Ricerc@Sapienza

In the last decade, the Italian Parliament devised a number of interventions aimed at improving competition among local public transport (LPT) operators and at implementing a more efficient use of scarce public financial resources available for the LPT services. The reform requires that the main criterion of historical costs currently applied to allocate national public resources among Local Authorities (LAs) should be gradually overcome in favour of principles that encourage efficiency. In order to support suitable Authorities in taking formal decisions to pursue this goal, this research is intended to:

- develop an operative methodology, consistent with the Italian legal framework, in order to apply standard costs in the allocation of national public resources available for the LPT services to Regions and, in turn, to LAs.

- perform simulations to illustrate the impact of this methodology in terms of reallocation of national public resources available at 2016 among LAs.

The research will make use of a data set including information about costs and technical/environmental gathered by means of questionnaires sent to companies producing, in Italy, 100% of the production of tramway and subways services, 29% of the production of bus services and 97% of the production of rail services.

According to the proposed research, we will measure the difference, for each Region, between the factual amount of funds received from the State by firms and the expected resources at the expense of the State if allocation is made on the basis of the standard cost. The immediate result would be a shifting of national public resources from Regions where LPT services should be produced at a lower cost in favor of Regions where productivity efficiency is achieved.

In a dynamic context where the proposed methodology is applied on a yearly basis, LAs could be gradually induced to use more efficiently the scarce national public resources earmarked for LPT services.