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This study contributes to the literature on local administrations' debt and attempts to answer the following research questions: (1) What effects do swaps produce on regions' debt? (2) Have swaps been used to finance discretionary debt?

The paper investigates the debt burden as influenced by economic, financial and political variables and forces with panel data techniques, and tests whether swaps have been used to financing debt due to unfunded expenditures.

Panel data results of 15 Italian regions over the 2007–2014 period shows that regions with higher debt exhibited a higher interest rate exposure and have employed derivatives hoping to counterbalance the reduced resources received from the central state, in line with other European countries' experience (i.e. France and Greece).

The scarcity of official data and information on swaps has limited the empirical investigations in the literature but did not reduce the losses of local administrations.

This study creates the first database on swaps purchased by Italian regions to investigate their impact on their debt. Results show that highly indebted regions with reduced funds from the central state and diminished local resources are more likely to use swaps to fund their debt. Italian regions heavily depended on long-term debt to finance their non-healthcare services, rather than current revenues; swaps have been used to finance discretionary (non-healthcare) debt.

This paper examines wage rate differentials that set off speakers of Italian (Switzerland’s third national language community) from the rest of the population. Although second language skills are used here as control variables, the focus is on agents’ first language, which can be interpreted as a proxy for ethnicity. This paper uses a unique data set, and to our knowledge, is the first paper, to address the issue of language‐based inequality in Switzerland. Our chief aim is to provide an overview and to identify priorities for further research. The methodology is accordingly kept simple. After presenting general information on Switzerland′s Italian‐speaking community, we discuss the conceptual and methodological issues involved in the identification and operationalization of the data necessary to assess its relative socio‐economic status. Results show that outside the predominantly Italian‐language region of Tessin, male speakers of Italian are at a significant disadvantage on the labour market, even after controlling for the effect of other determinants of earnings, including competence in Switzerland’s other national languages. Therefore, the Swiss way of dealing with linguistic diversity, which relies on the territoriality principle (i.e., a one‐to‐one correspondence between language and territory, making for fairly homogeneous language regions), is not just an institutional arrangement; it also appears to be backed up by labour market outcomes, because interregional mobility may carry a significant cost.

Aim of the paper is to report on the first Italian national library statistics.

No national library statistics existed in Italy. In Italy there is no national law governing public library services and no national authority for them. The Official Publications Working Group of the Italian Library Association, in collaboration with the Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries and the Italian National Statistics Institute (ISTAT), carried out a survey, financed by the University of Perugia, to collect information about the presence of official publications in Italian public libraries. A high percentage of answers was collected. The few questions, useful for the identification of the main peculiarities of the answering libraries, were able to supply for the first time some national data about Italian public libraries.

The paper presents aims and objectives of the survey, methodology, the unexpected success. ISTAT methodological office stated that the responding libraries constituted a valid sample of Italian public libraries and the results of the survey could be considered the first Italian national library statistics. Results, limits, impact and some prospectives for the future are presented.

The first official national statistics about Italian public libraries are an unexpected success.

It has proved however that we need wider agreements among institutions and funds, to have regular national library statistics.

Thanks to this survey, for the first time we can speak about Italian public libraries in terms of numbers.

This exploratory study aims to investigate the use of Facebook as a dialogic accounting tool for promoting citizen engagement in Italian regions.

This study adopts a mixed methodology. Indeed, it first collects some quantitative data to construct an engagement index for the Facebook pages of the Italian regions, and then it performs a content analysis of some posts while also examining the tenor of the related comments and the level of interaction between regions and citizens.

The Italian regions have mainly used their Facebook pages for public communication purposes rather than for public participation. Therefore, they have conceived social pages more as an instrument of self-legitimisation and thus monologic accounting and have rarely considered them as a tool for engaging citizens who, in turn, showed low interest in participating in online debates. Nature and environment, tourism promotion and sport were the most engaging content types. Findings also confirm that posting many messages does not automatically increase engagement.

This study is one of the first to investigate the potential of social media from a dialogic accounting perspective, especially in the public sector. Additionally, it focuses on regions which are understudied in the literature, although they are critical actors in implementing public policies. Last but not least, this study offers a framework that integrates the literature on the use of social media for citizen engagement and research on such platforms as dialogic accounting tools.

Since the 1980s, New public management has fostered the introduction of managerial approaches similar to those of the private sector in public administrations. Recently, the advantages of performing risk management in the public sector have been recognized; however, to the best of our knowledge, research on risk management in public administrations is underdeveloped, and there is a need to understand how risk management is performed. This paper addresses these issues and investigates whether and how risk management is performed in Italian public administration.

This study focused on a sample of 503 Italian municipalities and used a mixed research method. Through a qualitative content analysis of documents published on municipalities’ websites, data and information were collected and elaborated using quantitative indicators.

The main results are that a high percentage of large Italian municipalities perform risk management and comply with theoretical provisions on risk management, sometimes displaying isomorphic behavior in risk management practices.

This study provides a new perspective on risk management in Italian municipalities, contributes to filling a gap in the literature and suggests a theoretical perspective on municipalities’ approaches when introducing new managerial practices.

This paper aims to present the dynamics of housing prices in Italian cities based on unpublished data with regional details from the late 1960s, half-yearly base, for all main Italian cities measuring the average prices for three city dimensions: city centre, sub-centres and outskirts or suburbs. It estimates the Italian long-term house price index, city based in real terms, and shows a combination of methods to deal with large time-series data.

This paper builds long-term cycles based on the city (real) data by estimating the common components of cointegrated time series and extracting the unobservable signals to build real house price index for sub-regions in Italy. Three different econometric methodologies are used: Johansen cointegration test and VAR models to identify the long-term pattern of prices at the estimated aggregate level; principal components to obtain the common (permanent and transitory) components; and signal extraction in ARIMA time series–model-based approach method to extract the unobserved time signals.

Results show three long-term cycle-trends during the period and identify several one-direction causal non-permanent relationships among house prices from different Italian areas. There is no evidence of convergence among regional’s house prices suggesting that the Italian housing prices converge inside the local market with only short diffusion effects at larger regional level.

Data are measured as the average price in squared meters, and the resulting index is not quality controlled.

The long-term trends on housing prices serve to implement further research and know deeply the evolution of Italian housing prices.

This paper contains new and unknown information about the evolution of housing prices in Italian regions and cities.

The COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to causing a very serious economic crisis, has slowed the path taken toward achieving gender equality. For example, the closure of third sector activities by governments has meant the loss of many jobs in this female-dominated sector (ILO, 2020; UN, 2020) slowing and hindering the professional careers of many women (Carli, 2020).

The objective of this work is to identify gender differences by analyzing the levels of sustainable development achieved by Italian regions. The Italian case in fact is very peculiar due to its historical territorial gap between the regions of the North (among the most developed) and those of the Center-South, which still show high gender inequalities. A Gender Sustainable Development Index (GSDI) will be constructed through the use of 50 indicators from the Benessere Equo e Sostenibile survey of Istat. The technique used is the stacking method (Landi, Ivaldi, & Testi, 2017; Norman, 2010), which was chosen for its high replicability of results. The results show that only 40% of Italian regions have higher levels of female sustainable development than male sustainable development. Moreover, the regions with the worst levels of both female and male sustainable development are located in the Center-South of the country, confirming the strong territorial gap present within the Italian Peninsula.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the municipal reaction to a recent rescaling policy in Italy that, since 2010, require to small municipalities to jointly manage their basic tasks (compulsory joint management – CJM) through intermunicipal forms of cooperation. The paper will investigate: how many small municipalities did effectively join their basic tasks; which forms of cooperation did they choose to perform these tasks; and which kind of reaction municipalities enacted toward the national provision.

Quantitative data rely on an original database collecting information on all Italian municipalities up to 2015. A qualitative research has also been conducted by submitting a semi-structured questionnaire and interviews to the civil servants in charge of the CJM in each of the 20 Italian regions and to other privileged interlocutors.

Italian municipalities poorly complied with the CJM norm and when they did, they choose the easiest way to do it (using the simplest available intermunicipal cooperation form). Among the explanations for this reaction: the lack of consistency and clear political will of the national policy maker in respect to this norm and the lack of a mind set at the local level oriented to cooperation and networking.

This paper highlights the main patterns of conflict in functional rescaling of small-sized municipalities in Italy, thus providing both fresh new data on this phenomena and useful elements for shaping future policy making on this topic.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

The comparative study between urban regions gathered by the 2010 National Project of Relevant Interest financed by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR – PRIN 2010) re-opened, in Italy, the debate on regional comparison of data, especially the ones of land use monitoring, which are difficult to collect, and to compare. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate some results of comparative studies based on regional and national data sets of land use indicators. Further considerations of land use change (LUC) assessment and its effect on environmental policies extended to the whole metropolitan area of Milan are outlined.

The adopted methodology collects different types of information from the existent databases on land uses/land covers (national/regional) and presents an assessment between the selected case of studies (urban regions), leading a shift from a quantitative evaluation to a qualitative one. A comparative study was conducted applying a geographical and statistical difference of land uses among different time thresholds. Subsequently, a cross-tabulation analysis allows an in-depth LUC analysis for the Milan urban region.

The results of the study display an autonomous pattern for the Milan urban region, which is the most densely populated area in Italy and seems to be the only comparable to other international cases of studies due to its extension and characteristics. Nevertheless, it is not the urban region that is affected by the highest rate of land take, which takes place in the Italian context where densities of settlements are lower and sprawled. According to Soja’s (2011) interpretation, the post-metropolitan condition of Milan seems to be proved.

The study was aimed at creating the first online National Atlas which has been used to overcome traditional problems of homogenization of LUC data in Italy. The quantification and qualification of LUC patterns allow us to understand if, and where, post-metropolis condition occurs. This research gives a clear indication of the kind of ongoing phenomena for policy orientation to planners and administrators, especially the one of the green infrastructure approach at the city-region level to solving the emerging environmental challenges.