This paper draws and expands from a recent ex-post evaluation carried out for the European Commission aimed at assessing the long term effects produced by a sample of ten major infrastructures in the Transport and Environment sectors and interpreting the key determinants of the observed...

This paper briefly reviews some of the empirical findings of a research team of the University of Milan on privatization in different countries. The discussed effects include: effects on consumers, tax-payers, workers, shareholders; on aggregate growth, public finance, firms’ productivity,...

This paper comments an important book by Maurice FG. Scott, «A New View of Economic Growth». The main contribution of the book is to show that capital investment can sustain endogenous growth, as it embodies technical progress. Neoclassical theories of growth are based on an error in...

This paper supports the view that the deep roots of the current global crisis, which has taken the form of a mainly financial crisis, are related to a global fundamental unbalance in income distribution. There are two dimensions of the unbalance. The first one is between capital and labour...

This paper illustrates the story of the Port of Gioia Tauro, a major infrastructure investment co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund in the period 1994-1998, but whose origin dates back to the beginning of the 1970s. It draws from a recent ex-post evaluation carried out for the...

This paper, presented at the Sixth European Conference on Evaluation of Cohesion Policy (Warsaw, 30 November-1 December 2009), discusses why there is a strong need of ex-post Cost-Benefit analysis and which conditions should be met for a proper ex-post exercise to be carried out in the framework...

Discounting enables to express future monetary or socio-economic effects in terms of present values when inter-temporal decisions are to be taken. In the context of the cost-benefit analysis, this allows for directly comparing net benefits expressed in terms of their net present values, and,...

This paper presents the basic principles of the EU approach to cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of infrastructure projects, as embodied in the recently issued CBA Guide. After an introduction about the objectives and instruments of the 2007-2013 EU Cohesion Policy, and in particular the legal...

The aim of this paper is to study the characteristics of the internationalisation process and to identify its determinants in a representative sample of firms in the Italian automotive chain. The main findings of an econometric analysis based on micro-evidence are that: a) the firms engage in...

This paper analyses the household appliances district of Jesi-Fabriano. It shows how the internationalisation strategies of many enterprises are gradually modifying the organizational structure of the local production system. The diverse goals that have led the internationalisation processes and...