Takuya Urakami (p), Noriyoshi Nakayama

The Japanese water industry is facing a transitional period reflecting changes in populations, natural disasters, and the ageing water pipelines and facilities etcetera. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, which is the regulatory agency for the water supply businesses in Japan, revised the Waterworks Act in December 2018 to strengthen the foundations of the water utility management, and then promotion of further wide-area consolidation was raised as one of the important policy directions. The purpose of this article is to analyze potential merger gains among the Japanese water supply businesses. A DEA based procedure is applied to tackle this issue and 141 observations in Tokai-area (Gif, Aichi, Shizuoka and Mie prefecture) were used for this analysis. The obtained results are as follows: (1) Efficiency score tends to be one for relatively smaller water supply business; (2) on five years average, there are potential merger gains in thirty one merger cases out of fifty six; (3) especially, efficiency gain tends to appear in the case of mergers with very small water supply business with its employee number is one.

Valentina Alberti (p), Valentina Montalto, Francesco Panella, Nicola Pontarollo

In a context of high social inequalities the role of culture is more important than ever to bridge socio-economic gaps. Eurostat data shows that cultural participation rate is higher in urban areas, however, almost one third (31 %) of Europeans living in cities do not participate at all in cultural activities. From a geographical perspective, the number of cultural venues, their spatial configuration across Europe, and their distribution within urban areas, can be seen as a basic proxy to measure opportunities people have of cultural participation.
Spatial proximity, indeed, highlights a meaningful measure of local provision which interacts with other factors to provide information on enabling resources or “opportunity structures”. Drawing on these considerations, the objective of our paper is to develop a co-distribution index of culture and population that is capable of providing an initial layer to explore inequality in culture accessibility across 190 European cities.
We proceed by step. The first consists of the collection and treatment of georeferenced information on cultural venues, population and main public transport; in the second step we design three indicators measuring in each cultural and creative city (1) people living close to cultural venues in each city, (2) the average minimum distance to cultural venues, (3) accessibility of cultural venues by public transport. The third step analyses results and identify further steps to detail the index.
This raw index aims at building a first comprehensive, Europe-wide approach relating georeferenced data about cultural venues to population distribution in European cities. The study may lay the foundations for further analysis and to support debate on the policy implications of spatial inequality and access to culture.

Joaquim Israel Ribas pereira (p), Maurício Vaz Lobo Bittencourt, Alexandre Alves Porsse

The purpose of this essay is to present evidence regarding the relationship between road infrastructure and employment in Brazil. According to different theoretical approaches, the accumulation of infrastructure takes on different roles which, in summary, may have an impact on the increase in productivity in manufacturing, on the well-being of individuals or as a factor which induces the clustering of economic activity. The data used in this research are at the municipal level pertaining to the State of Parana, in Southern Brazil, and derived from the demographic censuses from 1970 and 2010. The selection of the aforementioned state along with the data is justified by the economic formation which is intrinsically related to road construction. In order to address the purpose of this paper, the empirical analysis was based on Duranton and Turner Model (2012), which, through a model of simultaneous equations, assumes a relationship between the initial supply of roads and a long-term effect on employment. The extension of the road network was calculated by employing georeferencing techniques, which allowed to determine the total number of kilometers per municipality. Simultaneity issues between variables were addressed by the use of two Instrumental Variables (IV) based on the origins of the initial stock of roads, namely the 1901 map of roads and paths, and the paths used by the tropeirismo (cattleman) in the 19th century - the Royal Viamão Corridor. The estimates obtained through the Limited Information Maximum Likelihood (LIML) reveals that a 10% change in the initial stock of roads lead to an 8% increase in employment over 40 years, suggesting a high level of importance of the road system for the local economy in the long run.

Javier Barbero (p), Martin A. Christensen, Andrea Conte, Patrizio Lecca, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Simone Salotti

The importance of institutional quality for economic growth and development is becoming more widely studied in the scholarly literature, using econometric analysis at both country and regional level. What is still missing is a comprehensive analysis of the role of institutional quality in a general equilibrium framework that captures all the transactions between different agents of an economy – households, firms, and the government – as well as the spatial interactions among regions. Neglecting the general equilibrium effects may result in an incomplete assessment of the role of institutional quality on the macroeconomic performance of the economy. In this paper we fill this gap in our knowledge by resorting to the RHOMOLO dynamic spatial general equilibrium model for the EU regions to assess the macroeconomic impact of regional variations in quality of government. The model allows capturing how macroeconomic variables – GDP, employment, trade, and consumer prices among others – respond to a hypothetical improvement in regional government quality. The results stress how the performance of different public policies across regions of Europe is heavily conditioned by variations in regional government quality, meaning that greater attention to the quality of local institutions is necessary when formulation and applying public policies.