LIBRI DI ANTONIO ACCONCIA

Il volume presenta i risultati più importanti ottenuti nell’ambito del progetto RICART (Rete Innovativa di Collaborazione dell’Artigianato artistico in Campania), nato allo scopo di delineare lo stato del settore dell’artigianato artistico in Campania. Il progetto si è posto sia l’obiettivo di esplorare quanto le imprese del settore possano contribuire allo sviluppo del territorio, sia quello di individuare le modalità di aggregazione, condivisione e collaborazione più efficaci per favorire la crescita del settore e del territorio. RICART ha visto come partner partecipanti le sette università della Campania, il consorzio Universitario CUEIM, l’Istituto di Ricerca su Innovazione e Servizi per lo Sviluppo del CNR (IRISS - CNR), l'agenzia di formazione Prisma Consulting e le società PROTOM GROUP e ARES 2.0, con capofila l’Università di Salerno.

The paper uses an original dataset to analyse the distribution of broadband take-up in the Italian provinces. Although the results should be approached with caution, from the perspective of cause-and-effect interpretation, we point out the interesting fact that broadband technology take-up is highly correlated to factors of wealth, level of education and degree of concentration of the offering, even after checking the demographic and typical morphology of the provinces. The first two factors would justify the alarm voiced by those commentators who fear the emergence of a new form of social inequality, driven by easy access to the new-generation of services available through the Internet.

We consider a simple economy where self interested taxpayers have incentives to evade taxes and to escape sanctions by bribing public officials in charge of tax collection. However, tax collectors may be monitored by second-level inspectors whose incentives to exert detection activity are endogenously determined. In this framework, it is shown that the effects of classical deterrence instruments, such as fines, may be perverse; in particular, larger fines for corruption directly reduce corruption and indirectly reduce incentives to monitor it determining, as an overall effect, an increase in the underlying offence, that is tax evasion. Nevertheless, on the normative side, we show that, even if the Government cannot commit to a given level of deterrence, the maximal fine principle still holds.

Looking at the distribution of income per capita across a large set of European regions since 1975 up to 1999, we conclude for a substantial stability of regional inequalities. It seems that on average the process of economic growth affect all regions in the same proportional way, that is, initial relative positions remain largely unaltered. A different conclusion is reached, however, if we concentrate on the evolution of labour productivity and employment ratio, respectively. In particular, our data suggest a process of decreasing dispersion in labour productivity (convergence), as well as a tendency for regions with relatively low (high) productivity levels to advantage of growth of employment ratio at a rate less (more) than the average. This determined an increase of the correlation between productivity and employment ratio. The latter conclusion is in line with both the traditional neoclassical theory and some of new growth theory models.

Regional Development and Public Spending: the Case of Italy (by Antonio Acconcia, Alfredo Del Monte) - ABSTRACT: In Italy redistribution and regional policies have been implemented since World War II; poorer regions have been receiving large amount of public funds, namely public consumption and infrastructure investment, to stimulate economic activity or, more generally, to increase welfare. Starting with this premise, the paper analyses the effects of public spending on regional growth in Italy. Taking advantage of both the spatial and the time dimension of the available data, we offer results of two distinct panel analyses which stress the cross-section or the time dimension, respectively. The main results are the following: there is a positive relationship between regional growth and infrastructure capital which mainly holds for the Manufacturing sector; within the Manufacturing sector, the impact of public investment on productivity is noticeably stronger for the low-income group of regions than for the high-income group of regions. No positive impact of public consumption on productivity is detected. Keywords: regional disparities; infrastructure investment; public consumption. JEL Classification: O18, H54