Federalism, Party Competition and Budget Outcome: Empirical Findings on Regional Health Expenditure in Italy

Emilio Giardina, Marina Cavalieri, Calogero Guccio () and Isidoro Mazza ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In the last decade, Italy has experienced a considerable decentralization of functions to the regions. This transformation has been especially relevant for the National Health System that has de facto assumed a federal system design. The federal reform aimed at disciplining public health expenditure, which drains a substantial share of the budget of Italian regions and is among the main causes of the regional deficits. Political economic analysis, however, suggests that impact of federalism on public expenditure depends on central and local government strategies to win in the electoral competition. Results derived in this preliminary study indicate that political competition actually works as a tool of fiscal discipline; it shows a restraining effect on public health expenditure.

Keywords: Fiscal federalism; local budget; multi-level policy-making; public expenditure; political competition; health economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 H51 H72 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-geo, nep-hea, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/16437/1/MPRA_paper_16437.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:16437

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().