Salary levels, even in individual contracts, almost never distinguish between graduates from a low-ranking Italian university and a Harvard Ph.D. Judging by the standards of American, British and German graduate schools or the French grandes écoles, it is almost as if Italy had given up the idea of training its professional elite at home and delegated the task to universities abroad.
This pace was significantly above that in the previous five years, and you would have to go back to the 1960s to find even closely comparable periods of consistently robust economic expansion. In this environment, the unemployment rate fell to 4 percent, and the underlying rate of price inflation slowed, on net, despite very high rates of resource utilization.