RISULTATI RICERCA

The intellectual biography of Ardengo Soffici, a Tuscan artist and writer, is em-blematic of the artistic and political choices made by many Italian intellectuals dur-ing the first half of the twentieth century. Through a close analysis of his writings published in the Florentine review «La Vraie Italie» immediately after the end of the Great War, it’s possible to understand how the Italian intellectuals helped to create the climate of disappointment and strong and violent nationalism that facili-tated the rise of Mussolini’s regime, with remarkable consequences for the 20’s and the 30’s.

At the beginning of the XXth century, the European educated youth showed an increasing polemical attitude toward its fathers generation. In Italy, this clash be-tween fathers and sons had a strong political impact even before the First World War. During the Giolittian era, young liberals, young socialists, young re-publicans and nationalist students challenged the leaders of their parties, in the name of an idealistic conception of politics, with a consequent tendency to deny the art of compromise and a pragmatic approach to reforms.

The issue of the «correct» level of the tariffs for public transport (and of the corresponding «correct» level of subsidies) has been ignored in Italy, even if the actual level of the tariffs is the lowest in Europe. Being this mainly a political decision, the economic analysis can only provide some factual background, related to opportunity costs, alternative measures expected impacts, distributive effects, environmental effects etc. In particular, the paper deals with possible regressive income distribution impacts of the combined high fuel taxes for car users and high subsidies for transit riders in metropolitan areas, and with the «capture» mechanism that seems implicit in the absence of any social impact survey at any administrative level. Eventually, an alternative approach is suggested for some extra-urban services: subsidies aimed only at specific «targeted» social groups, with a substantial liberalization process on the supply side. But the main recommendation remains focused on the need of a public and transparent debate on this issue, given its political content.

This paper deals with a new method of paying doctors, based on «satisfaction» of patients. Among the methods currently used, no one, up to now, seems apt to give «voice» to the patient, being rather based on the idea of «exit» if not satisfied. This is because the methods based on capitation, salary, fees, budget, and so on can not take account of the success of the therapy; the payment, in fact, is either independent from limited cases of low quality visits (dealing with average quality) as in the case of capitation, salary and budget or could be too sensitive (fees) as the patient has the incentive to misreport the health gains, in order to be exempted from the payment of fees (this case applies when the patient has already decided to change the doctor) or, again, the patient can misreport the poor quality if he pays by fees but fears a negative reaction by his doctor and he still wants to be his client. Our thesis, shown by a simple model, is that we can devise a method that can induce a correct revelation of patient’s satisfaction. This could help in such cases when the dissatisfaction is «mild», and the patient do not want to use the option of «exit». The paper, moreover, tries to estimate the likely financial and distributional impact of our proposal for Italy.

The Budget Law of 2002 has completed the local public services reform that Parliament has been working on for some years. While waiting to ascertain the shape that such a breakthrough will assume from an applicative standpoint and the juridical developments that shall follow the filing of an infringement procedure issued by the European Commission against the Italian Government, this article deals with the main features of the new discipline and tries to shed light on some of the interpretative issues. The contribution ends with a number of considerations concerning the possible constitutional illegitimacy of article 35 of Law 448/2001 and the fact that this could prompt the Constitutional Court to declare the entire law unconstitutional.