Disability and Work: A Two-Stage Empirical Analysis of Italian Evidence at Provincial Level in Providing Employment for Disabled Workers

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. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.