A number of regional initiatives have recently revived the Italian broadband sector, although their fortunes vary depending on governance, market and geographical issues. However, all these initiatives jointly succeeded in sparking a heated debate on how public–private interplay can facilitate...

This paper aims to empirically investigate the impact of a vast array of public policies on wireline broadband penetration through a novel and unique dataset covering 30 OECD countries, over the period 1995–2010. Estimation results show that, while both supply- and demand-side policies have a...