Social and welfare issues

This paper first presents a meta-analysis of the causal impact of cultural participation on well-being. The meta-analysis classifies the literature according to the strength of the evidence available and various types of cultural activities. Secondly, this paper uses data from time use surveys from Canada, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States to study individuals’ emotional responses to a series of daily activities. This is then used as a basis for an empirical assessment of the drivers of time allocation across different activities, showing that expectations of future well-being are one of the reasons why individuals decide to engage in cultural activities. Furthermore, the model helps explain why cultural participation, in spite of being one of the most enjoyable human activities, is also the least undertaken. We show that heterogeneity of preferences results in a strong selection effect in available statistics.

One in seven working age adults identifies as having a disability in OECD countries. Many of them are excluded from meaningful work and have low levels of income and social engagement. Governments can help create an environment that supports social and labour market integration for people with disability. This report reviews the effectiveness of the social protection system for people with disability in Italy and summarises the results of a pilot carried out in four regions testing an alternative disability assessment. The current assessment process can sometimes deny services to people in need of support while being generous to people with significant health problems but who are not experiencing severe disability. A disability assessment that takes medical and functional aspects into account helps to direct services and resources to those most in need and to harmonise access to disability support across the country. Implementing disability reform has proved to be difficult in Italy in the past decade. This report provides evidence that reform can improve outcomes for people with disability.

The paper discusses the implications of recent advances in artificial intelligence for knowledge workers, focusing on possible complementarities and substitution between machine translation tools and language professionals. The emergence of machine translation tools could enhance social welfare through enhanced opportunities for inter-language communication but also create new threats because of persisting low levels of accuracy and quality in the translation output. The paper uses data on online job vacancies to map the evolution of the demand for language professionals between 2015 and 2019 in 10 countries and illustrates the set of skills that are considered important by employers seeking to hire language professionals through job vacancies posted on line.

Being able to swim empowers individuals to make choices, have agency, and be free to choose core aspects of their life, such as working safely on or near water. It is also associated with lifelong health benefits and reduces the risk of drowning. Using data from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll 2019, this paper provides the first global estimates of adults’ ability to swim without assistance. Individuals in high-income countries are considerably more likely to report being able to swim without assistance than individuals in low-income countries. Disparities also exist within countries. In particular, women are less likely to be able to swim without assistance than men in virtually all countries, birth cohorts, and levels of education. Investing in reducing inequalities in life skills, such as swimming, can foster economic development and empowerment, especially in light of threats, such as climate change.

The present paper presents methodologies to forecast and conduct policy analysis for three well-being indicators with the goal of informing the Italian government’s budget planning process. For each of the three indicators (healthy life expectancy, overweight and obesity, and early school leaving), a model is developed that allows projecting future trends under a status quo scenario and that allows estimating the impact of policy and budget levers on future outcomes. The micro-economic models for being in good health have a moderate explanatory power with an R2 ranging between 0.2 and 0.3. The strongest predictors of good health are by far the prevalence of chronic diseases, followed by low mental health, sport practice and diet. Overall, the combined changes in inputs yield an improvement in the share of people declaring being in good health by 2.7 ppt, from a baseline of 62% among people older than 18. The micro-economic model for being in excess weight has lower explanatory power (R2 between 0.05 and 0.15). As a result, the combined changes in inputs yield a relatively small decrease by 0.5 ppt starting from a baseline of 47.6% of the population. The most important predictors are those associated with a healthy diet. Finally, the cross-region macro-economic model of early school leaving has high explanatory power (R2 above 0.90) and highlights a wide range of ‘push and pull’ factors. The combination of benchmark inputs yields a decrease in the rate of early leavers by 1.8 ppt, starting from a baseline of 13.1%. Overall, these results highlight the large scope for policy intervention to improve well-being outcomes, as well as the multiplicity of policy levers.

Social protection systems use a range of entitlement criteria. First-tier support typically requires contributions or past employment in many countries, while safety net benefits are granted on the basis of need. In a context of volatile and uncertain labour markets, careful and continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of income support is a key input into an evidence-based policy process. This paper proposes a novel empirical method for monitoring the accessibility and levels of safety net benefits. It focusses on minimum-income benefits (MIB) and other non-contributory transfers and relies on data on the amounts of cash support that individuals in need receive in practice. Results show that accessibility and benefit levels differ enormously across countries – for instance, in 2015/16, more than four out of five low-income workless one-person households received MIB in Australia, France and the United Kingdom, compared to only one in five in Greece, Italy and Korea, three countries that have since sought to strengthen aspects of safety-net provisions.

This report focuses on the local level integration of migrants in Rome, and provides information on the national framework for integration in Italy. While the study assumes that local authorities are at the forefront of migrant integration – providing information and essential services, ensuring access to education and the labour market, overcoming the barriers for full inclusion in the host society, and managing conflicts – local authorities are not alone. This report stresses the importance of multi-level governance of migrant integration, highlighting the key role of third sector enterprises, NGOs, business, faith-based organisations and unions. It identifies and shares selected local actions and governance practices to manage the short- and long-term effects of migration flows, and provides an international comparative of practices implemented by other EU cities, highlighting the most effective measures and lessons learned.