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Unemployment differentials in Italy have widened steadily since 1960. Although previous research into the causes of these spatial differences has improved our understanding of why they may occur, there is still much work to be done. This chapter has focused on labour productivity and wage differentials as two of the main driving forces of unemployment differentials over time. To this end, it has proposed a simple model in order to highlight the potential channels through which these variables may influence unemployment, and it has provided empirical evidence in support of this relation. The results of the empirical investigation strongly suggest that both wage and productivity differentials are important factors in explaining the dynamics of unemployment disparities in Italy over the past forty years.

The Songkhram River is a 420-km-long tributary of the Mekong River and is the last remaining, free-flowing, undammed Mekong tributary in northeast Thailand. This chapter seeks to clarify the framework of competition and harmony in land use of the seasonally flooded community forest on the banks of the Songkhram River. In a study of Thai forest policy, we identified two kinds of policy: a strong policy for excluding illegal farmers from the national forest, and a realistic response to the farmers involving a partial release of national forestland and community forestry. The participation of local people in forest management should be a key factor for solving the land problem in the national forest. The seasonally flooded forest in the Songkhram River Basin grows at the periphery of agricultural land and lies between water resources and agricultural land geographically. While flooded, the land is unsuitable for agriculture, but this prevents deforestation and provides rich natural resources for the local inhabitants.

This chapter reports the estimation of the extent to which the pattern of regional unemployment in Poland 1994–1998 can be explained by regional variations in skill levels. We find, plausibly, that higher skilled populations tend to generate lower unemployment rates and that controlling for population skill levels, lower levels of relative demand for unskilled workers raises a region’s unemployment rate. These equilibrium and mismatch structural phenomena can explain about half of the regional variance in Polish unemployment rates, and a significant amount of the variance of changes in those rates.

This chapter has used a matching theory approach to assess the impact on the Italian labour market of the so-called 1997 Treu Act (). Although the Treu Act aroused considerable interest in the press and among labour market participants, to date extensive scientific analysis on its effects has not been conducted. Our study is also of some interest because the relationship between unemployment and vacancies has been very seldom analysed in the Italian literature, mainly because of the lack of official vacancy data. We have adopted a fairly recent empirical approach where the matching function, re-parameterised as a Beveridge Curve, is modelled and estimated as a production frontier.

We have found largely favourable evidence as to the existence of a Beveridge Curve in the 1990s across the main territorial areas examined. Wide efficiency differences have been shown between the South and the rest of the country. Our evidence suggests that the Treu Act fostered an increase in the vacancy supply, especially in the North and in the Centre of Italy. However, for the South of Italy, and for unskilled labour in particular, some evidence has been found of a slight outward shift of the Beveridge Curve. As a consequence, it may be concluded from our evidence that the Treu Act brought about a reduction of unemployment in the more developed regions of the country, but did not greatly affect the efficiency of the Italian labour market. In the future, we intend to obtain more robust evidence on these matters by conducting our analysis at a finer level of territorial disaggregation.

Unemployment differentials in Italy have widened steadily since 1960. Although previous research into the causes of these spatial differences has improved our understanding of why they may occur, there is still much work to be done. This chapter has focused on labour productivity and wage differentials as two of the main driving forces of unemployment differentials over time. To this end, it has proposed a simple model in order to highlight the potential channels through which these variables may influence unemployment, and it has provided empirical evidence in support of this relation. The results of the empirical investigation strongly suggest that both wage and productivity differentials are important factors in explaining the dynamics of unemployment disparities in Italy over the past forty years.