LIBRI DI GRAZIELLA FORNENGO

Mercato, concorrenza e governance nelle imprese pubbliche che gestiscono servizi locali - Local public services in Italy are subject to an ongoing reform process that started with the legal privatisation of the activities. The new local capitalism is becoming more and more important and gives rise to different problems. Some of them are analysed in the present paper, namely 1) the extent of the activities of these public owned but privately regulated firms, sometimes difficult to include in any notion of public services; 2) the competition rules to be applied on the market and for the market in their different activities; 3) the corporate governance problems arising from the conflicts between the political interests of the public owners and the efficiency objectives of the managers. After a short review of the more recent policy interventions in the field we conclude that they couldn’t yet solve the above mentioned problems, even though they move in the right direction.

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.

The paper analyses, for the period 1998-2002, the effects of the reform of local public transit in Piedmont on the structure and efficiency of the regional bus transport industry. A data base covering almost all the firms concerned allows to distinguish the performances of private and public-owned firms. The industry became more concentrated after the merger (2002) between the two large public-owned firms operating in the metropolitan area and the widespread diffusion of informal groups of economic operators not assuming a specific legal form, ATI in Italian. Technical and economic efficiency indicators, as well as a DEA application, show on average a slight improvement at the end of the period, with poorer performances for the public owned companies.