Marco Percoco

Using the stochastic frontier approach based on Farrel's index to measure technical and allocative efficiency, we investigate the level of productive efficiency in Italian regions for the period 1970–1994. We found a 31% of technical inefficiency and about 21% of allocative inefficiency. The analysis is extended to measure the impact of public capital puzzle on regional productivity. The results show that infrastructure play an important role and that railways and maritime capital have an higher degree of effectiveness than the provision of roads.

Analysis of convergence has centered on movement of indices such as per capita incomes or welfare for countries or regions within countries. In this paper, the analysis focuses on the structure of economies in terms of the distribution of production across sectors and explores the implications of convergence of structure for a subset of EU countries. To assist in the

With the 2004 enlargement to the East, the EU regional growth process can no longer be seen in the frame of the traditional core-periphery pattern. This is why this article proposes an innovative methodology to endogenously detect convergence clubs while accounting for spatial ...

European regions have experienced a greater presence of service producers in their economy over the last few decades. Indeed, the manufacturing sector increasingly contracts out many activities to intermediate producer services. This is mostly because they are located close to each other and because services experience increasing returns to scale which reduce their marginal costs. In this paper, we propose

The aim of this paper is to uncover how the patterns of competition and complementarity in the regional system of Italy can explain its persistent internal disparities in spite of cohesion efforts by the European Commission. Our analysis is based on the application of the Dendrinos-Sonis model (1988, 1990) to the Gross Regional Product of the NUTS I regions of

Road pricing is becoming increasingly popular among decision‐makers as a policy tool meant to rationalize transport flows in a given area. This paper aims to study modal choice as a function of the personal characteristics of commuters by considering an original data set of more than 9000 commuters in the Trento district of Italy which was collected in 2001. Empirical estimates of drivers' reaction to the introduction of road pricing and to the improvement of the quality of public transport services are provided. It was found that the introduction of a system of road pricing would be far more effective in reducing private car use than an improvement in the speed of public transport. It is also shown that road pricing should be carefully defined, as elderly people and families with children are among those with more inelastic private transport demand.

The accuracy of ex ante project appraisal has been subject to scrutiny by scholars in recent years. It has often been claimed that the inaccuracy of project evaluation leads to a waste of public spending. In this article I acknowledge that the appraisal of a project consists in long-run predictions of several variables, so that the accuracy of ex ante evaluations should be assessed on the basis of forecasting rationality. I test for the rationality of a sample of World Bank project appraisals and find no significant discrepancy between ex ante and realized rates of return.

The accuracy of ex ante project appraisal has been subject to scrutiny by scholars in recent years. It has often been claimed that the inaccuracy of project evaluation leads to a waste of public spending. In this article I acknowledge that the appraisal of a project consists in long-run predictions of several variables, so that the accuracy of ex ante evaluations should be assessed on the basis of forecasting rationality. I test for the rationality of a sample of World Bank project appraisals and find no significant discrepancy between ex ante and realized rates of return.