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This paper assesses the efficiency of public agricultural expenditure in each Italian region through the analysis of regional budgets, both as a whole and in relation to specific agricultural policy measures. The degree of integration/complementarity between regional funds and Community funds of the second pillar of the CAP is also evaluated, in order to determine whether European resources are used by the Regions as a substitute for or in addition to regional measures. In Italy, public agricultural funding comes from three sources: the EU, the State, and the regions. While the literature on the effectiveness and efficiency of public spending in agriculture focuses on EU funds, the present research also takes into consideration the agricultural spending of Regions. This original analysis of agricultural spending at the regional level has been made possible by the databank of the CREA (Council for Agricultural Research and Economics), which has been gathering information on the allocations, payments, and remaining balances of regional accounts since 1990. The expenditure items for the agricultural sector included in the regional budgets were reclassified according to an original methodology created by the INEA (National Institute of Agricultural Economics, today CREA). The results show that the overall efficiency of public expenditure has improved over the last two decades (from less than 40% in 2000 to just over 50% in 2019). This improvement is quite evident in the South and the Islands and less so in the North. Agricultural policy measures that can be defined as “short term measures” (contributions to public and private entities involved in agricultural and forestry activities for running costs, such as salaries, telephone, electricity, etc.) show a good spending capacity, while measures requiring planning, such as business investments, still present difficulties. As regards integration/complementarity between regional funds and EU Fund for Rural Development Programmes (RDPs), the regions have been classified depending or whether or not they differentiate between the RDP financing and Budget financing. In the most recent period of 2014-2020, most regions have tended to target both sources of funding to support the same types of priority activities.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the controversies of fiscal and monetary policies in defining business cycles in Croatia, i.e. to answer the question whether they can, and in what way, determine the cyclical movements. Using Hodrick-Prescott filter for extracting cycles from selected macroeconomic variables for the period 1994-2013, this paper gives a reflection on the past relationship between the characteristics of Croatian fiscal and monetary policies by testing whether these two economic pillars are in fact coordinated over a business cycle. We found that both fiscal and monetary variables exhibit counter-cyclical behaviour with relatively weak correlation to the real GDP suggesting that they are coordinated during a business cycle but their reach is ambiguous. Finally, we conclude that fiscal and monetary policies in Croatia are constrained by internal and external factors, and thus they often cannot accomplish their counter-cyclical role.

In this paper we dealt with social tourism trying to concentrate mainly on its quantitative aspects. However, once we found a working definition for the analysis of this phenomenon (identifying the key players in its supply and demand, and outlining its main features in common and in disagreement with other types of tourism), the lack of sufficiently informative databanks clearly emerged. Then, in order to characterize the phenomenon and its evolution we analyzed several case studies, describing particularly interesting examples of social tourism around the world. Our analysis indicates the need to develop a richer quantitative information than the existing one, especially if policy evaluation exercises must be undertaken. Surveys are needed that can identify the groups currently excluded from tourism. Besides, policies must be analyzed considering their effects on the treated subjects vis-à-vis control (non-treated) groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]