A caccia di informazioni accurate sui «fantasmi». Una proposta per l’analisi del fabbisogno professionale e formativo

In the debate on unemployment in European countries virtually all observers and policy makers agree on the utility of active labour policies, even if a clear proof of their effectiveness is still missing. This general agreement concerns also vocational training schemes, and the idea that these should be realized as a response to the «training needs» of firms. Many public and private organizations have tried to seek better information on this «ghost entity» during the last decade. These efforts have been relatively unsuccessful, mainly because of the limits of the survey schemes currently employed in this field. In this work we present a scheme which has been employed in numerous surveys with the aim to overcome many of those limits. It is based on the idea that, in order to get affordable forecasts from the indications made by the firms, it is necessary to assess these indications on the basis of past behaviours, and the latter on the basis of the technological, organizational and market characteristics of firms themselves.