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How have socio-economic resources been mobilized to pay for public works from the Roman age up to twentieth-century Europe? How have the infrastructure's fundamental mismatch between social costs and benefits been solved? This chapter tries to answer these questions, first by looking at finance in a broad sense, as a set of mechanisms bringing resources to infrastructure; second by focusing on some core factors as technological and organizational change, public and private involvement, national and international drivers. A final taxonomy then outlines the macro-types of infrastructure financing that are analysed in the book, showing clearly how it is impossible to identify a unique pattern of infrastructure finance that always and everywhere is superior in terms of long-term sustainability, growth, and welfare effects. History teaches us that there are no recipes, but only a set of stories that may suggest some analogies to contemporary problems and may represent a way of testing conventional hypotheses.

Ex post evaluation of Cohesion Policy programmes 2007-2013, focusing on the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Cohesion Fund (CF).

According to his posthumous book, Laffont (2005), suggests that when policy-makers in less developed countries have a private agenda, regulators risk to be corrupted, and ex post evaluation is costly, government privatization supply is a non linear (inverted U) function of a corruption index. Both benevolent and very corrupted governments may divest State Owned Enterprises for very different reasons. Governments with an intermediate degree of corruption may like privatization, but not always for good reasons in terms of social welfare. Undesirable privatization occurs when the private benefit/cost ratio of the policy-makers exceeds the social value of divestiture. The paper restates the complex Laffont's model in a simplified, intuitive form. Then, some assumptions of the model are critically examined. Finally, empirical evidence is discussed, and found not entirely convincing, because of the modest impact of the negative quadratic corruption variable. The intuition seems, however, important, in suggesting that privatization may be a function of corruption in some countries. The policy implication is that international financial institutions should be aware that in some circumstances privatization may occur for the wrong reasons in LDCs.

Texto dispoñible en galego, español e inglés Este traballo estuda o papel dos clusters industriais para fomentar a innovación rexional e a cohesión económica en Europa. A partir dunha visión de conxunto dos clusters industriais na UE, na que se destacan as fortalezas e debilidades das aglomeracións de empresas, investigamos empiricamente a forma en que os clusters e as características rexionais afectan ao investimento en I+D e ao output de innovación e, así mesmo, investigamos o papel que desempeñan no impulso da cohesión económica. Atopamos que a existencia e o tamaño dos clusters rexionais fomentan de maneira significativa a innovación rexional en Europa. Porén, ten importancia a industria na que se especializan as distintas rexións. En particular, a especialización en clusters de tecnoloxía media-alta e alta parece crear unha contorna máis favorable para a innovación e para a I+D. Por último, a presenza de clusters nunha rexión asóciase positivamente con maiores niveis de emprego Este trabajo estudia el papel de los clusters industriales para fomentar la innovación regional y la cohesión económica en Europa. A partir de una visión de conjunto de los clusters industriales en la UE, en la que se destacan las fortalezas y debilidades de las aglomeraciones de empresas, investigamos empíricamente la forma en que los clusters y las características regionales afectan a la inversión en I+D y al output de innovación y, asimismo, investigamos el papel que desempeñan en el impulso de la cohesión económica. Encontramos que la existencia y el tamaño de los clusters regionales fomentan de manera significativa la innovación regional en Europa. Sin embargo, tiene importancia la industria en la que se especializan las distintas regiones. En particular, la especialización en clusters de tecnología media-alta y alta parece crear un entorno más favorable para la innovación y la I+D. Por último, la presencia de clusters en una región se asocia positivamente con mayores niveles de empleo This paper studies the role of industrial clusters in stimulating regional innovation and economic cohesion in Europe. Starting from an overview of industrial clusters in the EU, in which we highlight the strengths and weaknesses of agglomerations of firms, we empirically investigate how cluster and regional characteristics influence R&D investment and innovation output and the role they play in fostering economic cohesion. We find that the presence and size of clusters significantly enhance regional innovation in Europe; however, the industry in which regions specialize matters. In particular, specialization in medium- high and high-technology clusters seems to create a better environment for innovation and R&D. Finally, the presence of clusters in a region is positively associated with higher levels of employment SI

In the past two decades privatisation and liberalisation of network industries providing services of general economic interest (SGEI), have been particularly significant in the European Union. Wide variations around a common policy trend can, however, be observed across countries and sectors. We focus on electricity and gas sectors because energy sectors have usually been profit makers, not affected by direct government transfers, in contrast to other SGEI. We study the effects of privatisation and other reforms on consumer prices using both subjective data on consumers' perception of utility prices and data on average prices paid.

Privatization policy faces increasing popular opposition in Latin America. We test for the determinants of this discontent. We use the results of Latinobarometro (2002), a survey of a representative sample of 18522 individuals in 17 countries as our dependent variable of perception, and a privatization dataset on the same countries, including sectoral disaggregation of divestitures, time profiles, proceeds, and other variables for each country. We use as well a set of macroeconomic variables as controls. Our main finding is that disagreement with privatization is more likely when the respondent is poor, privatization was large and quick, involved a high proportion of public services as water and electricity, the country suffered adverse macroeconomic shocks, and there is high inequality of incomes. The more the respondent is educated, the more adverse to privatization he or she is. We suggest that these results depict a broadly consistent picture of privatization discontent that points to distributional issues, probably because of tariff rebalancing not adequately addressed by policy makers and regulators, as suggested by earlier empirical papers. Further research is needed on the relationship between perceptions and actual welfare changes.

The privatisation policy pursued in the UK by Mrs Thatcher's government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Major's government (1990-1997) was the largest experiment in public divestitures among capitalist economies. It had a deep impact on economic policy-making world wide, and was vastly imitated, in Western Europe, in the former planned economies, in a number of less developed countries. In this paper we test the impact of privatisation on macroeconomic performance in the United Kingdom using quarterly data from 1979 to 1999. In the econometric model, we use privatisation proceeds as an explanatory variable and we control for several other variables. Testing for cointegration the results show that there is a long run equilibrium relationship between GDP growth and the variables used in the model. However, in our empirical analysis we find a weak evidence that privatisation generated an aggregate shock on output in the UK. This result is consistent with empirical literature on microeconomic evidence that shows that in the UK ownership change per se had little impact on long term productivity trends.

This paper analyses the effects on consumers' welfare of the privatisation policy carried out in the UK since 1979. The approach we follow sees the privatisation of a State owned enterprise within the broader framework of the "policy reform" theory (Drèze and Stern, 1990). By adopting this perspective, the change in consumers' welfare "with" and "without" privatisations can be studied by appropriate welfare measures. We claim that an advantage of our approach is that of being able to provide the required welfare assessment in a simplified way by means of a limited set of information. In particular, we show that a series of welfare measures only based on aggregate information can be used once one becomes ready to accept the use of first and second order approximations and a few "reasonable" assumptions on the shape of demand functions. These welfare measures are subsequently used for the evaluation of the welfare effects related to price variations in seven British privatised public utilities. We conclude that the contribution to consumers' welfare of the privatisation policy in the UK, when compared to the huge transfers involved in the process, has been rather modest

This paper offers a review and discussion of the evidence concerning the underpricing and long run performance of British PIPOs (Privatisation Initial Public Offerings) between 1977-1996, i.e. from the first privatisation under a Labour Government (British Petroleum), until the last ones by a Conservative Government (Railtrack). We exclude more recent years because the change of government, the introduction of a windfall tax on excess profits of regulated utilities, and changes in the regulatory regime, mark a totally different landscape as compared with the previous twenty years. We find evidence that underpricing was not followed by underperformance, as is usually observed with IPOs, but rather strong outperformance. We decompose this trend by subgroups within a 55 observations sample, and conclude that lax regulation was probably the main driving force between abnormal returns of British PIPOs.