Abstract
Law 68 of March 12, 1999, whose aim is the regulation and promotion of the employment of persons with disabilities, has contributed significantly to their employment of disabled people, and consequently to their social inclusion, by transferring the responsibility for its implementation to the local authorities. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of Italian provinces in providing employment of disabled people according to law 68/99 and to examine which are the factors that could lead to an improvement of efficiency of the provinces that are not classified among the most efficient ones in the application of article 13 of this law. To this purpose, we propose a two-step analysis. First, we apply data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique in order to evaluate provinces’ performance with respect to the number of disabled people employed. Then, we apply models for censored data (Tobit model) to the efficiency scores obtained from DEA analysis. The results show that the sheer presence of potential employers and of employment offices is not enough to make a province able to correctly apply the law 68/1999. A second group of variables, i.e. socio-welfare factors, has to be considered, as the environmental context where each Province operates could influence the efficiency of each province in providing employment for disabled people. Hence, socio-welfare variables ought to be included as policy instruments in order to promote the integration of disabled people in the labour market.
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Notes
The prerequisite to take advantage of the benefits provided by law 68/99 is the inclusion in the compulsory employment lists, that are held by the employment services of the provincial governments. Employment services usually enroll the applicant in the lists of compulsory employment conditionally to further assessment of disability by health care bodies. Next to the entering, the disabled is then able to join the job opportunities that come to the employment service from both public bodies and private companies, by filling out the form reservation.
Article 13 of law 68/99 offers exemption from national security contributions to private employers that employ disabled people. More specifically, it provides total exemption for each disabled people employed who has a reduced capacity to work of more than 79 %; for a maximum of 8 years, and the exemption of 50 % for each disabled person employed who has a reduced capacity to work between 67 and 79 %, for a maximum of 5 years.
In this paper we omit the number of public sector organizations, that have been considered in a previous paper (Agovino and Rapposelli 2013b), because here we are referring specifically to article 13 of the law 68/1999, which consider only the private sector.
B type of cooperatives were established in article 1 of Law 381 of November 8, 1991. They are not for profit organizations, aiming at providing employment for disadvantaged groups, such as disabled people, formerly convicted people, people formerly involved with substances.
Potential in the sense that not all firms which ought to employ disabled people actually do so (see for instance Ministry of Employment 2004–2005).
In this application we do not identify private firms according to the number of employees, because a problem would be faced: due to the high number of variables included in the DEA analysis with respect to the number of units, there would not be a reasonable level of differentiation between DMUs evaluated (Dyson et al. 2001).
There are a number of ways in which environmental variables can be accommodated in a DEA analysis. In our application we incorporate them directly into the linear programming formulation (Ferrier and Knox Lovell 1990).
This test can be used to identify outliers in a data set and allows us to create a new variable that takes value equal to 1 if the observation is an outlier, 0 otherwise. The Grubbs test detects one outlier at each iteration and this operation is iterated until no outliers remain.
The winsorization is a statistical procedure for the artificial modification of the sampling distribution of random variables. It allows the replacement of outliers with threshold values appropriately constructed.
In the censored regression model, the exogenous variables are also observed for the units where the dependent variable takes values higher (or lower) the threshold, while in the truncated regression model these observations are completely eliminated from the sample.
These services are provided by cooperatives societies type A. They are directly involved in care, rehabilitation and education of disabled people, sick, elderly people, children, the homeless, people with mental distress, and they usually work in cooperation with public bodies.
In Italy the social capital supply was mainly used as one of the elements that help to explain the significant spatial differences that characterize the development of the country (Micucci and Nuzzo 2005). The inclusion in our analysis of socio-welfare factors is supported by the widespread idea that it is not possible to correctly interpret economic phenomena without regard to their relational dimension (Sabatini 2004). These relational phenomena contribute to the performance of companies no less than the availability of physical capital such as machinery and sheds.
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Agovino, M., Rapposelli, A. Disability and Work: A Two-Stage Empirical Analysis of Italian Evidence at Provincial Level in Providing Employment for Disabled Workers. Soc Indic Res 125, 635–648 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0851-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0851-z