Il rapporto tra capitale pubblico e altre variabili macroeconomiche: un'applicazione empirica[The relationship between public capital and other macroeconomic variables: an empirical application]

The issue of whether public capital is productive has received a great deal of attention in the last period, especially after the sovereign public debt crisis in some European countries. This work tries to estimate the dynamic effects of public capital on some macroeconomic variables (such as private capital, employment and economic growth measured as GDP), using the vector autoregressive methodology (especially the VECM – Vector Error Correction Model) for a set of some OECD countries with similar economic features (France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom and United States of America). The empirical analyses of public capital productivity is limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. The lack of data is always a big problem in the analyses of this problem. For this reason, we built a new database that provides internationally comparable capital stock estimates for the countries mentioned above. The empirical results suggest that there is evidence for positive output effects of public capital but not exactly the same for the other variables, employment and private capital.