The endogenous approach to regional development policy has become central over the last decade. By employing the conditional frontier approach, this paper investigates the relative contribution to labour productivity growth of: (1) capital accumulation, (2) exogenous technical change and...

Despite its economic development, the average length of trials in Italy is one of the highest in the world. In this paper we analyze the efficiency of the Italian courts of justice for the period 2003 to 2008. Results show that technical efficiency (lack of best practice adoption) is almost 40%...

In this paper an encompassing empirical strategy is presented which is able to decompose an indicator of industrial structural inefficiency into its sources components. The main purpose of the analysis is to bring a number of ideas floating in the efficiency literature together in the same...

One of the main characteristics of the technological capabilities of countries has always been their uneven distribution across the countries. This paper explores the dynamic of technological capabilities for a sample of 42 countries over the period 1995-2007 introducing some methodological...

In this paper it is shown that a well known procedure (GEKS) of transitivizing a bilateral system of productivity comparisons is implicitly a way of imposing a homothetic structure onto the data. The main implication of this result is that deviations between the bilateral and the multilateral...