Giulio Ecchia

Social innovation is a topic of growing interest for research and a policy-relevant theme. This paper aims to develop an economic model to analyse social innovation as the community provision of a public good. In our model, social innovation is produced by social innovators in favour of the members of a target group. On the one hand, we assume social innovation to be an imperfect substitute for a “traditional” group-specific public good, produced by the local government and financed by taxes. On the other hand, social innovators are motivated to act by social preferences. Our results focus on public policy towards social innovation. We show that, from a welfare point of view, the traditional public good and social innovation should coexist, with governments also playing an active role in supporting social innovation through subsidies. We also show that each community member can be better off with social innovation, as relying on social innovators’ motivations can lower taxes used to finance traditional public goods and social innovation subsidies.

This paper examines the state of child well-being survey data in Italy, highlighting the lack of longitudinal, child-centred studies, discussing the importance of such data for evidence-based policymaking and comparing Italy’s situation with that of other European countries where cohort studies are more established. We emphasize the importance of high-quality, longitudinal data to inform social policy and capture the dynamic factors impacting well-being, such as economic, health, and educational conditions. Although international initiatives by organisations like UNICEF and the OECD, have advanced child well-being research, gaps remain in Italy, where data are fragmented and cross-sectional, limiting the understanding of long-term outcomes. We introduce GUIDE (Growing Up In Digital Europe), the proposed first pan-European birth cohort study, aimed at addressing this gap by providing harmonized, longitudinal data on child and youth well-being, collected by directly surveying children and their families. This would provide a novel perspective for social research in Italy, where data on children’s viewpoints remain underdeveloped. As part of this initiative, Italy will conduct a pilot study for GUIDE in 2025, with a focus on adapting international survey tools to Italy’s cultural context. We describe Italy’s pilot study for GUIDE, including pre-test findings and sampling strategies, emphasizing the project’s potential to inform social policy in Italy and across Europe. By enhancing Italy’s child well-being data, GUIDE is positioned to inform policy and intervention strategies, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the factors shaping child and youth well-being in Italy and Europe within a life-course framework.

This chapter discusses the methodological innovations and challenges related to surveying child well-being in Italy, and the role of the GUIDE (Growing Up in Digital Europe) project. The GUIDE research infrastructure aims to develop a comparative longitudinal survey on child well-being across European countries. The proposed survey would follow two cohorts of children, one from ages 8 to 24, and one between ages 1 and 24. The data collected through this longitudinal survey will provide a holistic evaluation of child well-being and constitute an evidence base for public policies at different territorial levels in participating countries, as well as creating a unique dataset for comparative policy analysis. Building on pilots conducted in five countries in 2023, the Italian GUIDE team at the University of Bologna pre-tested the implementation of the survey in Italy. In collaboration with the Italian National Research Council (CNR-IRPPS), the team also produced a design for the pilot in Italy. This design will facilitate the evaluation of different survey modes, with particular interest in the option for a “push to web” via self-completion Computer Assisted Web Interviews (CAWI). The pilot will also permit assessment of the robustness of the survey instrument to regional heterogeneity, as data will be collected in northern (Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna) and southern (Campania and Apulia) regions; specific technical elements of the sampling strategy are discussed. After outlining the state-of-the-art regarding data on child well-being in Italy, the chapter analyses the work conducted so far to establish GUIDE in Italy, and presents pathways to the full-scale launch of the GUIDE survey in 2027 in Italy and Europe.

The aim of this paper is to present the ex ante Socio‐Economic Impact Assessment of a European Social Science Research Infrastructure (RI) named EuroCohort that will provide, over the next 34 years, a longitudinal study of the well‐being of children and young people across Europe.

In this paper, we first rely on small area techniques to derive from EU statistics on income and living conditions (EU‐SILC) survey new indicators of compensatory and social‐investment policies at regional level. While compensatory policies have mainly the goal of protecting individuals from “old” risks (e.g., old‐age), investment‐related social policies tend to focus more on “new social risks” (e.g., skill deficits). We rely on these new indicators to perform a data‐driven structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) analysis to investigate the causal relationships between youth labor market outcomes and these two types of spending. Our results support the view that social‐investment policies are effective for tackling new social challenges. (JEL C18, C54, E02)