Wednesday, June 26, 2013
D1.18B (Oudemanhuispoort)
The aim of this paper is to understand why, over the last 30 years, there has been increasing cross-regional divergence in social spending in Italy and whether this phenomenon has accelerated since the beginning of the economic crisis. Although it has been underlined that regions have become very important providers of social protection, very few studies have shown what regional-level factors best explain different levels of welfare generosity. A quantitative analysis based on an original dataset of spending figures in the areas of healthcare, social assistance, labour market policies, social housing and education is used to answer this question. Different hypotheses will be tested by assessing the relationship between spending figures (dependent variable) and data measuring fiscal capacity and institutional autonomy of regional governments, regionalization of the party system, demographic characteristics of a region and its level of economic development. The data cover a 30 year period and, therefore, it will be possible to see how the impact of different factors changed over time. Preliminary findings show that, in the last decade, the ability of regions to rely on their own economic resources and the level of regionalization of party politics have had a more positive impact on regional social spending than variables such as transfers from central government and centre-left regional government. Moreover, the gap between poor and rich regions has significantly widened since 2008. The results of the quantitative part will be combined with a brief analysis of some significant regional cases and some suggestions for future research.
