THE AGEING PROCESS AND THE ITALIAN LABOUR MARKET

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the role of the ageing process in the current age, where research activity is an expression of the characteristics of the human capital engaged in economic performance. The empirical evidence based on data about the Italian labour market, as a case study representative of the progressive ageing process in the last twenty years, shows an enlargement of the relative number of older workers at a high level of development and a higher supply of young labour when economic growth is fast. These results encourage the idea of evaluating the demographic dynamics on economic growth, with a Schumpeterian approach that captures the combined effect of experience and cognitive abilities linked to the age structure of employees and its influence on the capacity to generate new ideas.