Assessing Italy's Reform Challenges: What Do Growth Accounting and Structural Indicators Say?

Abstract

Italy’s overall GDP growth has been dismal in recent years and this poor performance has been compounded by a declining trend in labour productivity and total factor productivity growth. This paper looks into growth accounting and structural indicators and analyses Italy’s performance against other European countries. We look at the evidence provided by newly available information from the Lisbon Assessment Framework (LAF) developed by the Working Group on Lisbon Methodology (LIME) attached to the Economic Policy Committee and the European Commission services (DG ECFIN). Building upon the results of existing literature, we investigate whether this new evidence is supported by data from other sources and provides fresh insight into Italy’s reform process. The main message from the analysis of growth accounting and structural indicators appears to be that Italy’s GDP growth significantly underperformed that of the EU15 in 2001-2007 notwithstanding progress on reforms.

Keywords: productivity, economic growth and aggregate productivity, Italy

JEL Classification: D24, O4, O52