The political economy of public spending on italian rail transport: A European view

The public expenditure on railways is largely unexplored in Europe. This is surprising because the size of government financial support to the industry is remarkable. Filling a dozen years of missing information, this paper rebuilds the total public spending on the Italian railway since 1992 making it comparable. This research complements a significant lack of information of public interest since these data have been published from 1966 until 2001; year of the last data release. From then the extent of public support to the industry has remained indefinite. Our results serve: scholars aimed at comparing such expenses with other countries, policy makers aimed at taking superior data-supported decisions when it comes to budgeting and industry professionals for intelligence purposes. Thus, reducing the long-lasting asymmetric information in this domain - a key threaten to the sector growth. Results of this paper enable a proper comparison of the government spending on railways among different countries such as Italy, France and Great Britain as an exercise.