Assessing the efficiency of municipal public expenditure in a context of more and more limited resources is certainly a topical subject. In this time of economic crisis, the national lawmaker has brought legislation aimed at rationalizing public expenditure and interventions to reorganize the centres of local expenditure. In the specific case of Tuscany, regional government has given great attention to the problems of redefining an optimal dimension for the management of key public functions, in the awareness that greater expenditure efficiency is tightly linked to the demographic, geographic and economic characteristics of the expenditure authority. This institutional development is also mirrored in several literature contributions on the efficiency of public expenditure at both an aggregate level and for the single expenditure function (for a review of these study see for example Carosi et al., 2014).
In this work, the Tuscan situation is first presented through an analytical description of municipal expenditure and an overview of the legislation on the institutional set-up under study. This sort of investigation constitutes a necessary starting point from which to evaluate the efficiency of municipal expenditure in Tuscany.
Autore: Giovanna D'Inverno
