More Flexible, Less Productive? The Impact of Employment Protection Legislation Reforms in Italy

ABSTRACT

Through a meta-analysis of all publicly available research over a span of 25 years, the article assesses the productivity impact of the employment protection legislation reforms that have been introduced in Italy since 1997. European Union institutions and domestic reformers advocated the reforms in order to increase the competitiveness and productivity of the Italian economy. Yet, by incentivising temporary employment, the reforms have favoured competitive strategies that have reduced the productivity of the country’s firms.

KEYWORDS:

• Atypical work
• EU employment policy
• labour flexibility
• EU labour market reforms
• labour market deregulation
• productivity
• structural reforms
• temporary employment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Afonso et al. (2021); Perez and Matsaganis (2019); Picot and Tassinari (2017); Rathgeb and Tassinari (2022); Zartaloudis and Kornelakis (2017).

2. https://data.oecd.org/emp/temporary-employment.htm (accessed September 16, 2022)

3. See Barbieri et al. (2019); Berton, Richiardi and Sacchi (2012); Ferrera and Gualmini (2005); Rutherford and Frangi (2018); Sacchi (2018)

4. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EPL_OV (accessed July 5, 2022)

5. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EPL_T (accessed July 5, 2022)

6. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/lfsq_etpga/default/table?lang=en (accessed June 21, 2022)

7. See http://www.prisma-statement.org.

8. Saltari and Travaglini (2008) do not report a coefficient, but do report no impact on productivity from regulatory change. We counted this as one test, no impact.

9. One article (Cappellari, Dell’aringa & Leonardi 2012) measures productivity in three ways: valued added per workers, sales per worker, and TFP. In Table 1c, we have added together the tests measuring valued added per workers and sales per worker.

10. We have also performed a non-parametric t-test, the Wilcoxon one-sample t-test for the median, which does not depend on normality assumptions on the distribution of the observations, for the 10 sources that adopt productivity as their dependent variable and share of temporary or permanent workers in the workforce as independent variable. A one-sided test indicates that r_median is negative, with p value < 0.001.

11. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tipslm20/default/table?lang=en accessed April 30, 2021

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesco Stolfi

Francesco Stolfi is a Senior Lecturer in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University. His current research studies the distributive conflict surrounding the regulation of professions and occupations. He is currently completing a research project comparing the remuneration rules for physicians in Australia and Canada. His research has appeared in journals such as Comparative European Politics, Governance, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Public Policy, Public Administration and Review of International Political Economy.

Oliver Fritsch

Dr Oliver Fritsch is a Senior Lecturer at the Sir Walter Murdoch School of Public Policy and International Affairs, Murdoch University, Australia. He specialises in environmental policy and politics. Research areas include cost-benefit analysis and environmental analysis, public participation and stakeholder involvement, as well as transboundary problems. He also maintains a strong interest in regulatory impact assessment and other forms of ex-ante policy appraisal, and in applications of meta-analyses in political science and public policy.