Massimo Florio

Infrastructure and Growth in a Spatial Framework: Evidence from the EU regions

This paper examines the return to infrastructure in the European Union regions in a spatial framework. It innovates on the earlier literature on infrastructure and growth by a combination of regional focus, disaggregation of infrastructure types and consideration of spatial dependence. Different types of infrastructure capital are considered as determinants of economic performance at the Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques level. To account for growth spillovers among regions, a spatial Durbin model is estimated. The results confirm the important role of infrastructure and identify the highest rates of return as associated with telecommunication, quality and accessibility of transportation networks, with a positive impact of roads and railways.

A Logistic Growth Law for Government Expenditures: An Explanatory Analysis

Wagners Law would imply an exponential growth process of the ratio between public expenditures and national income (G/Y). However the law may be rejected both on theoretical and empirical reasons, because it disregards the role of ever increasing distortionary taxation. But, under someconditions, the combination of Wagners Law and the Pigous conjecture that the excess burden oftaxation constraints the growth of public expenditures, may be captured by a non-linear first orderdifferential equation. The equation is the Verhulsts logistic, originally invented to model althusian predictions on population growth. The integration of a Verhulst equation generates a S-shaped curve and preliminary econometric estimates on very long run trends (around 1870-2000) of G/Y in US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden seem to confirm similar logistic trajectories, in spite of different individual parameters.

Contemporary public enterprises: innovation, accountability, governance

Public enterprises (PE) are important players in the global economic arena. Recent empirical evidence confirms that more than 10% of the giant multinationals are government owned; that European PE successfully compete with their private counterparts in network industries such as electricity, gas and telecommunications; and that worldwide PE are found on both sides of the market for corporate control, i.e. they are not just targets of privatization, but also acquirers of private and public firms. In this context, three research themes emerge and are represented by papers in this special issue of the Journal of Economic Policy Reform: entrepreneurship and managerial motivation in PE; measurement of users’ satisfaction and accountability; relations of PE with regulators and governments.

Cost-benefit analysis of Infrastructure Projects in an Enlarged European Union: an Incentive-Oriented Approach

The purpose of the paper is to analyse some results of cost-benefit analysis in a sample of ISPA (Structural Instrument for pre-accession countries) projects. The focus is particularly on the variability of financial and economic rates of return and how to integrate this information in the EU co-financing mechanism. We investigate, through the analysis of variance of co-financing rate, to which extent variability of rates is due to structural characteristics (sectors, countries) or to the existence of a residual variance due both to specificity of the project and discretional element of the appraisal method, which may constitute an information noise. We find that the variance of co-financing rate across countries is poorly explained by different composition of sectors of investment. This suggests the need to reinforce a more consistent approach to evaluation and co-financing. We suggest some possible solutions.

The Welfare Impact of a Privatization: The British Telecom Case-History

In this paper we offer and discuss new evidence on the performance of British Telecom before and after privatisation. We use a unique dataset based on company accounts over forty years (1960-1999), and original additional company data on several variables. We focus particularly on output, prices, revenues, costs, employment, productivity, profits and investments. Our key-finding is that operative profits were remarkably stable before and after divestiture, and that ownership change per se had little discernible impact on productivity trends, particularly between 1984-1991. Major changes in performance after 1991 were however related to variations in financial arrangements, competition and regulatory pressure. This allows us to look at the BT case history as a natural experiment on the relative importance of privatisation, liberalization, and regulation.

Public enterprises, planning and policy adoption : three welfare propositions

Despite widespread privatizations over the last three decades, public enterprises, as production units under government control, are still present in several countries and sectors. While the academic and political debate on the costs and benefits of privatization is vast, a focus on the rationale for public enterprises, from the standpoint of Social Cost Benefit Analysis, is missing. This paper aims at filling this gap and provides a normative discussion on public enterprises in a general equilibrium setting. The conditions under which public provision may be beneficial and the metrics for evaluating polices and projects under (a)symmetric information and (non)benevolent governments are presented in three welfare propositions. The main policy message points to the overall quality of institutions as a necessary pre-condition for socially desirable public enterprises. A sound institutional environment provides policy-makers with the correct incentives to design and implement meaningful policies even if public administrators adopt sub-optimal plans. Institutions should constrain self-interested policy-makers from disrupting the key welfare signals for policy adoption as well as for project appraisal, while bias in management is a relatively less important concern.

Privatisation Discontent and Utility Reform in Latin America

Abstract Privatisation faces strong and increasingly popular opposition in Latin America. This paper uses individual data on social attitudes, socioeconomic status and demographic information from three waves of Latinobarometro surveys (1998, 2000 and 2002) in 17 countries to study the role of privatisation of utilities and its distributional impact. We find that disagreement with privatisation is most likely when the respondent is on a low-to-middle income and when it involves a high proportion of public services such as water and electricity. This complements recent empirical research that points to distributional concerns in the implementation of privatisation in Latin America, particularly because of inadequate regulation of utilities.

A State Without Ownership: The Welfare Impact of British Privatisations 1979-1997

This paper offers a comprehensive evaluation of the welfare impact of a policy usually regarded as highly successful and vastly imitated worldwide: the privatisation policy pursued in the UK by MrsThatchers government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Majors government (1990-1997) The British case history is particularly relevant for several reasons: Britain was the first developed country to embark on large scale public divestitures; the time span is long enough to see some long run effects; Conservative governments were able to consistently implement their policy with limited effective opposition; and there is already a wide body of scholarly literature and good data sources on British company performances, price trends and other relevant variables. The paper considers the impact of privatisations on five types of agents: firms, employees, shareholders, consumers and tax-payers. The main conclusion is that British privatisations had modest effects on the efficiency of production and consumption. On the other hand, privatisations did have important effects on the distribution of incomes and wealth. Thus the outcome of privatisation in the UK was modest and not unambiguosly a Pareto improvement.

Do you pay a fair price for electricity? Consumers’ satisfaction and utility reform in the EU

The research question addressed by this paper is a simple one: are European consumers happy with the electricity supply services after two decades of reforms? We focus on self-assessed consumers’ satisfaction with electricity prices as reported in three waves of Eurobarometer survey, 2000-2002-2004, conditioning on some indicators of public ownership, vertical integration and entry regulation across the EU-15. Our results do not support a systematic association between consumers’ satisfaction and the complete reform package made of privatisation, vertical disintegration and liberalisation. These results, which have been extensively tested for robustness, raise various concerns about the way the reform processes have been undertaken and provides some warnings about possible effects on public support for public utility reforms.

Fair trades by trade fairs: Information providing institutions under monopolistic competition

It is a standard result of search theory that the optimal reservation supply price, e.g. wage, is negatively correlated to search costs. This paper applies the inverse relationship, between demand prices and limit prices, to the analysis of an hitherto unexplored topic: trade fairs. Trade fairs bloomed during the Middle Ages and early trade-based capitalism and survived for centuries. In last decades, their growth became sustained: they attract every year hundreds of thousands of exhibitors and tens of millions of visitors.The driving forces behind the trade fair activity are increasing return to scale of search for information, under conditions of imperfect competition, particularly large group monopolistic competition. Under these circumstances, trade fairs offer their participants a collective substitute for information activities that would be beyond individual possibilities. This mechanism is of paramount importance for small firms. Where there are many small suppliers and buyers, and product differentiation, trade fairs give agents the opportunity of low-cost, high-density information exchanges, under spacetime constraints. This leads to lower search costs and lower limit prices, then fairer trades. But this mechanism also implies natural monopoly or oligopoly: the larger the trade fair, i.e. the larger the number of suppliers and visitors who participate, the less the average cost of the service. More generally, natural monopolies arising from decreasing-to-scale search costs ask for a new view of governments role either in the organization or in the regulation of information exchanges. Policy implications for small business development are stressed, including tariff regulation, public investment, and involvement of small business associations in the design and organization of trade fairs.