Reports

Italy’s start-up visa aims to make the national start-up ecosystem more easily accessible to foreign talent, rich with knowledge and skills, and more integrated into global markets. Government reports show that the programme has not yet achieved a critical scale. The analysis of similar initiatives in Chile, France, Ireland and Portugal identifies five gateways for attracting more foreign entrepreneurs, such as an effective policy outreach, smooth inter-institutional co-operation across the migratory process, and the provision of sound support services for a 'soft landing' of entrepreneurs upon arrival. These takeaways may also inform new talent attraction policies targeting remote workers, an expanding group in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

This profile provides a concise and policy-relevant overview of health and the health system in Italy as part of the broader series of the State of Health in the EU country profiles. It provides a short synthesis of: the health status in the country; the determinants of health, focussing on behavioural risk factors; the organisation of the health system; and the effectiveness, accessibility and resilience of the health system. This edition has a special focus on the impact of COVID‑19. This profile is the joint work of the OECD and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, in co-operation with the European Commission.

Smart Specialisation Strategy is a place-based EU policy that seeks to enhance regional competitiveness through leveraging and bolstering innovation in the selected priority areas (industries or technologies) in each region. The new iteration of S3 requires developing cross-border collaborations with regions possessing complex and complementary technological expertise currently missing in a region to upgrade its technological evolution. The reason for this is that new growth opportunities arise from recombining existing technological capabilities while more complex technologies offer strong competitive advantage. This paper presents a simple roadmap for regional S3 internationalisation and the results of an in-depth case study on the opportunities for and barriers to S3 internationalisation in Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG), a region in the North East of Italy. The paper develops recommendations on how to make the most of the Research, Technology, Development and Innovation endowments in FVG through enhancing the innovation-internationalisation nexus in order to improve competitiveness of the region.

Raising the effectiveness of Italy’s public sector is more urgent than ever. It will be key to revive investment and productivity and improve access to quality public services for the most vulnerable. The quality of public goods and services is variable, weakening Italy’s resilience to shocks like the COVID-19 crisis and the ability to secure a more sustained and inclusive recovery. Excessive regulations and their onerous enforcement add to businesses’ operating costs. Trust in public institutions and public service delivery is one of the lowest across OECD countries. In the coming years Italy will have a unique opportunity to improve the effectiveness of its public sector, through the Recovery and Resilience Plan, the renewal of the public sector workforce, and the potential of technological innovations. This paper proposes options to strengthen public sector effectiveness by looking at what interventions the public sector makes in the economy, how the public sector mobilises its workforce, procures goods and services, and leverages the benefits of digitalisation, and who acts across levels of government and between the public and private sector. It concludes that recruiting and developing the necessary skills in the workforce, monitoring performance, as well as encouraging coordination will be key to better budget allocations, regulatory environment, and delivering quality public goods and services.

Public policy can play an important role in steering the large-scale diffusion of teleworking. Various communities around the world are experimenting with innovative solutions. In Italy, the Autonomous Province of Trento has plans to design a comprehensive plan for teleworking as a way to foster local economic and social development. Opportunities and challenges for a smooth transition to an ever more hybrid work environment are explored in view of a number of societal objectives, including an improvement in living standards, territorial cohesion and competitiveness. The paper identifies six policy areas for recommendations, reflecting the conditions needed to achieve these objectives.

Enterprises are a key provider of education and training for adults across OECD countries. Yet, policy-makers lack a detailed understanding of how training in enterprises takes place. This report opens the black box of training and informal learning in enterprises by providing in-depth insights on: i) what training and learning opportunities enterprises provide; ii) why they provide training (or not); and iii) how they make decisions about training. It presents new evidence from 100 qualitative cases studies in five countries: Austria, Estonia, France, Ireland and Italy. The findings will assist governments and social partners in designing and implementing better policies in support of training in enterprises.

This report offers an initial overview of the available information regarding the circumstances, nature and outcomes of the education of schoolchildren during the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns of March-April 2020. Its purpose is primarily descriptive: it presents information from high quality quantitative studies on the experience of learning during this period in order to ground the examination and discussion of these issues in empirical examples. Information is presented on three interrelated topics: the nature of the educational experience during the period of lockdowns and school closures; the home environment in which education took place for the vast majority of schoolchildren; the effects on the mental health and learning outcomes for children during this period. The data come primarily from 5 countries (France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States) with additional information on some aspects for 6 additional countries (Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Finland, Italy and the Netherlands). This report will be of interest to policy makers, academics, education stakeholders and anyone interested in a first international empirical analysis of the effects of the pandemic on the lives and education of schoolchildren.

Industries and businesses are becoming increasingly digital, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this trend. Regulators around the world are also experimenting with data-driven tools to apply and enforce rules in a more agile and targeted way. This report maps out several efforts undertaken jointly by the OECD and Italian regulators to develop and use artificial intelligence and machine learning tools in regulatory inspections and enforcement. It provides unique insights into the background processes and structures required for digital tools to perform predictive modelling, risk analysis and classification. It also highlights the challenges such tools bring, both in specific regulatory areas and to the broader goals of regulatory systems.