IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bdi/wptemi/td_403_01.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Seasonality and Capacity: an Application to Italy

Author

Listed:
  • Guido de Blasio

    (Banca d�Italia and International Monetary Fund)

  • Federico Mini

    (The World Bank)

Abstract

Information on seasonal frequencies can provide valuable insights for understanding economic fluctuations. This is particularly true for Italy, where the variability of production in manufacturing is extremely high and almost entirely due to seasonal factors. This paper identifies the qualitative and quantitative features of seasonal fluctuations in Italy and compares them to those of France and Germany. Seasonality in Italy is twice as large as in France, six times larger as in Germany. Qualitatively, seasonal fluctuations are extremely homogeneous across technologically different manufacturing sectors, giving informal support to the contention that Italian seasonality may be due to endogenous factors (synergies across agents) as opposed to exogenous ones (seasonality resulting from changes in underlying technology and preferences). Next, we quantify the amount of seasonally-driven excess capacity in the Italian manufacturing sector, and show that it is around thirty percent higher than that in France or Germany.

Suggested Citation

  • Guido de Blasio & Federico Mini, 2001. "Seasonality and Capacity: an Application to Italy," Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 403, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    • Handle: RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_403_01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/temi-discussione/2001/2001-0403/tema_403_01.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Luca Dedola & Eugenio Gaiotti & Luca Silipo, 2001. "Money demand in the euro area: do national differences matter?," Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 405, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    business cycle; seasonality;

    JEL classification:

    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • C49 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Other

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_403_01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bdigvit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.