LIBRI DI EDOARDO MARCUCCI

Il volume raccoglie alcuni saggi di politica economica dedicati a Gian Cesare Romagnoli e presentati nella Giornata in suo onore all’Università Roma Tre. Tra i temi affrontati: la contabilità economica italiana ed europea; la politica economica dell’ambiente; una trattazione metodologica e applicata del ciclo economico, del commercio internazionale, della sostenibilità fiscale del debito pubblico e dello stato del benessere per l’infanzia; la politica dei trasporti e la politica economica regionale.

City logistics require an understanding of a number of issues that are seldom accounted for in current research. Policies may produce unsatisfactory results because behavioural and contextual aspects are not considered. Relevant data is crucial for forecasting the reactions of agents to policy changes. Despite recent methodological advances the development of appropriate survey instruments is still lacking to test policy acceptability. This paper expands and innovates the methodological literature by describing a stated ranking experiment to study freight agent interactive behaviour.

In the last years Energy Efficiency (EE) has become an important issue in the public policy makers’ agenda due to ambitious objectives of the European Commission to reduce energy consumption by 20% in 2020. Many countries have adopted state-level EE programs targeted to include Energy Saving (ES) policy mixes in different sectors including transportation that is among the most energy intensive ones. The aims of this paper are to: i) report briefly the macroareas of state-level transport EE policies related to the transport sector, ii) verify the level of implementation of these policies among some European countries, iii) highlight, for each country considered, the EE measures adopted up to 2007 and compare the results obtained, iv) evaluate the implementation of EE transport successful measures adopted by each respective National Energy Agency (NEAs), and finally v) compare the main results deriving from EE policy implementation. In particular, in this last objective we adapted the good practice policy mix framework for car passenger transport proposed by the AID-EE Project at the information obtained from countries’ National Energy Programmes (NEPs) updated to 2007.

The paper provides an evaluation of the Ecopass road pricing scheme for the years 2008, 2009 and 2010. The term Ecopass conveys the stated political objective of the scheme: a PASS to improve the quality of the urban environment (ECO). The scheme has actually improved the air quality in Milan, although the recommended PM10 threshold is still exceeded for a larger number of days than that recommended by EU directives. This paper estimates the costs and benefits of the scheme three years after its implementation using the same methodology applied in Rotaris et al. (2010) for the year 2008. The results indicate that the benefits still exceed the costs, and by an increasing amount, but at an annual decreasing rate of improvement. The Ecopass scheme has proved beneficial, but it seems to have exhausted its potential: little further gains in air quality could be obtained via a fiscal incentive to improve the abatement technology of the vehicles. The new administration, elected in June 2011, was faced with the task of deciding whether to dismiss, maintain or change the Ecopass scheme. The prevailing idea coming from the Ecopass Commission and from the advocacy groups was to extend both the area of application and the number of classes subject to the charge. In November 2011 the new administration decided to substitute Ecopass with Area C, a policy based on a congestion charge which incorporates some environmental elements.

I modelli a scelta discreta sono, ormai, uno strumento indispensabile per l’economista applicato che si voglia confrontare, ad esempio, con lo studio della domanda di trasporto, o con altri temi di ricerca tipici dell’economia applicata, come la scelta localizzativa delle imprese multinazionali (economia industriale) o quella delle famiglie (economia regionale). Il volume illustra i fondamenti teorici e le componenti strutturali dei modelli a scelta discreta.

The paper illustrates a method to detect and estimate interaction effects in household decision-making and tests the representative member hypothesis by studying how preferences of single members influence family choices. We performed a stated choice experiment concerning hypothetical choices among alternative residential locations. We found that the rankings of the attributes for the family and for each member were the same. The estimated coefficients for each member were statistically different from family ones, which demonstrates the fallacy of the representative member hypothesis. We estimated single members’ relative power at the attribute level and extended a model developed in the literature to three-member groups.

Gli atti dell’VIII Riunione Scientifica del SIET evidenziano il ruolo centrale dei trasporti nel quadro dell’ampliamento dell’Unione Europea. Con lo scopo di perseguire obiettivi quali il risparmio energetico, la sicurezza dei trasporti, il contenimento degli effetti ambientali, il volume tratta problematiche legate all’omogeneizzazione organizzativa e normativa del settore e al ruolo dei trasporti e della logistica nelle realtà distrettuali. I contributi si focalizzano sulle criticità del trasporto locale e urbano e sulle ricadute che il sistema dei trasporti produce sull’ambiente.