This paper provides a structured narrative review of the political economy implications of place-based policies (PBPs). It complements the extensive literature on their economic effectiveness by examining how territorially targeted transfers interact with political incentives, accountability arrangements, local institutions, and implementation capacity. The empirical discussion focuses on studies providing causal evidence, using Italy and EU Cohesion Policy as evidence-rich settings. The review shows that external funding and multilevel governance may weaken accountability, while concentrated local benefits and territorial representation can make transfers electorally valuable. It also discusses how discretion and local voting may shape project selection, and how transfers may interact with social capital, policy preferences, corruption risks, or organised crime under specific institutional conditions. These mechanisms help explain why PBPs often produce heterogeneous effects, why unintended consequences may arise, and why economically justified interventions can perform differently across institutional environments. The paper argues that policy design should combine clear market-failure rationales, disciplined discretion, well-defined implementation responsibilities, and independent evaluation of economic, political, and institutional outcomes.
This paper investigates whether the higher productivity of metropolitan regions in the EU reflects stronger recent growth dynamics or the persistence of historical advantages. The study focuses on the difference between capital metropolitan, other metropolitan, and non-metropolitan regions. A ten-sector shift-share decomposition using new and more detailed ARDECO data is combined with a descriptive regression framework to show which factors are associated with productivity growth. Capital metros consistently display the highest levels and growth rates of labour productivity. Other metro regions, however, have above average productivity, but below average productivity growth over the past two decades. In contrast, non-metro regions have reduced their productivity gap. Across all regional typologies, within-sector productivity improvements represent the dominant source of growth. The regressions show that initial low productivity, capital-region status, population density, patenting activity, employment shares in ICT-related activities and construction, and transport infrastructure quality are positively associated with productivity growth.
This paper analyses the relationship between social capital and road-traffic fatality rates, focusing on the role of healthcare capacity as a conditioning factor. Building on a crash-chain perspective, we argue that social capital primarily affects preventive behaviour and immediate post-crash responses, while healthcare capacity governs survival once an accident occurs, implying a context-dependent interaction between the two. Using regional panel data for Italy, we estimate models that explicitly account for the interaction between civic norms and healthcare resources. The results show that higher levels of social capital are associated with significantly lower road-traffic fatality rates. However, this association is heterogeneous across contexts: it is stronger in regions with weaker healthcare capacity and progressively attenuates as the healthcare system improves. Overall, the findings provide supportive evidence consistent with a mechanism of conditional complementarity between civic norms and healthcare capacity. Social capital appears to be particularly relevant where formal trauma care is limited, while its marginal contribution declines in resource-rich healthcare environments, with relevant implications for regional road-safety and public health policies.
This study quantifies the long-term socioeconomic consequences of local railway closures in Japan. Exploiting the policy choice forced upon municipalities by the Japan National Railways Restructuring Act of 1980 as a quasi-experiment, we estimate the causal effects of railway-line closures using difference-in-differences (DID) models, addressing potential selection and omitted-variable biases inherent in policy evaluation. Using a municipal-level panel dataset from 1975 to 2005, the DID analysis indicated that the railway-line closures associated with the outflow of child-rearing populations and a decline in regional commercial activity over the 20-year post-treatment period with variation across regions. These findings have direct policy relevance for contemporary debates on the role and value of regional transportation infrastructure.
