The analysis considers the effects on employment of the crisis in Italy in the period 2008-2009, suggesting that the redefinition of the characteristics of job demands, and not just their level, is a suitable way of understanding the specific features of the Italian situation. Comparing employment dynamics in Italy with those of other European countries there emerges, as in other countries, the greater weakness of non-standard employment, but also – uniquely – a contraction in more qualified jobs and an increase in non-qualified ones. The effects of this adjustment have been socially differentiated and selective, penalizing above all the younger, more qualified members of the work force, and proving to be more serious in the South, where the role of unemployment pay and the compensatory effects of the service sector have been weaker. Italian businesses are fragmented and not very innovative, and there is little interest from the political and institutional world in the contexts of innovation and competitiveness, and this may have encouraged adaptive and defensive strategies in the choices of re-sizing and in the definition of new employment requirements. only subscribers can see the full article

Working and forming a family is problematic for the Spanish, particularly for the «young adult» population between the ages of 20 and 29. It has become more difficult in recent years for this cohort to achieve emancipation and combine the two factors, due to economic instability, job uncertainty and the deficit of effective social policies in favour of new family units. In this scenario the strategies adopted to reconcile professional duties with the upbringing of children reproduce existing gender differences. This dynamic in turn reinforces familism as a socio-cultural and institutional structure based on women’s limited participation in the labour market and their greater role in the household and in reproduction. only subscribers can see the full article

The aim of this article is to illustrate the main economic mechanisms that can create problems of coordination and under-accumulation of human capital during periods of economic slowdown due to shortterm idiosyncratic shocks and/or the need for a more profound restructuring of the economic system (e.g. in the presence of technological revolutions). The analysis of these mechanisms is followed by the illustration of some historical cases in which policies aimed at encouraging human capital accumulation have led to a proper coordination between human capital, physical capital and technology, thus overcoming a period of crisis. Finally, the last part presents the results of an analysis aimed at evaluating how temporary salary shocks can have permanent effects on the level of human capital by reinforcing family bonds.only subscribers can see the full article

The crisis of the system of production has had the effect of reinforcing the role of regional administrations in managing passive labour policies. In fact, we need to consider not only the functions of running – and financing – the benefits system, delegated to the regions in the agreement between state and regions of February 2009, but also the array of additional and substitute interventions that have been made by locally autonomous bodies. Yet regional interventions, lagging behind national interventions, have been patchy and inevitably limited to the immediate area, and bring out the potentially disruptive character intrinsic to more recent developments in the area of wageprotection policies, when they are not sufficiently accompanied by a strongly equalizing action at national level. only subscribers can see the full article

The European Union’s new strategy, Europe 2020, offers an integrated and innovative response to the economic and social challenges that the economic crisis has highlighted or worsened. Proposed and adopted during the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion, Europe 2020 places the reduction of poverty and exclusion as one of the Union’s priorities and defines a quantitative aim to be reached before the end of the decade. To support this commitment and make it credible, the European Commission has proposed a flagship initiative, the European Platform to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion, one of whose tasks will be to appeal to social innovation to find adequate responses to social risks old and new. only subscribers can see the full article

The economic, demographic, social and political trends that became established in the last thirty years and the global crisis that followed are having particularly negative effects on young people and their future, particularly in Italy, where the backwardness of the production system is worsening the effects of the crisis. The article, which draws on some results of the «Report on the social state 2011» prepared by the author himself, also compares the situations of «fathers» and «sons». The condition of the latter is worsening, although this is not due to any selfishness on the part of the former, but to the worsening of the economic-social balance of the last thirty years, which is not so much ageist, as classist, discriminating against families and specific areas. The analysis of the European and Italian welfare systems is followed by some proposals for defusing the pensions bomb that is developing in Italy and that penalizes this generation of young people above all.only subscribers can see the full article