The education sector in Italy is mainly public and highly centralized concerning both financial and regulatory aspects. However, there are significant disparities in school spending and students’ performance across regions. This heterogeneity is also relevant in relation to the ongoing fiscal...

The education system in Italy is mainly public and highly centralised concerning both financial and regulatory aspects. However, there are significant disparities in school spending and students' performance across regions. The aim of the paper is to provide a first attempt for the Italian case...

This paper investigates both the indirect (i.e. the existence) and the direct effects (i.e. the usage) of direct democracy institutions on major fiscal outcomes across the United States over the 1992-2009 period. Being based on a more recent time span than previous contributions, our work...

Many countries have recently implemented fiscal decentralization reforms, assigning more functions and spending responsibilities to sub-national governments. In this paper we investigate the reasons behind the decentralization process of different categories of government expenditure (such as...

In this paper we investigate the interactions among fiscal decentralization, income inequality and regional disparities, using a sample of 23 OECD countries over the period 1971-2000. We first explore the effects of fiscal decentralization on overall income inequality. We then test whether...

We hereby propose a model to analyze the provision of environmental protection activities (United Nation 2005) with positive interregional externalities in order to verify - at least in theory - whether this kind of policy is better accomplished through centralized policymaking, which implies a...

The aim of this paper is to re-examine the relationship between fiscal federalism and the size of local governments. Traditionally, the empirical studies have focused on the different accountability power of grants and local taxes, concluding that the former encourages the growth and the latter...

Background:Italy is a country showing low math achievement, especially in the Southern regions. Moreover, national student assessments are recent and rigorous policy evaluation is lacking. This study presents the results of one of the first randomized controlled trials implemented in Italian...

Nature is an important resource which can enhance Italy’s territorial competitiveness. Nature reserves cover about ten per cent of the territory and are even more concentrated in Southern Italy. In order to draw upon such an asset effectively, an overall strategy should be applied to the...

Data from the 2003 OECD-PISA Survey for Italy reveal a striking difference in the relationship between students' competence (as measured by PISA score in Mathematics) and school grades across regions: a competence level granting bare sufficiency in the North yields excellence grades in the...