Luigi Campiglio

The motivation of this paper is to propose a new interpretation of the relationship between economics and politics in Italy: the main results are the following. Parties’ coalition power, as measured by Shapley-Shubik index, helps to explain the governmental formation process, together with the power of passing a law. We find that the president and the prime minister exercise a significant appointment power: together with main parties’ secretaries and the Bank of Italy governor they represent the restricted power e´lite. During the first republic the confirmation power in Parliament is high, with a premium for the Christian Democratic Party: since 1994, with the second republic, the confirmation power decreases and becomes more volatile. Parliamentary professional composition suggests that the distance between political representation and electoral basis tends to increase and become more polarized. Electoral vote is retrospective and takes the economic growth of the previous legislature as the basic information

The aim of this paper is to estimate the changeover's inflationary impact in Italy and Milan and make an assessment of the official methodology used by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). The changeover's inflationary impact has been estimated in 0.6-0.7 percentage points in Italy, with a lag distributed over a period longer than initially expected. We show diat the tirning and methodology of the survey carried out by the ISTAT has an impact on the lag distnbution and the accuracy of the short mn inflation measurement. We estimate that the prices collected monthly at the local leve1 weight only for about half of the basket value. In modern economies firms offer an increasing wider variety of goods and services which call for a wider coverage of prices collected. We draw the attention on the weight for housing expemes: 9.3 percent in Italy and 8.5 in Milan.