of the factors that determine their different efficiency in the employment of disabled people. The results show that the employment of disabled persons is significantly affected by three groups of factors, i.e. the input endowment of the factors which affect the employment of disabled people, the Province ability to coordinate actions geared to achieving the employment of persons with disabilities, and the promotion of policy actions aimed at supporting the social inclusion of disabled people.

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Notes

  1. Article 13 of law 68/1999 provides, for private employers, total exemption from national security contributions for each disabled people employed who has a reduced capacity to work of more than 79 %, for a maximum of eight years; and the exemption of 50 % for each disabled person employed who has a reduced capacity to work between 67 and 79 %, for a maximum of five years.

  2. People with legally protected status are usually placed in employment from a numeric list, ranking individuals according to their score on specific indicators.

  3. Employment through personal calls allows the employer to hire an employee chosen by himself, thereby allowing for preliminary evaluations of the recruitment of the person who responds to the characteristics needed by the company. This results in an advantage also for the worker, whose employment will not be experienced as an imposition by the employer, but as a choice made for the acquisition of a useful resource to the company.

  4. In its first paragraph Article 13 explicitly refers to “agreements”, i.e. three sided employment contracts (employment services, employers, workers) aimed at facilitating the employment of disabled people.

  5. The averaging is performed over all pairs \((x,y)\) of objects, where \(x\) is an object from the first cluster, \(y\) is an object from the second cluster. The distance between cluster \(X\) and \(Y\) is described by the following expression: \(D(X,Y)=\frac{1}{N_x .N_y }.\sum \limits _{i=1}^{N_x } \sum \limits _{j=1}^{N_y } {d(x_{i,} y_i )} \)

  6. The other hierarchical clustering techniques have several limitations. The Single Linkage method clearly shows clearly more pronounced than other algorithms all the similarities between the elements, thus it advantages the homogeneity between the elements of each group rather than the difference between the groups. On the contrary, the Complete Linkage method clearly shows the differences between elements, thus it advantages the difference between the groups rather than the homogeneity of the elements of each group.

  7. In this paper we omit the number of public sector organizations, that have been considered in a previous paper (Agovino and Rapposelli 2011), because here we are referring specifically to article 13 of the law 68/1999, which consider only the private sector.

  8. B type of cooperatives were established in article 1 of Law 381 of November 8, 1991. They are not for profit organizations, aiming at providing employment for disadvantaged groups, such as disabled people, formerly convicted people, people formerly involved with substances.

  9. Potential in the sense that not all firms which ought to employ disabled people actually do so (see for instance Ministry of Employment 2004–2005).

  10. In this application we do not identify private firms according to the number of employees, because a problem would be faced: due to the high number of variables included in the DEA analysis with respect to the number of units, there would not be a reasonable level of differentiation between DMUs evaluated (Dyson et al. 2001).

  11. There are a number of ways in which environmental variables can be accommodated in a DEA analysis. In our application we incorporate them directly into the linear programming formulation (Ferrier and Knox Lovell 1990).

  12. This test can be used to identify outliers in a data set and allows us to create a new variable that takes value equal to 1 if the observation is an outlier, 0 otherwise. The Grubbs test detects one outlier at each iteration and this operation is iterated until no outliers remain.

  13. The winsorization is a statistical procedure for the artificial modification of the sampling distribution of random variables. It allows the replacement of outliers with threshold values appropriately constructed.

  14. In the appendix we report the number of provinces, their abbreviation and the size of each cluster (Table 4).

  15. The classification resulting by using different distance measures, such as the squared Euclidean distance, is very similar to that one obtained by using the Euclidean distance.

  16. Large values of the Calinski–Harabasz pseudo-F indicate distinct clustering.

  17. They allow to highlight the weight of each input in the analysis of each cluster.

  18. Education (education services); EHSCM (environmental health services and cemetery management); OSS (other social services); CSOCS (community services and other cultural services); PS (personal services); PHVS (public health and veterinary services); EO (number of employment offices); CSTB (number of cooperative societies of type B); TLH (number of temporary layoff hours); EW (number of employed women); FR (number of foreign resident population).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University “G. D’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara, Viale Pindaro 42, 65127 , Pescara, Italy

    Massimiliano Agovino & Agnese Rapposelli

Authors
  1. Massimiliano Agovino
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  2. Agnese Rapposelli
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Correspondence to Massimiliano Agovino.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 3 and 4.

Table 3 ID codes for Italian Provinces
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Table 4 Summary of results
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Agovino, M., Rapposelli, A. Employment of disabled people in the private sector. An analysis at the level of Italian Provinces according to article 13 of law 68/1999. Qual Quant 48, 1537–1552 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-013-9851-3

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