LIBRI DI FABIO FIORILLO

Property taxation can be used in a Pigouvian way to raise the costs of environment and decrease land use consumption for the benefit of enviromental protection. However, in presence of a growing shortage of funding over time, local governments can use property taxation in order to ‘fill the coffers’ rather than to pursue enviromenal safeguard. A negative effect on the budget side could be associated with a weeker control on land use regulation from local governments, since higher enviromental consumption leads to higher tax revenues. In this paper we address this issue developing a theoretical model which shows a positive (negative) relationship between tax revenue and the number of land use permissions when there is complementariety (substitutability) between environmental and human uses of land. We test this relationship on a panel of Italian municipalities from 1999 to 2006. Our results show a positive and significant correlation between property tax revenue and the issuance of land use permits, suggesting the prevalence of the complementariety relationship. This result implies that Italian municipalities are more concerned about funds raising rather than environment preservation.

The Law 42/09 represents an important step towards fiscal federalism in Italy. In particular, the Law places its foundation on the principles of territoriality, fiscal autonomy and fiscal equalization in order to abandon the criterion of historical expenditure in favor of «standard costs». A standard level of services must be provided by the local governments which must finance the expenditures mainly with their own tax revenues. In case the revenues are not adequate to cover the «standard» financial needs, the central government intervenes with equalization transfers. The definition of «standard criteria» therefore represents a crucial phase in the whole reforming process. The amount of central government transfers in fact depends on the flexibility of these criteria. Since the law gives very few indications on how to calculate the «standard costs/revenues», in this work we propose some alternative evaluations of these and assess the impact that different approaches can have on the central and local budgets using a CGE (Computable General Equilibrium) model based on a bi-regional SAM (Social Accounting Matrix) for Italy for 2003.

Il testo illustra le problematiche affrontate per la messa a punto di un questionario per la rilevazione delle tariffe e delle imposte comunali nelle Marche, la somministrazione dello stesso alle amministrazioni comunali e la gestione delle informazioni ricavate dalle rilevazioni. Sono poi presentati i principali risultati relativi ai servizi analizzati sulla base dei dati raccolti. Chiude il volume un saggio sugli indici dei prezzi al consumo, nel quale vengono proposti indici famigliari del costo della vita.

L'assetto federale e le forme di associazionismo intercomunale - This paper reviews main motivations behind the constitution of local councils partnerships as they serve to devise decentralization pitfalls in order to the optimal dimension of government. To this aim, the paper focuses on one of such partnership, namely Unione di Comune (UdC). Some stylized facts are derived with regard to dimension, functions and finalities of Italian UdC and structural characteristics of associated councils. The financing issue has been analyzed under the heading of both ensuring adequate funding to promote partnerships and avoiding pressure on the national government’s budget and public finance in general. Theoretical considerations and empirical experience from abroad, such as inter communality in France, show that the assignment of an autonomous tax proves to be more efficient compared to una tantum or annual transfer or tax sharing. Finally, the paper offers an insight into the way UdC provides administrative functions and public services by mean of the Marche Region case study.

La rilevanza dei temi dell’organizzazione e della gestione dei sistemi tributari, e degli effetti delle imposte sugli incentivi e sulla crescita economica, hanno indotto la Società Italiana di Economia Pubblica a dedicare la sua XX riunione scientifica all’Economia della tassazione – la ricerca sui modelli impositivi, sulle ragioni, le funzioni e gli effetti dei tributi. Questa raccolta offre una selezione di contributi, rappresentativa di alcuni dei filoni di studio oggi più importanti e fecondi.

Il volume raccoglie alcuni dei lavori presentati alla riunione annuale del 2006 della Società Italiana di Economia Pubblica sul tema dei servizi pubblici. Gli studi raccolti forniscono una panoramica articolata dei diversi temi sul tappeto, attraverso l’analisi delle tematiche generali – i problemi della liberalizzazione e della privatizzazione, la definizione dei rapporti pubblico-privato e i profili di articolazione territoriale dei servizi pubblici – e delle tematiche specifiche collegate ai diversi settori: energia, servizi idrici, mobilità e trasporti.

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.

It is well known that the water cycle is going to assume a central role in the economic system because of its increasing relative shortage. This means that even though the water available to planet Earth is the same water that has always been available and the only water that ever will be available, in reality however, we have a limited amount of usable drinking water. Since the drinking water conservation and its production depends on the economic activity, in this paper we analyse the link between water cycle and the economic system constructing a new type or framework that combines standard material of account (MFA) techniques with make and use (M&U) accounting matrices in order to coordinate the physical issues of accounting to the value issues. The impact of economic policies on the water cycles as well as consistency of policies with sustainability is then evaluated showing the importance of the natural resourceseconomic system feedback in this kind of analysis. In other terms, this new framework allows the analyst to consider both the effect of given policies on the water cycle and the constraint produced by the sustainability problem on the economic system. Finally, we studied the dynamical system resulting from the MFA and M&U integration and show how to investigate the estimation problem of the framework extrapolating the use by use matrices from the system.