Analysis of gender-sensitive policies through CGE models: the Italian case.

The gender integration in all areas of policy choices and at all stages of the decision-making process is strongly recommended by the European Union and represents an achievement that Member States should accomplish in every policy measure. Equality between women and men is a fundamental value and a driver for economic growth. The increase in female employment represents a key objective in order to promote equality and social inclusion values, founding principles of the European Union. A larger women inclusion in economic and social life might have a direct impact on household’s disposable income, on consumption and, in a virtuous income circular flow, on total output especially in countries like Italy where economic, social and cultural disparities between men and women still persist. Total employed women workforce, in Italy, is still far below the EU average and concentrated in only few professional fields. Moreover, female participation is structurally related with the difficulty in balancing different households' needs. Focusing on these aspects, the availability of actual and potential support becomes critical. There is a broad consensus, between politicians and academics, that intervention measures should be concentrated on the implementation of increasing employment rate policies. The female and male participation in the labour market should be scrutinized and the policy-maker decisions should secure the integration path whether any unbalance that discourage female participation emerges. This is possible by choosing the proper policy measure that need to encourage and stimulate female participation in labour market without neglecting the employment rate and income growth. Therefore, the gender issue should be integrated with other traditional economic variables observed from the production phase to the demand formation moving through the formation and distribution of incomes. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the analysis of the gender background in Italy by designing a set of policies related to the empowerment of female labor employment and testing the impact of these policies on the economic system. To this end, the multisectoral analysis offers the possibility to identify the labour demand by gender and detect how the income is allocated and distributed allowing to properly assess the overall impact of any gender policy on the entire economic system. This analysis requires the construction of a useful and efficient tool that comprehensively includes the circular flow of income and that takes into account the labor demand, giving a picture of the workforce. For this purpose, has been built a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Italy for 2012, which contains gender attributes. The SAM is a flexible framework that describes all the flows taking place in the whole economic system, with particular attention to the role of secondary distribution of income. The reading of the SAM makes it possible to trace the circular income flow from its generation to distribution, up to the final use. Besides providing a consistent picture of the structure of an economy, SAMs are used as database in calibration of Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models, which evaluate the impacts of economic shocks. The gender-sensitive SAM provides the suitable data for developing of gender-related CGE models for the quantitative testing on the main macroeconomic variables of the alternative policies’ effects. In this thesis have been evaluated different kind of policies designed to increase the level of women participation into the labour market with twofold nature: incentive and conciliation. The incentive policies are based on providing an additional income, directly to both women and their families, or subsidies to firms that hire women. Conciliation measures, instead, are generally based on the release of time for care, and the provision of care services (public or private), both for children and for other reliant relatives (elderly and disabled) allowing people with family constraint to work. In the first chapter of this work, all the phases designed to build the gender-sensitive SAM for Italy for 2012 are presented and described. In the second chapter, are evaluated the impacts of the gender policy according to which the taxes on female compensation of employees are cut in order to subsidize the hiring of women from firms in those economic sectors with higher gender disparity. This analysis is developed through a static CGE model that presents rigidities into the labour market. In the third chapter, in order to encourage female labour participation, two different policies have been designed. More specifically, the first policy is designed for counteract the lack of childcare facilities by increasing the level of investment in services for early childhood. The second policy is realized for expanding expenditure on services related to early childhood by providing direct transfers to households. The direct and indirect effects of these two alternative policies have been analyzed through a dynamic gender related CGE model. The results obtained from the different simulations have allowed to exclude the recessive traits that some of these manoeuvres can generate given the absence of a trade-off between their social and economic features.