The programme of the Festival

Italy needs new businesses, capable of exploiting the skills, know-how and creativity of its young people; their university and secondary school education, their knowledge and experience. How are ‘young’ businesses born? What characterizes them? What are the main obstacles to their development? And what, instead, are the initiatives – at all levels – that can be taken to promote them? This is what will be discussed in Bari, starting with the real-life experiences of a dozen new business owners, their stories and their successes.

Speakers
Alessandro Andreatta, Davide Bassi, Tito Boeri, Gregorio De Felice, Lorenzo Dellai, Giuseppe Laterza, Armando Massarenti

Towards a life-affirming economy. What changes are needed to ensure that the economy can serve the purpose of peace, through the reduction of direct, structural and cultural violence and the satisfaction of the fundamental needs of all human beings, thereby contributing to equitable human relations and guaranteeing the minimum impact from an ecological point of view?

Italy holds the record for the amount of time young people remain under their parents’ roof. Is this a problem? Yes, because it has repercussions on social mobility, business initiatives, salaries, and therefore on the economy and society at large. Is this the fault of the bamboccioni as Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa famously called them? No, or at least only in part. Culture is a factor, as are intergenerational relations, not to mention the policies and institutions that provide so few opportunities for young people.

Three specific themes in one event open to the public will address the delicate issues of inheritance and donations, including from a business perspective: ‘Family pacts for transferring businesses between generations’ (10.00-10.45); ‘Donations’ (10.45-11.30); ‘Inheritance’ (11.30-12.15).

The watershed of the thirty-fifth year traditionally divided life into two halves: in the first half, it was often claimed, parents helped their children; in the second half these roles were reversed. Family solidarity has established criteria for looking after family members and transmitting goods between generations. With the advent of the Welfare State the family has been relieved of many duties The recent financial crisis has shown how these social services are now in decline, sparking the rediscovery of the values of familial solidarity and the safeguarding of future generations.

Growing disparities in income pose new economic, social and political challenges. The generational fractures are increasingly pronounced owing to the limited possibilities for upward social mobility. Experiences in countries where social inequalities are marked, including in Italy, will be compared with the more virtuous experiences of the Nordic countries.

Currently the dollar is the world's currency (the only true international and reserve currency), although there are widespread doubts about whether it can retain this status and, if not, what will replace it. This lecture uses economic history – looking backward across the generations – to shed light on the prospects, risks and implications. 

Discussed by Lorenzo Robustelli, Alessandro Rosina

Over the past forty years income and wage inequality have increased markedly in the United States and United Kingdom. Less attention has been paid to trends in expenditure and consumption inequality. Yet the wellbeing of families and individuals depends on consumption and less directly on income. Living standards can remain unchanged even as income falls if families succeed in absorbing the negative shocks. Unfortunately, recent studies suggest that the rise in income inequality is being accompanied by an almost equal increase in consumption inequality. 

Family ownership is a typical trait of Italian businesses. The transfer of control from one generation to another is a delicate operation. How can this event be made less traumatic? What models, if any, can be followed?

Nowadays progress in health and longer life expectancy allow human beings to enjoy a much more active old age than ever before. In the United States, there is a lot of debate around the possibility of working well past sixty: this is seen as a way of ‘repaying’ to society what individuals have received in the course of their lifetime, but also of creating original economic initiatives through a ‘new diffuse social entrepreneurship’.

In a historic phase in which the economic crisis is profoundly reshaping lifestyles, certainties and trust, how will the relationship between the new generations and the world of finance evolve?

A meditation on the relation between climate change and the current crisis of the hegemonic economic model, with an eye to future developments and the responsibility of choices that must orient a new economy, guaranteeing environmental sustainability for future generations. 

There is one theme that is repeated in every single survey of schools, and that is Italy’s deficit in the education of its human capital, from the perspective both of quality (learning levels, competencies required by the world of industry) and equity (differences based on the social and cultural origins of families). The gap begins to form in lower-secondary schools and is amplified at higher-secondary level and at university. The economic and social cost is enormous and calls for urgent measures for the recruitment and education of teachers, the organization of schools, assessments and the definition of the subjects to be taught.

Presented by Oscar Giannino

Sustainable agriculture integrates environmental protection, economic profitability, social and economic equity. Sustainable agriculture can be a field of application for another economy, understood as the production and exchange of goods, not subject to mechanisms of financial speculation, and universally equitable and sustainable, including for future generations.

Unlike most advanced economies, Italy’s public debt problem existed well before the crisis. Since 1991 the debt-to-GDP ratio has consistently been above 100%. What decisions on expenditure and revenue have brought about this situation and when were they taken? Public debt has since become a problem for all the advanced economies. What are the prospects for the future?  

Who creates jobs? Small businesses, large businesses or young businesses? The conventional wisdom is that small businesses are the primary creators of jobs. The evidence shows instead that it is business start-ups and fast growing young businesses, which happen to be small, that disproportionately create jobs. Small, mature businesses tend to be net destroyers of jobs.

Wealth is a stock of endowments and flows that expand over time – if – on the part of individuals, persons and society, there is a dynamism that favours an increase in wellbeing. A solid economic and financial culture from an early age is proof of the transfer of wellbeing between generations.

Discussed by Valeria Fedeli, Andrea Ichino, Anna Maria Tarantola

As the eurozone crisis unfolds, mistakes matter, but so do expectations. And it is expectations that will decide in what direction Europe is headed, whether towards the collapse of the area and the single currency or its salvation. The problem is that expectations can also be generated by erroneous perceptions and still end up becoming reality. An original and unorthodox analysis of the economic situation by one of the great contemporary commentators and undisputed leaders of international finance.
 

Women’s work is strongly conditioned by the needs of the family, such as maternity leave and periods of assistance to children and parents. Paid leave can weigh on the economic results of women (including on pensions). Mothers (and fathers) encourage daughters to reproduce (by caring for the grandchildren) while daughters care for elderly mothers (and fathers and fathers-in-law...). The social state does not always help reconcile work with caring for the family.

A dialogue and a debate on two economic models. Can the growth economy guarantee survival beyond the crisis, or is a radical paradigm shift instead required in economic theory and practice?

Why do we have a tendency to postpone tasks such as saving for our retirement or for our children’s education? Evolutionary psychology and the study of birds’ and human behaviour can help us explain these phenomena.

At what point is the revolution? On 19 February last, the cultural insert Domenica del Sole 24 Ore published a manifesto calling for ‘a Copernican revolution’ in the development-culture nexus, which had thousands of followers and sparked a national debate, earning the praise of President Giorgio Napolitano. Reactivating ‘the virtuous circle between learning, research, art, rights and work’ is the ambitious objective of the five points of the manifesto, which aim to promote human capital. Economists and scholars from the world of science and art take stock of the progress to date and examine what remains to be done.

Smart cities, smart citizens: what will cities (and territories) look like in the future? The transformation of the current landscape and a debate on how Internet and new ICT technologies can change lifestyles and interpersonal and intergenerational relations, both inside and outside cities.

Do the objects we consume everyday, those that surround us at home and in the workplace, the ones that tempt us from our TV and computer screens, have their own particular history? Can we speak about a ‘biography’ of objects, in a way that includes economic, cultural and social elements? If we think we can, then we can also talk about a genuine life cycle of products, which takes on a different meaning according to the moment: production, sales, utilization and finally ‘death’ – or better recycling, re-use or in any event transformation into something new. 
 

Discussed by Alberto Martinelli, Salvatore Rossi

Generational turnover is one of the most significant aspects of mafia power. Rituals and changes in the command style have emerged clearly in the major inquiries of recent years into the Mafia and ’ndrangheta, along with the growing role of women, both inside and outside the family.
Two magistrates at the front line in the fight against organized crime, first in Palermo and then in Reggio Calabria, together with an economist, reflect on the state of play today in one of the most decisive battles to unblock the economic and civil development of Italy. 

Equitable and sustainable pensions can also be achieved through supplementary pensions, and not just by extending the working life. The projects of APG and those of PensPlan open up new prospects for subsidiarity.

Economic growth is assumed to be good for human wellbeing; and the case made for free markets is often that they will maximize growth. But recent research into determinants of human happiness questions whether growth should be the objective; and free markets in finance have clearly not delivered even the growth benefits promised. Adair Turner’s lecture will explore what economics can tell us both about desirable social objectives and about the means by which we pursue them. It will argue that while growth itself is not the primary objective, it is a likely result of other desirable aims, such as economic freedom. That alternative justification has, however, profound implications for important aspects of public policy.

The family is the only place in which all the generations meet and where everyone feels as if they are part of a mobile and complex system of transfers. In recent years, not only have the contours of the family changed but also its traditional structure, since for economic, social and affective reasons, grandparents have been placed at the centre of the household geometry. A providential change and at the same time a risky one insofar as it tends to isolate the family from society, hindering the emancipation of children and creating new forms of dependency. All contradictions that merit identification and analysis.

Michele Pellizzari, Nicola Sartor, Antonio Schizzerotto and Claudio Siciliotti discuss the results of a wide sample survey on the role of the family in the early stages of children’s professional careers. The results help us understand the support available today for reforms that liberalize the markets and reduce dynastic constraints in the labour market. 
 

Discussed by Alessandro Barbera, Paolo Guerrieri

Reformulating the title of the film by Jean-Paul Jaud as a question serves to examine the issue of intergenerational transfers in the current economic crisis. The traditional economy is deaf to the reality of the Anthropocentric and is sacrificing the future generations by resorting to the expedient of a mystifying discounting tax. We must now leave the economy behind and build a society of deceleration.