Administrative Burdens on Business Activities: Regional Disparities

Abstract

A significant strand of the recent literature endorses the thesis that “excessive” regulation (or a heavy administrative burden on firms) damages competition and growth. The Italian system has a poor ranking both in anti-competitive regulations (see the OECD product market regulations indicators) and in bureaucratic burdens (78th in “Doing Business” in 2010), despite improvements in the former over the last 10 years. But Italy’s position is the result of a combination of possibly very different contexts, so it is useful to evaluate the differences between Italian regions with reference to some indicators that are likely to take different values (i.e. those that do not depend simply on national laws). The aim of this paper is to measure this variance with reference to the costs and the length of the various administrative procedures and to discuss the causes of the differences.

Keywords: Administrative Burden, Bureaucracy, Regulation

JEL Classification: K2, L51