The paper summarizes the framework used in a research project on local public services carried out by Bank of Italy researchers. It discusses motivations, characteristics, results and general lessons of the project, whose sector-specific results are detailed in individual papers. The project was...

This paper studies the effects on local public transport of the reform begun in the late nineties, using data from a recent Bank of Italy survey. There are still substantial differences across Italy’s regions, and the level of efficiency is far from the original aims of the reform. Although...

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the size and the industrial and geographic distribution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in Italy. The discussion is organized into two sections. The first, based on OECD list of countries in "ICT Intensity Groups", show...

The Italian and European regulatory framework for patents would benefit from further improvements in order to foster dynamic competition between Italian firms. At the national level the exclusive allocation of the right to patent inventions to universities, rather than to researchers, would...

This paper studies the effects of differences in local administrative burdens in Italy in the years preceding a major reform that sped up firm registration procedures. Combining regulatory data from a survey on Italian provinces before the reform (costs and time to start a business) with...

In this collection of papers we first analyze the evolution of the Italian food industry and the retail trade sector during the past decade (Chapters 1 and 2). Chapter 3 describes the structure of large retailers and buying groups in Italy. Chapter 4 proposes alternative measures of the degree...

There has been a significant increase in project financing in the public sector in Europe in the past decade, benefiting the implementation of infrastructure projects. In Italy, project financing is still much more limited than in such countries as Spain and the UK: the projects funded are...

Using data from a Bank of Italy survey, this paper analyzes the Italian taxi market and its recent changes. Local regulations are rather homogeneous, while there is a widespread disproportion, within municipal advisory committees, between the number of representatives of taxi drivers and that of...

This paper presents a quantitative and analytical documentation to the debate on taxi service liberalization. The results of a survey of the Bank of Italy on the main Italian cities show that the supply of taxi is much lower than that of other foreign cities. The paper gives also some...

The modernization of the solid waste management sector prompted by the Ronchi decree of 1997 has proceeded slowly and is far from being completed. Regional differentials in the effectiveness of local policies and in the efficiency of waste collection and disposal firms are still large. Southern...