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 Mrs Thatcher's government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Major's government (1990-1997) The...

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,...

We study the internationalisation process in a representative sample of 786 firms in the Italian automotive supply chain. Most of these firms have agglomerated in the Turin industrial district, the cradle of FIAT, the dominant Italian car-maker and one of the global players in the automotive...

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...

This paper analyses the micro-history of an irrigation infrastructure in the Alps, the Rû Courtaud, bringing water from the glacier of Ventina along the Ayas Valley, until some villages in the countryside of Saint-Vincent. Established in 1393, the infrastructure is still working and serving the...

When decision-makers consider pure and applied research infrastructures, such as genomics platforms, astronomic observatories, nanoelectronic laboratories, oceanographic vessels, or particle accelerator facilities (just to mention some examples) are faced by this question: what is the net social...

The research question addressed by this paper is a simple one: are European consumers happy with the price they pay for electricity supply services after two decades of reforms? We focus on self-assessed consumers’ satisfaction as reported in three waves of Eurobarometer survey,...

Jean-Jacques Laffont's work has deeply influenced public economics, and has established an important framework for the theory of incentives and regulation. He died in 2004, but his last book, based on the Caffe' Lecture in Rome, has now been published (Laffont J-J, Regulation and Development,...

This paper proposes three propositions for the future of European industrial policy, based on a discussion of the Report 'An Agenda for a Growing Europe' (Sapir at al, 2004). My first proposition is that the growth gap between US and EU indeed exists, it is not a statistical artefact, in spite...

In this paper we analyse the so called "planning contracts" which were adopted by the Italian Government in 1986 to promote industrial development in the South, that is the least favoured area of the country. The paper is organised in two sections. First, we present a full and detailed picture...