The aim of this note is to introduce the special issue on "Mega-projects and regional development in the Italian experience" and to review some of the critical issues associated with the evaluation of mega-projects. In particular, we focus on the shortcomings of Cost-Benefit Analysis when the...

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...

[abstract missing - contribution appeared in the programme]

This article aims at estimating the density functions and gradients related to the locations of services in Milan. Density curves constructed from data on the location of producer services confirm theoretical expectations and the pattern of their location clearly assumes a quadratic exponential...

Starting from the literature on decision processes in public choices, aim of the paper is to suggest an integrated methodology to get a choice as much as possible shared and participated joining two different approaches. On one hand there is the “classic†or top-down approach based on...

The choice of an appropriate social rate of discount is critical in the decision-making process on public investments. In this paper we review concisely the literature on social discounting and refer explicitly to a recently growing field of related research, that is, individual time preference....

Abstract 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...

This article aims at analysing the effect of temporal aggregation in space-time autoregressive models. By means of a simulation experiment, it is shown that, the greater the spatial dependence in time series, the lower the bias due to temporal aggregation. However, the ratio between the average...

The aim of this article is to verify whether public investment in infrastructure is effective in terms of growth. While there is extensive literature analysing the effect of public capital stock on development and growth, comparatively less attention has been devoted to the contractual...