Administrative Burdens on Business Activities: Regional Disparities

A significant strand of the recent literature endorses the thesis that “excessive” regulation (or a heavy administrative burden on firms) damages competition and growth. The Italian system has a poor ranking both in anti-competitive regulations (see the OECD product market regulations indicators) and in bureaucratic burdens (80th in “Doing Business” in 2011), despite improvements in the former over the last 10 years. But Italy’s position is the result of a combination of possibly very different contexts, so it is useful to evaluate the differences between Italian regions with reference to some indicators that are likely to take different values (i.e. those that do not depend simply on national laws). The aim of this paper is to measure this variance with reference to the costs and the length of the various administrative procedures. Some suggestions on the potential impact of these inefficiencies and possible causes of the differences are discussed.