Giuseppe Francesco Gori (p)

Annalisa Caloffi

The very recent years have seen a strong intensification in the centralization degree of procurement at the European level. This has been fostered by a generalized reduction in the financial resources available to local authorities, which have therefore increasingly seeked for cost savings, as well as by relevant regulatory interventions such as EU Directive 24/2014, aimed at incentivizing the adoption of centralized purchasing techniques in order to ensure efficiency gains in the procurement market.
In this respect, the new Italian Procurement Code (D. Lgs. 50/2016), which adopts the EU Directive, allows single procurers to spontaneously aggregate in small (inter-municipal) centralised bodies as an alternative to resorting to national or regional procurers. Both the cost saving and the efficiency effects associated with such a configuration must still be ascertained.
This work tackles this issue by analyzing the recent behavior of Italian municipalities in the light of the Procurement Code reform trying to provide an empirical assessment of the relationship between procurement centralization and procurement performance. The procurement behavior of municipalities - small and peripheral ones in particular - is crucial in that they account for a large share of public expenditure, thus affecting the magnitude and the spatial distribution of its growth-enhancing effect.
Resorting to a rich dataset of procurement contracts concluded between 2012 and 2017 in Italy, we estimate the effect on a municipality’s procurement performance of its choice to be part of an inter-municipal aggregation of procurers. We identify the causal effect of this policy using quasi-experimental methods to select suitable controls among municipalities acting as single procurers. In doing so, we control for pre-treatment differences between treated and controls accounting for several municipal characteristics, including financial and organizational ones. In particular, with regards to the latter group of characteristics, we focus on municipalities’ procurement experience and their endowment in terms of procurement officials. Our measure of municipal procurement performance includes the auction’s winning rebate, the number of participants, the delay in public works’ completion and the cost overruns.

Daniele Di Gennaro, Marusca De Castris (p)

Giuseppe Gori

In literature, the effectiveness of European Structural Funds (ESF) is usually analysed at firm (Zúñiga‐Vicente et al., 2014) or NUTS-II level (Becker et al., 2016). The development of place-based policies focused on fostering spatial agglomeration and the empowerment of territorial strengths underlines the relevance of the different administrative levels and, in overall, of the spatial context. However, even if ESF are designed to generate spatial externalities, studies on the evaluation of the spatial effects of ESF are still limited.
Indeed, including spatial interferences in a causal framework rules out the validity of the SUTVA and the identification of causal effects becomes problematic. This paper tries to overcome the identification problem related to the spatial interactions by modelling a novel spatial multilevel framework.
We use an integrated dataset, including European data on ESF payments by NUTS2 and longitudinal information on economic and demographic characteristic of the provinces. Our sample consists of 200 regions that refer to EU15 countries. Combining regional and provincial information allow us to consider the occurrence of spillover effects which arise within and between regions. The spatial econometric framework developed in this paper is composed by two different weight matrices: the first, which identifies provincial contiguity on the belonging or not to the same region, while the second based on regional border. This operation takes into account different level of spatial dependence (Corrado and Fingleton, 2011)
This allows to correctly understand the spatial relationships occurring in response to the treatment and, in overall, to provide unbiased estimates of the effects of the policies. In this way, we evaluate the presence of spatial spillovers in response of the ESF by disentangling the relative effects at different NUTS levels.

References
Becker S.O., Egger P.H., and von Ehrlich M. (2016), EU Regional Policy in: Harald Badinger and Volker Nitsch (eds.). Handbook of the Economics of European Integration, Chapter 17, Routledge, 2016.
Corrado, L. and Fingleton, B., (2011), Multilevel Modelling with Spatial Effects, No 2011-13, SIRE Discussion Papers.
Zúñiga‐Vicente, J. Á., Alonso‐Borrego, C., Forcadell, F. J., & Galán, J. I. (2014). Assessing the effect of public subsidies on firm R&D investment: a survey. Journal of Economic Surveys, 28(1), 36-67.

Annalisa Caloffi (p), Marzia Freo, Stefano Ghinoi, Federica Rossi, Margherita Russo

Marusca de Castris

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