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Drawing on a EU-funded research project on urbanisation in China and Europe (URBACHINA), the purpose of this inquiry is to explore the potential of foresight – through visionary scenarios and related participatory processes – in promoting learning and sustainable futures in China’s centrally planned context. Our research explores the use of backcasting, of Donella Meadows’ “levers” and Paul Raskin’s “proximate-ultimate drivers” and of archetypal worldviews to further our understanding of how we think about the future, and of the tension between transition scenarios and transformative, paradigmatic or deep change.

A review of recent foresight studies and literature provides an overview of the latest approaches: in particular the methods, scope, process, level of participation, themes discussed and wild cards considered. Building on this, the inquiry designs and implements a participatory, normative and qualitative scenario building to explore sustainable urban futures for China, adapting the elements of Joseph Voros’ basic foresight process to include a total of nine steps, with five workshops, two international surveys, an adapted backcasting step and internal consistency mechanisms.

The combination of a participatory iterative process with normative approaches to envisioning, helped question assumptions and deeply ingrained development models, as well as the narrow space for “alternatives” resulting from China’s centralised, top-down planning and decision-making. The experience confirms the power of scenario/storyline building in helping reflect and question strategic policy choices and enrich urban policy debates. The process successfully proposed a number of steps that ensured triangulation of the envisioning outcomes and additional learning also through backcasting. Finally, the research shows a clear link between the development of scenarios space, the debate on transition and transformative futures and archetypal worldviews, which were shown to be stable even after decades.

The URBACHINA approach to the specific challenge of sustainable urbanisation in China applies a strong normative component combined to more locally accepted exploratory methods and introduces a participatory approach to all key stages of scenario building. This represents an innovative contribution to the country’s foresight practice and the results help Chinese decision makers to reflect on the wider sustainability implications of their urban strategy. The inquiry deepens our understanding of the use of proximate and ultimate drivers of change and of the tension between transition and transformation pathways to our future.

This paper analyses the effect of a particular Active Labour Market Policy, the hiring incentives, on firms hiring policies. The effects of a programme on firms' behaviour have in fact rarely been evaluated.

The analysis is based on micro-data drawn from Rilevazione su Imprese Lavoro (RIL), conducted by Inapp in 2010, 2015 and 2018 on a representative sample of limited liability and partnership firms. The authors apply a policy evaluation framework to investigate the impact of the use of incentives in the short run. The authors infer the counterfactual policy scenario thanks to a survey question that asks about firms' behaviour in the absence of the incentives. The authors also control for firms' unobserved heterogeneity, including firm's fixed effects, and endogeneity issues, estimating a differences-in-differences model that exploit the longitudinal component of the RIL survey.

The authors find that the use of at least one incentive scheme in 2017 is associated with an increase in the share of newly hired of about 0.07 percentage point in the short run. Moreover, hiring incentives have a small positive relationship with the share of both young workers and temporary contracts. Finally, these results are robust to endogeneity issues.

The analysis provides an updated evaluation of the effectiveness of hiring incentives in Italy by focusing on firms' behaviour rather than on the evolution of individual employment. It identifies the impact by using a rich set of econometric methods as well as counterfactual analysis.

In recent decades, capitalist globalization has entailed a new international division of labor with the relocation of some stages of manufacturing production from the Center to the Periphery through the Global value chains (GVCs). This new pattern of global production is marked by wide income disparities between the different regions of the world economy, accentuated by value transfers hidden within both traditional and GVCs international trade. The chapter presents a theoretical model based on a Marxian approach for the accounting of unequal exchange in international trade in value-added, resulting from the decoupling of value-produced and value-captured inside and outside GVCs. The empirical results show the ongoing relevance of unequal exchange in contemporary capitalism as one of the fundamental causes of disparities in income and economic development among the countries of the global economy.

This meta-analysis aims to verify the efficacy of occupational health and safety (OHS) training in terms of knowledge, attitude and beliefs, behavior and health.

The authors included studies published in English (2007–2014) selected from ten databases. Eligibility criteria were studies concerned with the effectiveness of OHS training for primary prevention of workplace injury; and studies focused on examined outcome related to OHS.

The selected studies (n = 28) highlighted a strong support for the effectiveness of training on worker OHS attitudes and beliefs and, to a lesser extent, on worker’s knowledge but only medium for behavior and small evidences for its effectiveness on health.

Future research should more deeply investigate the efficacy on knowledge increase of trainings delivered by experts and researchers, applying different methods, in a small group; training delivered by peer and by researcher, applying different methods; and trained workers less than 29 years and more than 49 years old, considering that workers in these age groups are particularly vulnerable to fatalities.

Our study is a contribution for those they intend to grant effective training, in response to specific needs of OHS. The evidences presented could be considered a first step to identify the factors related to the efficacy of OHS training to plan adequate interventions.

The OHS training is effective on the basis of the extent interventions are carried out for each specific learning outcome.

This meta-analysis suggested that classroom training, although the most used and studied, does not ever revealed itself very effective: it was not significant for outcomes in terms of knowledge and showed a decreasing efficacy for attitudes and beliefs, behaviors and health. It seemed that there was a distinction between interventions on knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, as opposed to behavioral interventions and health.

In this chapter, we propose a theoretical assessment of the relationship between unions and investments. We develop a simple model where a firm chooses its investment level anticipating the employee's effort choice and the outcome of wage bargaining. First, and consistently with the holdup view, we find that the union's bargaining power has a negative effect on the accumulation of fixed capital. Second, we show that this negative effect is mitigated by the voice ability of unions to ease the displeasure of exerting effort. Hence, when the voice ability of unions is strong vis-à-vis their bargaining power, the holdup view does not necessarily survive, and unionized firms invest more than their nonunionized competitors.

This chapter explores the relationship between performance-related pay (PRP) and productivity in the Italian economy. It contributes to the literature in two main ways. First, it provides estimates for the PRP – productivity relationship based on a nationally representative sample of manufacturing and services companies (other studies on Italy are more limited in scope, since they focus on specific sectors). Second, it addresses the question of firms' heterogeneity, an aspect so far not examined in relation to PRP in Italy. We use a two-step approach. In the first step, we estimate a classical production function using longitudinal data on the balance sheet variables of Italian firms over the period 2002–2005. In the second step, we regress the distribution of the firm-specific fixed effects on dummy variables for the presence of PRP and unions, as well as on control variables for the year 2005. The most important results are that the adoption of PRP is positively and uniformly correlated with productivity throughout the whole distribution and that the presence of trade unions has a positive association with firms' unobserved productivity across all quantiles, being significantly higher for the best performing firms (those placed at the highest quantile of the productivity distribution).

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of performance-related pay (PRP) on productivity and wages of Italian firms.

A unique data set for the Italian economy, obtained from the ISFOL Employer and Employee Surveys (2005, 2007, 2010), is used to estimate the relationship between PRP, labour productivity and wages, also controlling for an ample set of covariates. The authors performed standard quantile regressions (QRs) to investigate heterogeneity in associations of PRP with labour productivity and wages. In a second stage, the endogeneity of PRP was taken into account by using instrumental variable QR techniques.

The econometric estimates suggests that PRP are incentive schemes that substantially lead to efficiency enhancements and wage gains. These findings are confirmed for firms under union governance and suggest that well-designed policies, that circumvent the limited implementation of PRP practices, would guarantee productivity improvement and wage premiums for employees.

The main limitation of the findings concerns PRP data, that do not offer statistical information on different types of schemes, at group or individual level.

This paper is the first to investigate, on a national scale for the Italian economy, the role of PRP on both productivity and wages, in order to shed light on the efficiency and distributive implications, whereas most of the studies of related literature are restricted to one of those aspects.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which performance-related pay (PRP) has been negotiated through decentralised bargaining in Italy.

The paper provides estimates aimed at identifying the main factors that have favoured agreements on PRP, on the basis of a nationally representative sample of Italian manufacturing and service companies.

The paper shows that collective bargaining on PRP in Italy is positively associated with the presence of unions. The estimates also suggest that in unionised firms, workers have more access to returns from training in the form of PRP schemes. Finally, the paper finds that firm performance is positively associated with the adoption of PRP.

Further research based on additional data should enable the authors to identify causal effects.

Partial fiscal exemptions for the wage component linked to enterprise results might increase the number of firms adopting PRP. In addition, the presence of unions may discourage the diffusion of “cosmetic” schemes that are adopted merely to secure benefits for the firm. Unions may also increase the returns of training and diffusion of PRP.

This paper utilises a unique database containing recent information from a nationwide sample of Italian firms. It includes a whole set of information, including unionisation at the firm level, which allows the authors to address a critical issue, i.e., the strategic role of unions in adopting (or impeding) the adoption of PRP.