Francesco Timpano

The paper looks at regional economic structure and performance of Italian regions and reviews some recent contributions focussed on the Italian “Mezzogiorno” with a specific focus on the effect of the 2008 financial crisis and the recent Pandemics (Covid-19) crisis. A comparison between Italy and the rest of the EU indicates a structural difference between the underperforming Italian economy and the rest of the Union due to the specific structure of the Italian economy in terms of sector and firm size and the consequences on strategic and organizational issues of weak small businesses and inefficient medium and large enterprises...

The paper explores the heterogeneity behind the production of innovation at the regional level. We empirically estimate the innovation equation with EU regional data using either patents or innovative sales in the region as dependent variable. The empirical model accounts for external, spillover, effects and allows for parameter heterogeneity among pre-selected groups of regions...