The impact of remittance flows on growth and income distribution has attracted a great deal of attention, but the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between remittances and economic development is far from clear. Although there is wide consensus that foreign remittances can help the receiving households to increase income, consumption and capabilities to cope with socioeconomic shocks, there has been little quantitative research on impacts of remittances on household welfare and poverty. Our paper seeks to fill some of these gaps proposing an empirical analysis of the role of remittances as a tool for reducing inequality and covering households against poverty and social exclusion risks. The empirical analysis focuses on four Eastern European Countries: Slovenia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, and is based on the EU‐SILC (European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) 2005 data‐set providing for each household information as to the received inter‐household cash transfers and among which regular cash support from households in other countries (i.e. remittances) are included. The results show that remittances are statistically significant in terms of poverty reduction even if their effects are generally smaller than those of welfare transfers. Furthermore, the impact of remittances and welfare transfers differ across the countries considered.remittances, inequality, poverty, O10, O15, O52,

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The question of complementarity or substitutability of FDI and international labour mobility has not yet been answered. The substitutability assumption does not take into consideration the technological spillover of FDI in the host countries. Moreover, migration flows reveal cultural characteristics and labour force properties of their native country which may stimulate bilateral business networks, strengthening the complementarity assumption between capital and labour flows. In this paper we build a continuous time dynamic model where these offsetting forces are at work. We analyze whether, and to what extent, the increase in labour mobility might affect FDI outflows. A numerical simulation is performed showing that a higher income growth rate corresponds to a higher labour mobility. Some policy implications and further research direction are suggested

The last twenty years have seen a marked slowdown of the Italian productivity growth rate. The literature has underlined the role of international factors, such as globalization and adoption of the euro. In this paper we emphasize the role and dynamics of capital accumulation investigating the impact of the introduction of information technology on capital and production in the Italian economy and the extent to which that is being affected by skills in the labour force. The model is specified and estimated as continuous-time general disequilibrium framework. It presents original features: it analyzes the effects of the introduction of the ICT technology on the Italian economy not in a partial equilibrium context of a single market but from a macro point of view where input markets interact; it does not assume that these markets instantaneously clear but rather that there are imperfections and frictions; it does not impose the condition that the economy necessarily converges to a steady state. The model behaves quite well in replicating the dynamics of the Italian economy. It also shows however that there remains some structural inefficiency that worsened in recent years. In fact, our main finding shows that there exists a permanent gap between "optimal" and actual output which increased in the latter part of the sample period. While a fraction of this gap can be attributed to unavoidable (market and non market) adjustment costs some is associated to efficiency losses

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