In a unionized economy with endogenous fiscal policy central bank transparency has two contrasting effects on wages, the relative strength of which determines the macroeconomic performance. This finding allows us to demonstrate that (i) if the central bank is populist the effect of transparency is negative, and (ii) if policy makers are sufficiently conservative and the government is active, transparency decreases inflation and unemployment, but opposite results apply if a populist government faces a tight fiscal constraint. Macroeconomic volatility disappears with full transparency and increases, in general, with opacity, but the relationship is hump-shaped when the central bank is strongly populist. Copyright � 2007 The Authors; Journal compilation � 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and The University of Manchester.

Italy is experiencing at present the most serious economic recession of the post-war period. Between 2008 and 2013 national income fell by 9 per cent, per capita incomes by 11 per cent, and industrial production by 25 per cent; and unemployment doubled. In this essay we argue that, while this dramatic situation has been made worse by the policies of ‘expansive austerity’, its origins can be traced back to changes that took place in the 1990s (notably globalization, competition for emerging new markets and the diffusion of new technologies – ICT) to which Italy failed to react speedily or effectively by reorganizing its entire productive system. Instead, many of the reforms that have been introduced with respect to the labour market, for example, have\ud reduced costs but in ways that have encouraged firms to stay in traditional sectors where products are poorly differentiated and of low technology content. If the Italian economy is not to become even weaker, new reforms are urgently needed to encourage innovative investment and push through to completion a restructuring of the industrial system that can no longer be deferred

Sraffa's suggestion regarding the monetary determination of the rate of profits raises two fundamental questions addressed by this paper: (i) can the money rates of interest be envisaged as variables set by the financial system independently of the real sector of the economy? (ii) How can they determine the general rate of profits and so allow for the determination of natural prices and income distribution? To elaborate on the intuition that the competitive process must link the rate of profits earned in the financial sector (and ruled by the intermediaries' margin) to that earned in the production sector, a long-period credit economy is constructed. Unlike previous attempts, the system of equations describing such an economy leaves Sraffa's (1960) original price equations unaffected. If certain fairly unrestrictive conditions are met, the solution of this system is shown to exist and to be economically meaningful, hence supporting Sraffa's hint that the rates of interest are free to determine the rate of profits outside of the system of production.

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This paper critically re-examines the restructuring of public services. Four main decision-making phases are identified: the public oversight to be guaranteed to socially sensitive economic activities; the ways of financing them; the economic organisation of the industry; and the production decisions. By focusing on organisation, the paper reinterprets the market structure in public service industries on the basis of the interactions among three main players: users/citizens, the government and the service supplier. It argues that the issue of public versus private ownership has been overemphasised, and that an effective increase in efficiency can be obtained by introducing appropriate incentives for both public and business players. Instead of using a single policy instrument, namely privatisation, public action ought to be informed by an array of organisational solutions.