RIVISTA INTERNAZIONALE DI SCIENZE SOCIALI

The paper introduces the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) as a suitable framework to catching the inequality generating process of households income distribution. This framework which allows linking personal to functional income distribution highlights the linkages between the different sources of inequality: the macro features of the productive system and the individual/household endowments. This approach, we argue, could be useful in evaluating the impact of ‘‘policies’’, aimed at reducing poverty and inequality ex-ante. The paper shows, also, how the SAM could be a step towards a ‘‘system of distributional accounts’’ (DINA). This approach is aimed to collect macro National Account (NA) data making them consistent with the microdata coming from the households income surveys. Two numerical examples, referred to the Italian economy, based on the SAM as a tool of policy analysis are introduced. The resulting multipliers matrices help to highlight the existence of relationships between functional and personal income distribution.

The aim of this paper is to look at Marx’s analysis of British social and labour legislation and compare it with those offered by other authors both in the liberal and the socialist camp. The first step taken by the reformed British Parliament towards a full-flagged laissez-faire regime was the reform of the Old Poor Laws in 1834. From that date onward, poor relief would become more difficult to obtain, and at a very high cost in terms of human dignity. However, starting from 1820, the perception that ‘‘unrestricted factory industrialization made beasts of men, women, and children’’ led bourgeois Parliaments to develop a sophisticated labour legislation which was introduced by a series of Factory Acts. The paper aims to provide a more exhaustive assessment of Marx’s judgment of the bourgeois institutions in passing legislations meant to ameliorate the poor’s and worker’s living conditions.

At a European level, discussion of the correct application of Council Regulation (EEC) No 696/93 on statistical units started many years ago, as it has been incorrectly applied in many countries. The correct application of the regulation envisages aggregating the legal units under common control when they do not have sufficient decision-making autonomy. In many countries, however, the erroneous assimilation between the concepts of enterprise and legal units has prevailed, even if these legal units do not have sufficient autonomy in the decision-making process. The paper analyses the correct application of the enterprise definition, in both theoretical and practical terms, by exploring the impact of the ‘‘new’’ definition of enterprise on structural business statistics. The most important revision in estimating economic values is a significant transfer of value added from services to manufacturing activities, as well as a reduction of the main economic variables, such as turnover and costs.

We study sovereign debt markets behaviour during the Classical Gold Standard (CGS) Era (1880-1913), i.e. the first era of globalization characterized by free movement of capital and a fixed exchange rate regime. In particular we analyse both the issues of markets memory and the degree of confidence in sovereign debt markets by means of three stochastic models: Markov Chain (MC), Mover Stayer (MS) and Non Homogeneous Markov Chain (NHMC) estimated on two-state transition matrices of countries switching from sound to distressed. Markov Chain and Mover Stayer models beat the Non Homogeneous Markov Chain in fitting the data in the CGS period (1880-1913). This result implies both the short memory of the markets towards countries’ default history and an increased level of certainty which enables countries to better attract capital from lenders. The lessons learnt from the CGS period could also be relevant to understand sovereign debt markets in the Eurozone today given the striking similarities between the two periods.