This study investigates the economic crises that occurred in Italy between 1970 and 2011, referring in particular to the employment level and the different effects on the Italian regions. Empirical results suggest that regions with a larger share of manufacturing or a higher number of temporary workers suffered to a greater extent than others during recessions. In contrast, regions with higher percentages of public employees and service industries were better able to 'resist' the negative phases of the economy. Moreover, the recent crisis has exacerbated the strong imbalances between the North and South making rebalancing policies necessary to place the country on a sustainable growth path.

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This paper investigates the long-run economic relationship between health care expenditure and income in the world using data on 167 countries over the period 1995-2012, collected from the World Bank data set. The analysis is carried using panel data methods that allow one to account for unobserved heterogeneity, temporal persistence, and crosssection dependence in the form of either a common factor model or a spatial process. We estimate a global measure of income elasticity using all countries in the sample, and for sub-groups of countries, depending on their geo-political area and income. Our findings suggest that at the global level, health care is a necessity rather than a luxury. However, results vary greatly depending on the sub-sample analysed. Our findings seem to suggest that size of income elasticity depends on the position of different countries in the global income distribution, with poorer countries showing higher elasticity.

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