How to Improve the Effectiveness of EU Structural Funds: Lessons From Foreign Institutional Investors and Sovereign Wealth Funds

The reduction of the amount of resources devoted by the policy maker to measures aimed at supporting the industrial development by reason of the increasing public finance constraints is a very debated topic. According to several observers, the increase of the gap between Mezzogiorno's and the other Italian areas' growth rate would be caused, among other factors, by the shortage of these funds. However, claiming that the limited growth of the Southern Regions is due to the resource insufficiency could be a biased interpretation. The present paper aims at providing a contribution to this debate: in particular, it intends to understand if the main issue is the fund reduction or this is represented by the presence of problems in terms of governance and spending mechanisms experienced by the assignee Administrations. In order to provide an original contribution to improve these mechanisms, alternative models of public resources investment have been analyzed.In particular, the investment approach of State-owned institutional investorsand sovereign wealth funds has been deepened: in fact, these operators adopt privateand very lean tools to invest the State-owned funds. This approach permits toachieve decision making quickness (and, hence, limited investment time-to-market)and high quality in terms of investment selection. In such a critical context, a test,according to which part of the resources that the Regional Administrations are notable to spend could be managed following this approach, could be launched.