| The extremely large disparities in employment rates across Italian regions, and the bad performance of the Italian economy in terms of job creation in the 80´s and early 90´s make job creation a top-priority in the economic policy agenda. This paper uses data on employment from 784 Local Labor Systems (LLS´s) covering the whole Italian territory to analyze job creation and its covariates for the 1981-1996 period. Local agglomeration economies, in particular input-output linkages, social characteristics, in particular the crime rate, and infrastructure growth are found to be important determinants of employment growth across Italian LLS´s. Using these estimates and data relative to 1996, we assess the potential for job creation in the LLS´s for the next... |
