0000000001219562
AUTHOR
Annalisa Castelli
Local vs. National Environmental Spending: A Stochastic Frontier Analysis
This work studies the impact of public environmental spending in a fiscal federalist framework. The main question is studying when the centralization of this public economic function is welfare improving. Applying the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) on Italian, Portuguese and Slovakian data, the paper tries to test this issue. Our results highlight the superiority of centralized environmental spending with respect to the decentralization of this particular public good.
Pollution and economic growth: a maximum likelihood estimation of environmental Kuznets curve
As in Brock and Taylor (2011) in this paper we consider the importance of the relationship between the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) Literature and the Economic Growth Theories. To address this issue we construct country production functions that directly incorporate CO2 emissions as input and estimate them using Stochastic Frontiers. This approach differs from that of Brock and Taylor (2011) but is similar to the one followed by Koop (1998). By introducing the environmental “bads” directly in the production function, we can analyse their contribution to total output growth. We highlight an important contribution of CO2 emissions to growth and find out that the EKC seems not to hold, at…
Stochastic Frontiers Approach: an Empirical Analysis of Italian Environmental Spending
Using the stochastic frontiers approach (SFA) on a panel of Italian regional data, this paper tries to analyse the optimal design of environmental spending. The main question is, so forth, studying centralization vs decentralization of a public economic function, such as the protection of the environment, in order to improve the welfare of a country. Empirical results on Italy are ambiguous: the changing from a centralized to a decentralized government, giving more autonomy to local units, does not highlight a clear improvement in regional economic performance.