by Alessandra Cardone
ROME, Oct. 6 (Xinhua) -- A recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on a "low-skill equilibrium" hampering Italy's growth would highlight flaws deeply rooted in the country's economic and social fabric, an analyst said in an interview.
The euro-zone's third largest economy is currently suffering from a low supply of skills, matched with an equally low demand, the OECD wrote in the report Skills Strategy Diagnostic on Thursday.
"(Italy's) productive sector is marked by relatively few tertiary educated workers, and a small inflow of new graduates to the labor market," the report said.
At the same time, the study warned Italian businesses often fail to make the most effective use of available skills in the workplace.
"Italy have always been marked by a limited attention paid to formal professional skills, and by a certain predominance of humanistic and jurisprudential training over the scientific and technical one," Andrea Goldstein, managing director of Bologna-based think-thank Nomisma, told Xinhua.
"Our economy has always benefited from a specialization of production in which formal skills were not the most crucial factor," he explained.
As such, compared with other countries, investing in tertiary education has not always been seen as a major priority, neither by families, nor by the society as a whole, according to the expert.
Yet, the current combination of a low supply and a low demand of skills would represent a heavy obstacle for the country's future chances to boost its growth. "The sum of these two elements is the very worrying thing," Nomisma's chief economist said.
He also stressed that, of the two flaws, the low demand of skills was perhaps the most alarming. If the productive system were unable to absorb the most effective skills, in fact, highly qualified workers would either have to choose between taking jobs below their qualification, or find the right opportunities abroad (both of which very often happen to Italian university-graduates).
"In both cases, the advanced skills are dissipated, despite being the result of a high cost sustained by the Italian society (being the country's education system mainly public)," Goldstein warned.
The OECD report mirrored the expert's analysis. For example, it stressed that Italy was "the only G7 country with a higher share of tertiary educated workers engaged in routine occupations, than in non-routine tasks requiring more complicated activities, such as creative problem solving and decision making."
This would result from the low demand for higher levels of skills, which "may be connected to the large share of family-owned businesses," according to the OECD.
This was another problem ingrained in the country's productive model, the expert said. "Our productive sector sees a large majority of family-run businesses, which are usually less prone to promote external talents," noted Goldstein, who also suggested looking at the problem through a wider, cultural perspective.
"In the last 15 years, our society has taken celebrities from the show-biz as model of success, for example, much more than researchers or scientists," he explained. Other countries did better in choosing their values, and defining their success examples.
Although critical, the OECD report acknowledged Italian authorities' efforts to improve the responsiveness of the labor market through a set of structural reforms in recent years.
Among such measures, it mentioned the Industry 4.0 National Plan, a package that could play "a pivotal role in boosting sluggish Italian skill demand", the OECD wrote.
The plan alone, however, could only partially improve the situation, since machineries and technologies -- even the most advanced ones -- do not automatically produce more skills, Goldstein warned.
"The plan could be very effective only on the condition of being accompanied by an equally intense effort to improve the functioning of the education system," he said.
"So far, this seems to be the case, considering the cabinet's new budget law under discussion for the next year," he added.
