Jorge Durán Laguna (p)

Raffaele Paci

In March, the Commission published the 9th Cohesion Report, presenting an assessment of the state of cohesion in the Union, based on a wide range of socio-economic indicators and analyses.
Results show that twenty years after the 2004 enlargement, the EU’s Cohesion Policy has led to remarkable convergence. In Central and Eastern Europe as a whole, income per head increased from 52% of the EU average in 2004 to nearly 80% today. At the same time, their unemployment rate has dropped from 13% to 4%.
In stark contrast with the 2009 recession, GDP has strongly rebounded after the pandemic outbreak. However, the pace of economic convergence has persistently slowed down after the 2009 recession. The impact of the 2009 recession on convergence, investment and GDP has indeed been a major and persistent one.
In this difficult context, Cohesion Policy has played a pivotal role in the overall improvement of economic, employment and social indicators in the EU. Cohesion Policy plays a key role in supporting public investment. During the 2014-2020 period, the policy represented almost 13 % of total government investment in the EU as a whole, and 51 % in less developed Member States. These investments have strengthened the European growth model, spurring economic growth in line with key policy priorities from the twin transition to innovation, business, and skills, from childcare, education and health to protection from natural disasters. However, challenges remain and untapped potential and pockets of poverty can be found in every region.
Demographic changes will affect all regions in the coming decades. Regions will have to adjust to a shrinking labour force, an ageing population. The challenges tend to be more acute in rural and thinly populated regions. Similarly, the effects of the digital transition and climate change are likely to exacerbate regional disparities in the EU.
Within this context, the need to ensure economic cohesion, which has been enshrined in the EU since The Treaty of Rome of 1957, remains as relevant as ever.
Link to the report: Inforegio - Ninth Report on Economic, Social and Territorial Cohesion (europa.eu)

Adriana Di Liberto (p), Ludovica Giua

Jorge Durán Laguna

Among the possible determinants of the observed gender gaps in education, a vast literature examines the role played by gender-biased teacher evaluations. Moreover, a recent and growing literature stresses the positive effect of good school management on different educational outcomes. This study investigates whether the observed systematic differences in teacher evaluations between boys and girls in Italy are affected by the quality of the school leadership and by specific managerial practices implemented in schools. The empirical analysis will exploit the change in school principal as exogenous shock and evaluate whether a school leader with better managerial practices reduces gender-related grading bias and, through this, gender educational inequalities.

Ivan Etzo, Raffaele Paci (p), Cristian Usala

Adriana Di Liberto

We investigate if and to what extent university mobile students contribute to the dynamics of the economic performance in the territory where they decide to move to attend university. We examine the case of Italy at the level of 90 NUTS3 areas over the years 2013-2019. Moreover, we assess the brain drain/brain gain effects by looking at differences in the impact between southern and northern regions and derive the implications in terms of income inequalities.
We find a positive impact of student inflows on GDP pc growth of Italian regions (NUTS3 level). The positive effect is driven almost entirely by the effect on northern regions (brain gain). On the contrary, only the southern regions suffer from the brain drain effect on regional growth. Notwithstanding substantial outflows of students from northern regions, they do not impact negatively on their regional economic dynamic. Thus, increasing interregional mobility of students is likely to increase the spatial income inequalities between the South and North of Italy.