This paper offers a new theory and empirical testing of long-term trends of public expenditures for five countries. While Wagner’s Law would imply an exponential growth process of the ratio between public expenditures and national income (G/Y), the law should be rejected both on theoretical...

We consider results of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in a large sample of ISPA (Structural Instrument for Pre-Accession countries) projects co-financed by the European Union to support investment in transport and environment. The research focus is on the empirical analysis of the variability of...

In this paper we study the furniture industry in two European countries, Germany and Italy. Although the two industries are characterized by very similar output and technology, they differ widely in terms of market organization, most notably the distribution of firms by size, and the...

This paper applies incentive theory to the context of the European Union (EU) Regional Policy. The core instruments of the policy are the Structural Funds, capital grants that ?ow from the European Commission (EC) to Mem- ber States and regional authorities to promote investment and growth at...

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 typical ingredients of energy reforms in the European Union (EU) in the 1990s were full or partial privatization, vertical disintegration and liberalization. This paper analyses the effects of energy reforms on the probability of households experiencing deprivation, defined as difficulty in...

This paper criticises the view that deviations from uniformity in capital taxation, as measured by dispersion of effective marginal tax rates in the King-Fullerton (1984) framework, are always undesirable. International evidence shows a consistent pattern of tax selectivity. We argue that in...

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...