‘New’ Regional Policies of the EU and the Italian Experience

The new participatory approach of Italian policymakers to regional policies has led to a set of instruments called negotiated planning. In this paper it is argued that the new measures may suffer from drawbacks similar to the ones often imputed to public enterprise: ambiguity of objectives, scant accountability, dependence from political lobbies, which can be serious obstacles for policy effectiveness. To direct the abundant resources still untapped towards activities favourable for development, it is instead necessary to debureaucratise the economy, removing power and opportunities for rich pickings from political groups, bureaucracies and local potentates. To this end, a type of public enterprise able to overcome the failures of the past and to operate efficiently in competition with private firms, could achieve the fundamental objectives of generating positive externalities and beneficially altering the returns pattern of private activities.