24 - PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Contents

1. Personnel of the Public Administration

2. Activity of the Chambers of Commerce

3. Specific data on personnel and activity of the Public Administration

4. Information technologies in the Public Administration

1. Personnel of the Public Administration

Information on employees of the Public Administration are derived from the survey “Annual Account” calculated by the Government Accounting Department (Ministry of Economy and Finance), in compliance with title V of Decree n. 165/2001 (which replaced decree n. 29/1993).

The Annual Account is a Census Survey that involves over 10,000 Public Administrations and nearly 3.4 million employees (with an open ended contract). The total labour costs of the Public Administrations exceed 165 billion euro every year.

The variables surveyed are:

• number of employees and structure of employment;
• number of part-time workers and of workers with “flexible” contracts;
• paid and non-paid absences;
• turnover and mobility;
• age of employees and years in the job;
• level of educational attainment;
• geographical distribution;
• labour costs;
• average earnings of employees (per capita);
• funds deriving from integrative agreements.

Data are aggregated according to the following criteria:

• employees with open-ended contracts include teaching staff in the school sector having fixed-term contracts;
• the labour costs of staff who are not employees (atypical contracts) are computed separately.

The bodies surveyed belong to the following categories:

• National Health System
• Non-economic public bodies
• Research bodies
• Regions and local administrations
• Regions with special statute and autonomous provinces
• Ministries
• Tax agencies
• Presidency of the Council of Ministers
• Schools
• Higher Education in Arts and Music
• Universities
• Fire brigades
• Police
• Armed forces
• Courts
• Diplomatic Bodies
• Civil governors
• Penitentiary bodies

The survey covers all bodies that declared to have employees as of 31 December of the reference year.  Also surveyed are Institutions that operate only with staff outsourced from other public bodies and those that, due to administrative changes, were active only until a certain date.

Since 2006 the statistics include data on employees of the schools located in the Autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano. Due to this, from that year the number of employees increased by some 16,000 units, which are not imputable to new recruitment.

The information published in the Annual Account is also contained in a specific database (SICO - Information system on employment in the Public Administration). Each public body enters in the system its own data, and correct possible errors that the system itself or the controlling offices indicate.

2. Activity of the Chambers of Commerce

Information on the activity of the Chambers of Commerce is provided by Unioncamere – Italian Union of the Chambers of Commerce.

Unioncamere’s duties are defined in Law n.580 of 1993 and in several amendments and subsequent laws. In recent years the roles and the functions of the Chambers of Commerce increased significantly, and presently they are an institutional network in support of enterprises.

In February 2010 the regulations of the Chambers of Commerce were completely renewed, by means of Decree n. 23. Various important changes concerned both the juridical profile and the duties of the Chambers, which were also given functional autonomy. The concept of “Chambers system” was defined: it is a system that includes not only the Chambers of Commerce, but also the Regional Unions of the Chambers, the National Union of the Chambers, the agencies, and the Italian Chambers of Commerce abroad.

This section of the yearbook also contains dome data on the employees of the Chambers of Commerce of Lombardia. They are collected by Istat, through the survey on the balance sheets of the Chambers of Commerce.

More detailed information can be found in the explanatory note to section 17 – Public finance.

3. Specific data on personnel and activity of the Public Administration

This section of the yearbook contains a set of data on the presence, on the national territory, of Statistical Offices. The source of the information is Sistan – National Statistical System.

The National Statistical System (Sistan) is the network of private and public bodies that provide official statistical information. The system comprises:

• Istat (National Statistics Institute);
• Public bodies and organisations that provide statistical information (Isae, Inea, Isfol);
• the statistical offices of the State administrations;
• the statistical offices of the public administrations and bodies (identified by Law);
• the statistical offices of the autonomous regions and provinces
• the statistical offices of provinces, of municipalities, of local healthcare units, of the Chambers of Commerce;
• the statistical offices of private entities that have functions of public interest and are essential for the functioning of the system itself.

The primary objective of Sistan it to provide the country and the international organisations with official statistics that meet the following principles: reliability, impartiality, timeliness, protection of respondents’ privacy, transparency, minimum burden on respondents, efficiency.

The activities of Sistan are supervised by a Commission for the guarantee of statistical information, which is an external, autonomous and independent entity. This commission supervises the following aspects of the statistical information: impartiality, completeness, quality of the methodology, compliance of the surveys with Community and international directives.

This section of the yearbook also presents data on the number of employees of the social security bodies, which are collected by Istat within the survey on the balance sheets of the social security bodies.

This survey contributes to the calculation of the economic account of the Public Administrations (according to the schemes set by the European System of Accounts – ESA95) and to the calculation of the economic account of social protection (according to the criteria ret by the European System of Integrated Statistics on social protection - Sespros).

4. Information technologies in the Public Administration

In 2006 Istat carried out an experimental survey on the use of  ICT in the Italian municipalities.

The data collected related to the organisational aspects of the use of ICT in the local administrations, the type of equipment used, and the use made by the local administrations with regard to their own production processes and to the services provided.

In line with the E-Europe programmes and the national objectives, this survey is part of the Italian system of statistics on the Information Society.

The survey was conducted on a stratified sample of municipalities. The sample included all provincial capitals and al municipalities having a population of at least 60,000 inhabitants. The reference year was 2005 (however, for some variables the reference year was 2004).