OPTIMAL ENDOWMENTS OF PUBLIC INVESTMENT: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS FOR THE SPANISH REGIONS

. In this paper we try to find some evidence on the optimality in the provision of government capital in the Spanish regions, during the period 1965-1995. To this end, an optimality condition is derived from an optimization growth model, generalising the condition previously derived by Karras (1997) to the case of any kind of returns to scale over all inputs in the production function. Then, a simple production function is estimated, from which the marginal products of both private and government capital are computed. By comparing the estimates of those marginal products, we are able to infer whether the public capital stock in the Spanish regions is underprovided or not, relative to the private capital stock.