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2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

14. Structural Funds and Regional Convergence: Some Sectoral Estimates for Italy

Authors : Gianluigi Coppola, Sergio Destefanis

Published in: Geographical Labor Market Imbalances

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Abstract

In this chapter, we assess the European Structural Funds’ effects on the economies of the 20 Italian administrative regions for the period 1989–2006. The principal novelties of this chapter are that the empirical analysis separately considers the effects on four sectors (agriculture, energy and manufacturing, construction, and services), and we employ a non-parametric FDH-VP to calculate Malmquist productivity indexes. This allows us to distinguish the Funds’ effects on factor accumulation from those on total productivity changes. Our evidence implies that the Funds had a weak, but significant, impact on total factor productivity change but virtually no effect on capital accumulation or employment. Different types of Structural Funds are found to have widely different influences, with the European Social Fund, arguably, having the strongest impact.

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These regions are Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, Sicilia, and Sardegna.

The limited availability of regional accounting data prevents the inclusion of more recent data in this study.

On 1 January 2007, the EAGGF was replaced by the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF) and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD). We will not address the EAGF or the EAFRD in this study.

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Consistent pre- and post-SEC95 series for value added and the number of labour units were generously provided by Roberto Basile of ISAE, Rome.

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The appropriate unit root tests, the results of which are available upon request, failed to produce evidence against the hypothesis that the regression residuals are stationary.

Regressions were also estimated by taking the ratio between the Fund values and their sample means, but this alternative specification did not substantially affect the results. In future work, we intend to consider the modelling of variables in greater detail, including zero values.

This index is calculated using the value added, employment, and capital stock data, assuming constant-returns to scale and a labour share of output equal to 0.3.

Evidence in favour of this view is provided by D’Acunto et al. (2004).

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Title: Structural Funds and Regional Convergence: Some Sectoral Estimates for Italy
Authors: Gianluigi Coppola
Sergio Destefanis
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Book: Geographical Labor Market Imbalances
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-55202-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-642-55203-8

Copyright Year: 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55203-8_14

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