RISULTATI RICERCA

The partial privatisation in 1999 of the water supply, sewage collection and treatment company of Berlin, Berliner Wasserbetriebe (BWB), was the most significant privatisation in the water sector in the European Union after the privatisation of the British water industry under Mrs. Thatcher in 1989. During the 1990s the Berlin Senate developed a privatisation programme for its participation in the public utilities sectors (building, water, gas, electricity, as well as local banking). BWB was restructured in a holding company, to be partially sold (49,9%) for 1.65 billion Euros to an international consortia composed by RWE Aqua, CGEA Deutschland (Vivendi) and Allianz. The main reason was not an ideological one, but the extreme difficult financial situation of Berlin, which is today still precarious, due to the high costs for its reconstruction and huge transformations into the German capital town. The privatisation of BWB is presented today as a potential model for partial privatisation of public assets throughout Europe. Nevertheless, the main suggestion is to consider the Berlin case as an exception. When partially sold, BWB was a sound company, with high quality standards, serving an important local market of up to 4 million people. The rules, the procedures and the decisions in this case depended from the specific local social, political and economic conditions. Today Berlin presents indeed the highest standards in services, but suffers also among the highest tariffs in Germany and in Europe. These tariffs are necessary to recover high production costs, but also to remunerate the interest rates of the private investors. The privatisation of BWB represented therefore a short period success, producing an urgently needed financial flow for the Berlin Administration. In the longer term, many critical voices to this model are emerging. The present contribution describes how the partial privatisation of BWB took place, and which effects it produced in these first four years.

The aim of the paper is to reconsider the Italian transport policy. First, the six main transport policies implemented in Italy since the sixties are deeply analysed: building of infrastructure; supply of public services; promotion of competition; reduction of external costs; internationalisation; promotion of innovation. Then, they are compared using four Kuhnian paradigms of state intervention in the economy. Finally, two conclusions come out: 1) the today prevailing competitive paradigm is not adequate to promote and to make viable the creation of new transport systems; 2) there is a need to explicitly refer to structural and dynamic paradigms as the theoretical foundations of an entirely new transport policy.

Due to the Growth and Stability Pact, Local and Regional governments face an hard budget constraint, thus they have to levy taxes to finance their expenses. This paper measures the incidence of the fiscal policies levied in Marche Region on income. We run the analysis using a biregional CGE model, Marche vs Rest of Italy, which let us evaluate the impact of regional taxes (regional additional on IRPEF and IRAP), of local taxes (comunal additional on IRPEF and ICI) and of tariff (gas, water and waste) on income. Comparative static exercises show that the impact on income comes mainly from regional taxes. The overall effective tax rate shows an U shape with respect to income. The U shape depends on two regional taxes: on the strong progressivity of regional additional on IRPEF applied by Marche explains the high pressure on higher income; and on the effective tax burden of IRAP which affects the workers with lower income and not firms that legally pay it.

There is abundant evidence of a relationship between socio-economic variables, such as income, wealth or labour position, and a variety of health outcomes, in terms of mortality and morbidity. Recently, some scientists have tried to prove that is not income itself, but inequality in income, that causes negative effects on health. This kind of approach is named relative income hypothesis, in contrast to the absolute income hypothesis. Another approach, held mostly by academic economists, denies the existence of a causal link between income and health, and supports the opposite causality relationship, which considers the initial stock of health as the determining factor of individual income and wealth. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the existing literature on the connection between socio-economic variables and health in industrialized countries. The second part is devoted to comment on the existing debate between the absolute income and relative income assumptions, and on the analysis of the different health policy measures that each approach implies.