The Evaluation of the Negotiated Planning in Italy: A Counterfactual Analysis

This paper aims to examine the effects of the Negotiated Planning in Italy in the last decade, withparticular attention to the impact of funding related to the Territorial Pacts on beneficiary firms. The literatureis divided into different analyses on the effects of the «new Italian economic planning». The firstand more drastic argument is attributable to the idea of the failure of Negotiated Planning, coordinatedsince 1999 by the Department for Development Policies of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (Rossi,3382005; De Blasio - Lotti, 2008; Accetturo - De Blasio, 2011). In response to specific additional investmentflows addressed to the South of a significant amount, distances North-South were not reduced and especiallythe enormous effort of the new season of the decentralized territorial policies showed radical methodologicallimitations and results, with negligible effects on economic development and on employmentof the involved areas. The second theory emphasizes instead the presence of «positive signs» in economicdynamics of the South in the last decade, while recognizing the need of some major revisions in contentand practices of development policies (Viesti, 2005). However in the economic empirical literature thereis a lacks of comprehensive assessment of the effects of Territorial Pacts concerning complete data ondisbursements to firms, investments, performance of funded firms. The paper aims to fill this gap. Themethodology used for the assessment is consolidated in literature of public policy evaluation, and in particularthe implemented instruments are the difference-in-differences analysis and the matching analysis.Two reasons for caution in interpreting the results has to be pointed out: first, that the assessment of theeffects of Territorial Pacts is much broader than the analysis of the performance of the beneficiaries andgenerally concerns the territorial development of eligible areas, the institutional learning and the capacityto cooperate, and secondly the impacts of incentives on firms also derive from anticipatory effects whenincentives accelerate investment processes already programmed.