Reports

Increasingly frequent and severe droughts are threatening Italy’s agricultural sector. With climate change forecast to accelerate these trends, the sector must build long-term resilience. This will require better planning and preparing for, absorbing the impact of, and recovering from droughts, as well as more successfully adapting and transforming in response to these events. Recent positive developments include improved data collection on water supplies and agricultural damage and loss from natural hazards to better inform water management and investment decisions; strengthened commitment to ex ante risk management frameworks; and more participatory approaches for water management. Nevertheless, the agricultural policy portfolio currently underemphasises investments in on-farm preparedness and adaptation, in favour of coping tools such as insurance. Further efforts to build agricultural resilience could benefit from a holistic, long-term sectoral risk management strategy; an evaluation of the trade-offs between spending on risk coping tools versus investments in natural hazard preparedness and measures to mitigate their impacts; and more explicit consideration of farmer demographics and capacities in policy design.

This reliable and up-to-date source of OECD quarterly balance of payments and international merchandise trade statistics provides a detailed insight into the most recent trends in trading patterns for OECD countries with the rest of the world. Balance of payments data are presented adjusted for seasonal variations. International trade data are broken down by country. The series shown cover data for the last ten quarters and two years available. This quarterly publication is divided into two parts: I. Balance of payments and international trade II. International merchandise trade by country.

Governments around the world have adopted unprecedented policies to deal with COVID-19. This paper zooms in on business shutdowns and investigates their effectiveness in reducing mortality. We leverage highly granular death registry data for almost 5,000 Italian municipalities in a diff-in-diff approach that allows us to mitigate endogeneity concerns credibly. Our results, which are robust to controlling for a host of co-factors, offer strong evidence that business shutdowns are very effective in reducing mortality. We calculate that the death toll from the first wave of COVID-19 in Italy may have been about twice as high in their absence. Our findings also highlight that timeliness is key – by acting one week earlier, the death toll may have been reduced by up to an additional 25%. Finally, shutdowns should be targeted. Closing service activities with a high degree of interpersonal contact saves the most lives. Shutting down production activities – while substantially reducing mobility – only has mild effects on mortality.

This report explores the spatial dimension of productivity in the co-operatives of Italy, a country where they make up a relatively large share of total national employment. Co-operatives play a countercyclical role in job creation during crises. In a post-pandemic world, they could make a major contribution to steering the economy towards inclusiveness and sustainability. Productivity growth ensures that co-operatives can achieve both economic and social goals in the future. This report applies a place-based approach to investigate the issue of productivity in co-operatives, given their many interdependencies with local communities. Novel evidence points to the local factors that are linked with the concentration and productivity of co-operatives across regions, sectors and firm size classes in Italy. A comparison with other Italian firms as well as with Spanish co-operatives and other Spanish firms serves to illustrate how productivity performance varies across space and firm types. This report constitutes an empirical test for the analytical approach developed by the OECD Spatial Productivity Lab.

Social protection systems use a range of entitlement criteria. First-tier support typically requires contributions or past employment in many countries, while safety net benefits are granted on the basis of need. In a context of volatile and uncertain labour markets, careful and continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of income support is a key input into an evidence-based policy process. This paper proposes a novel empirical method for monitoring the accessibility and levels of safety net benefits. It focusses on minimum-income benefits (MIB) and other non-contributory transfers and relies on data on the amounts of cash support that individuals in need receive in practice. Results show that accessibility and benefit levels differ enormously across countries – for instance, in 2015/16, more than four out of five low-income workless one-person households received MIB in Australia, France and the United Kingdom, compared to only one in five in Greece, Italy and Korea, three countries that have since sought to strengthen aspects of safety-net provisions.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on SME access to finance. In particular, the sudden drop in revenues created acute liquidity shortages, threatening the survival of many viable businesses. The report documents an increase in demand for bank lending in the first half of 2020, and a steady supply of credit thanks to government interventions. On the other hand, other sources of finance declined, in particular early-stage equity. This paper, a special edition of Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs, focuses on the impacts of COVID-19 on SME access to finance, along with government policy responses. It reveals that the pre-crisis financing environment was broadly favourable for SMEs and entrepreneurs, who benefited from low interest rates, loose credit standards and an increasingly diverse offer of financing instruments. It documents the unprecedented scope and scale of the policy responses undertaken by governments world-wide, and details their key characteristics, and outlines the principal issues and policy challenges for the next phases of the pandemic, such as the over-indebtedness of SMEs and the need to continue to foster a diverse range of financing instruments for SMEs.

This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of innovative start-up firms in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, an autonomous region situated at the extreme North East of the Italian territory, bordering with Austria and Slovenia. This work is part of a series of thematic papers on sub-national start-up landscapes in Italy, produced by the OECD Trento Centre for Local Development. Following the 2018 OECD Evaluation of the Italian Start-up Act, which embraced a national perspective, it represents a first attempt to analyse the impact of this policy at the local level. Friuli-Venezia Giulia hosts a polycentric, mainly urban start-up landscape, with a low prevalence of female and young founders. Its historical sub-regions of Friuli and Venezia Giulia present remarkable differences under several perspectives, including the industrial composition of their start-ups, the spread of emerging technologies among them and their propensity to use national incentives. Firm dynamism, notably high-growth and exit trends, constitutes another major focus of this work, which concludes with a set of evidence-based recommendations for policy-makers.

This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of innovative start-up firms in Trentino, a high-income mountainous area in the North East of Italy. This work is part of a series of thematic papers on regional start-up landscapes in Italy, produced by the OECD Trento Centre for Local Development. Following the 2018 OECD Evaluation of the Italian Start-up Act, which embraced a national perspective, it represents a first attempt to analyse the impact of this policy at the local level. Among Italian regions, Trentino boasts the highest density of registered innovative start-ups over all young firms established locally. However, innovative start-ups spread unevenly throughout this territory, concentrating in urban areas. Female and young founders are less prevalent than in Italy at large. Firm dynamism, in particular high-growth and exit trends, the uptake of emerging technologies among local start-ups as well as their propensity to use national incentives are other key areas of this work, which concludes with a set of evidence-based recommendations for policy makers.