Abstract
Interest in the spread of human capital has grown in recent decades, as it is acknowledged to play an increasingly important role in supporting social and economic development. This paper, starting from the distinction between education – assessed by educational attainment – and literacy proficiency – that is, what people are actually able to do with the written word – examines the distribution of these properties in Italy. Results of analysis show that while the longstanding gap between the North and the South is gradually closing with regard to the distribution of educational credentials, there is still a significant difference in the acquired level of competence. There is also an unexpected result: the regions of the North-West, once the main driver of Italy's economic development, today deploy a smaller stock of human capital than the North-East and Central macro-regions. In light of these findings, improving the education system's effectiveness and creating adequate political, institutional and legal arrangements that favour the development of human capital appear to be an absolute priority for Italy.
Highlights
In Italy, the stratified distribution of human capital, though assiduously debated, remains an unresolved puzzle: composite inequalities between genders, generations and socio-economic-cultural conditions create a multidimensional and variegated scenario, the complexity of whose phenomena and causal links must be acknowledged
In the last few decades, formal education statistics have shown high rates of participation in the education system and an increase in the number of graduates in the southern regions of Italy, which historically have had lower levels of education than the rest of the country. These data appear to point to a growing convergence between the performance of the school system in the South and those in the other macro-regions
If we shift the focus from formal education to real education data, i.e., the skills that people possess and use in their daily life – in work as in free time – this process of convergence is incomplete
Summary
In Italy, the stratified distribution of human capital, though assiduously debated, remains an unresolved puzzle: composite inequalities between genders, generations and socio-economic-cultural conditions create a multidimensional and variegated scenario, the complexity of whose phenomena and causal links must be acknowledged. International comparisons apart, this does not describe the entire situation: the low return on investment is evident in the early stages of a career, not in subsequent ones All, this conjecture is far from applying to the South, where the return on education is higher than in the rest of Italy (Cingano and Cipollone 2009): the advantages associated with having a high level of human capital are even greater in areas with low percentages of highly skilled people, that is to say in the economically weakest parts of the country. Piecing together this puzzle calls for refining research techniques and oversampling the regional populations
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