Optimal Endowments of Public Investment: An Empirical Analysis for the Spanish Regions

Regional infrastructures policies, through an increased public investment, are widely used to promote the development of poorer regions in the European countries. In this paper we try to find some evidence on the optimality in the provision of government capital for the case of the Spanish regions, during the period 1965-1995. To this end, a simple optimality condition is derived from an optimization growth model, namely, that marginal products of private and public capital should be equal. By comparing the values of both marginal products, obtained from the estimation of a simple production function, we should be able to infer whether the public capital stock in the Spanish regions is underprovided or not, relative to the private capital stock.