Fabio Fiorillo, Elvina Merkaj (p)

Jaime Bonet

Municipal waste management represents one of the biggest challenges for EU institutions. In this context the EU has progressively enriched the waste management legislation in the aim to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy. Improving municipal waste management can lead to a reduction of its environmental impact during the whole life
cycle of the consumed products, from production to consumption and waste phase.

We consider both production and consumption side as generator of waste. Taking inspiration from the Italian waste management system, we theoretically frame a model where the waste service provider is not only the municipality, but also a private firm which is a competitor of the municipality regarding firms waste.
In the model citizens can dispose their recycled waste only to the municipality waste management system and should decide the amount of time they dedicate to recycling. On the other hand firms can choose whether to contribute to the municipal waste management or to sell their recycling waste to the private firm. The municipality decides the amount of
capital to employ, the definition of urban waste in order to keep/not keep firms and the taxes to impose to firms and citizens in order to meet the recycling objectives.

We solved the model as a sequential game between the municipality and the firms regarding their strategies on waste management. The municipality plays first by deciding the rules of the game. In the second step firm decide whether to dispose their urban waste to the municipal of private waste collector.

Findings suggest that the municipality should be competitive in order to induce the most productive firms to participate to the municipal urban waste system, otherwise the private competitor would take the best part of market (cream
skimming of firms). We find that the solution depends on the productivity of firms and citizens in recycling and on the redistributive objectives of the municipality. In case firms are more productive than citizens, the municipality would set fiscal incentives for firms to choose the municipal waste system. A municipality that cares only for efficiency will set the rules of the game in order to provide services of waste management only to the most productive firms, leaving the others to the private market. On the other hand a municipality that has redistributive concerns will lower the burden of citizens by accepting also non productive firms.

Giulio Pedrini, Gianluca Monturano (p), Amedeo Argentiero, Paolo Maranzano

Elvina Merkaj

Tax evasion among self-employed workers is a common practice in many countries and particularly in Italy, where the latest estimates report an amount of approximately € 27 billion of evaded personal income taxes in 2022 very heterogeneously distributed across the country (Argentiero et al., 2020). Indeed, it is commonly acknowledged that most of the lost fiscal revenues come from self-employed workers as they are not subject to withholding taxes, both in Italy (Carfora et al., 2018) and worldwide (e.g., Engström and Holmlund, 2009). Less is known, however, about the relationship between the occupational profiles (and their underlying tasks and skills) and tax evasion. Recent contributions showed that occupational conditions, tax compliance, and attitude to evasion are correlated and mutually reinforcing (Hashimzade et al., 2014). However, such analyses referred to the generic category of self-employees or entrepreneurs, without disentangling different occupational groups (typically identified by ISCO codes). When taken separately, each occupational group could be associated with an increase (or decrease) in the propensity to evade taxation, either for subjective or objective reasons.
The paper fits into this topic by trying to identify those occupational groups (clusterized into macro-categories based on tasks) being associated with a higher probability of evading taxes in different industrial and local contexts. Data analysis will rely on three different data sources: 1) the Italian Labour Force Survey, conducted by the Italian Statistical Office every quarter, and reporting the territorial distribution of each type of occupation by type of contract (including self-employment); 2) estimated tax evasion at the provincial level provided by the Italian Revenue Agency; 3) national survey provided by INAPP-ISTAT on the tasks and skills used in each occupational profile. The period under scrutiny will span from January 2014 to December 2015 (8 quarters).
The econometric model will assess, at the provincial level, the relationship between the share of self-employed workers in the selected occupational families and the tax gap, as measured by the Italian Revenue Agency. The empirical model will control for province-specific and time-fixed effects and other factors potentially affecting the propensity to evade taxes, such as the educational attainment of the workforce, the social capital, and the quality of the institutions. Furthermore, we will implement statistical models accounting for spatial correlation across provinces and regions for robustness. Results will improve understanding of the occupational characteristics acting as discriminant variables in individual tax compliance/avoidance decisions within the group of self-employed workers.

Elena Fourcroy (p)

Gianluca Monturano

The use of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) has been promoted and supported by the European Union in the last two decades, through favourable regulatory measures, incentives and subsidies, nationally declined by Member States. Among RES, biogas production has also been promoted by bioeconomy and Circular Economy (CE) policies. Indeed, biogas production has one main by-product, called digestates, whose land application in agriculture contributes to “close the loop” of material flows in rural areas. The continuous growth of the biogas sector in the last years has leaded to an increasing production and use of digestates, and an increasingly fast growth of the sector in the coming years is forecasted. However, the recent social sciences literature on biogas has highlighted the rise of local conflicts around biogas plants, and the damages they can cause to the development of the sector. The literature has underlined that one dimension of these conflicts is related to the management and the use of digestates. The literature suggests that adequate local and regional governance, and more precisely, territorial governance, can help anticipating and solving the conflicts around biogas plants in general. However, no research has yet addressed how territorial governance can effectively contribute to the anticipation and solving of the conflicts that are specifically related to the management and use of digestates. In addition, the literature on the territorial governance of biogas plants remains globally scarce. This article therefore aims at bridging this knowledge gap. We use the qualitative case study method to explore this topic that remains, to date, very scarcely explored. Thanks to preliminary interviews with expert, and preliminary exploration of the grey literature and the press, we selected five cases of biogas plants in France and in Germany, that are either considered as models of “good” governance of the management and use of their digestates, or that are notorious cases because of the important conflicts they have experienced. We conducted semi-structured interviews, as well as an analysis of the regional and local press, and a document analysis. In line with previous research on the territorial governance of biogas plants, we mobilise the concept of proximities to analyse the interactions between local agents, and the mechanisms and processes of coordination that local agents implement to anticipate and solve the conflicts related to the management and use of digestates. We finally formulate policy recommendations to help stakeholders of the sector preventing and solving these conflicts.

Jaime Bonet (p), Javier Pérez, Eduardo Haddad

Elena Fourcroy

The extraction of non-renewable natural resources has the potential to generate revenue to finance government activities. One of the most used tax tools is the collection of royalties from mining projects because they are usually unrelated to their profitability. Rent capturing through taxation may enhance the public sector’s ability to harness natural resources’ potential to sustain a broad-based development. Imposing royalties to mining operations may bring substantial costs to the economy (Ergas et al., 2010; Dobraand Dobra, 2013; Postali, 2015), including resource sterilization and its consequences (Lilford, 2017). There are potential losses for the industry, which must face additional costs to its operations. Nonetheless, if recycled into the economy to finance public expenditures, royalties’ revenues may provide upfront benefits to the government.

Colombia, an important oil and coal producer and exporter in Latin America, is pursuing success in this endeavor. The country’s strategy, associated with the Sistema General de Regalías (SGR), is grounded on asset formation through domestic investment, focusing on the long-term intergenerational transfer of wealth and upfront expenditures to generate short-run growth effects, with a strong focus on social and regional equity. Using a computable regional equilibrium model, this paper estimates the general equilibrium effects of royalty payments by mining activities in the regional development in Colombia. The results indicate that the benefits in welfare and the reduction of regional inequalities, due to the imposition of royalties, are greater than the losses that it can generate in the regional output. Further results show the presence of regional and sectoral heterogeneities. The main contribution of this paper is that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first time that the effects of a royalties’ reform in Colombia are analyzed in a general equilibrium setup.