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Effectiveness and efficiency of European Regional Development Fund on separate waste collection: evidence from Italian regions by a stochastic frontier approach

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Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to analyze the results of the impact of European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) in Convergence regions over the 2007–2013 on separate collection rate of Italian regions. The aim is twofold: propose a groundbreaking analysis that allows us to control both for the effectiveness of the Regulation (EC) No. 1080/2006, by a Difference in differences equation (DID), and the Regions’ efficiency in the separate collection process, by a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Specifically, the SFA allows us to model the DID equation in order to take account the regions’ efficiency in the separate collection process in terms of institutional quality. In particular, we use a panel with two dimensions: temporal—9 yearly observations from 2004 to 2012; and cross-sectional—20 regions. The estimates suggest that ERDF have not contributed to reducing the structural divide in Italy and its managerial slack has triggered in the failure of the convergence objective. Policy implications are discussed.

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Notes

  1. COMMISSION COMMUNICATION—third progress report on economic and social cohesion http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/ES/TXT/?uri=celex:52004DC0107 (accessed September 2016).

  2. DG Regio expenditure category 44 “Management of industrial and household waste” for the programming period 2007–2013.

  3. The importance of environmental integration is also reaffirmed in the 7th Environment Action Programme to 2020. It emphasizes that environmental integration in all relevant policy areas is essential to meet environmental targets.

  4. http://www.gruppobiancamano.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=89&Itemid=110&lang=en (accessed September 2016).

  5. There are 11 outcome indicators and targets related to certain collective public services that convergence regions in Italy committed to improve. These services are education, child care and assistance to the elderly, water supply and waste management, all areas in which convergence regions lag behind the rest of the regions and which are considered crucial for increasing the effectiveness of cohesion policy.

  6. 40 actions for the upgrading of the regional waste management system. 15 infrastructures for waste recovery and disposal.

  7. The main field of intervention of the ERDF in the waste sector are the investments in infrastructure providing basic services to citizens in the area of environment, as provided for in Article 3 (1) of the ERDF Regulation.

  8. EC, 2015: Cohesion Policy in Italy http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docgener/informat/country2009/it_en.pdf (accessed September 2016).

  9. ERDF funds allocated to the waste sector were primarily oriented toward waste management rather than, for example, prevention measures or efforts to reduce waste production. These funds were largely used for projects in support of selective waste collection and sorting, as well as for the enhancement of recycling capacities in all of the Convergence Objective regions and in Sardegna for the programming period 2007–2013.

  10. In Italy, specific organizations have been built, the ATOs (Ambiti Territoriali Ottimali, sort of waste union) that have at times not got the resources to guarantee proper waste management actions.

  11. Administrative absorption capacity, can be defined as the ability of central, regional and local authorities to prepare programs and projects, to decide on them, to organize coordination, to deal with administrative bottlenecks, work reports requested by the Commission and to finance and supervise applying their implementation properly, avoiding fraud as much as possible (Lupu and Asandului 2015).

  12. See Nifo and Vecchione (2014) for more details.

  13. We consider, in addition to truncated normal distribution, three other different distributions of the inefficiency term: half-normal, exponential, and gamma distribution. We omit these results because very similar. Interested readers are welcome to request these results from the authors.

  14. This problem is known in the empirical literature as the “incidental parameters problem”.

  15. http://www.isprambiente.gov.it/en/ISPRA (accessed November 2015).

  16. See Nifo and Vecchione (2014) for more details on the construction of the index.

  17. See Nifo and Vecchione (2014) for more details.

  18. Although the Regulation (EC) No 1080/2006 is operational for the 2007–2013 period, we consider only the 2007–2012 period because the data on the Institutional Quality Index are available until 2012.

  19. The northern regions are our benchmark (or reference group).

  20. In “Appendix”, Table 8, we report the regional annual average of variables used for the construction of Tables 6 and 7.

  21. For ERDF funding, we noted that the operational programme selected did not contain information regarding specific administrative measures.

  22. Even if each ERDF project was individually assessed and approved by the Commission during the 2007–2013 programme period the level of detail concerning supporting measures requested by the Commission from Italy did not in general ensured their existence before the granting of EU funding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economic and Legal Studies, University of Naples “Parthenope”, Via Ammiraglio Ferdinando Acton, 38, 80133, Naples, Italy

    Massimiliano Agovino

  2. Department of Philosophical, Pedagogical and Economic-Quantitative Sciences, University “G. D’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara, Viale Pindaro, 42, 65127, Pescara, Italy

    Mariaconcetta Casaccia & Alessandro Crociata

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  1. Massimiliano Agovino
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  2. Mariaconcetta Casaccia
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  3. Alessandro Crociata
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Correspondence to Massimiliano Agovino.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 8.

Table 8 Annual average of efficiency scores, separate collection rate and IQI
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Agovino, M., Casaccia, M. & Crociata, A. Effectiveness and efficiency of European Regional Development Fund on separate waste collection: evidence from Italian regions by a stochastic frontier approach. Econ Polit 34, 105–137 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-016-0050-2

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