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• W95864179 abstract "Recently, a rising interest in political and economic integration/disintegrationissues has been developed in the political economy field. This growing strand ofliterature partly draws on traditional issues of fiscal federalism and optimumpublic good provision and focuses on a trade-off between the benefits ofcentralization, arising from economies of scale or externalities, and the costs ofharmonizing policies as a consequence of the increased heterogeneity ofindividual preferences in an international union or in a country composed of atleast two regions.This thesis stems from this strand of literature and aims to shed some lighton two highly relevant aspects of the political economy of European integration.The first concerns the role of public opinion in the integration process; moreprecisely, how economic benefits and costs of integration shape citizens'support for European Union (EU) membership. The second is the allocation ofpolicy competences among different levels of government: European, nationaland regional.Chapter 1 introduces the topics developed in this thesis by reviewing themain recent theoretical developments in the political economy analysis ofintegration processes. It is structured as follows. First, it briefly surveys a fewrelevant articles on economic theories of integration and disintegrationprocesses (Alesina and Spolaore 1997, Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina et al.2000, Casella and Feinstein 2002) and discusses their relevance for the studyof the impact of economic benefits and costs on public opinion attitude towardsthe EU. Subsequently, it explores the links existing between such politicaleconomy literature and theories of fiscal federalism, especially with regard tonormative considerations concerning the optimal allocation of competences in aunion.Chapter 2 firstly proposes a model of citizens’ support for membership ofinternational unions, with explicit reference to the EU; subsequently it tests themodel on a panel of EU countries.What are the factors that influence public opinion support for the EuropeanUnion (EU)? In international relations theory, the idea that citizens' support forthe EU depends on material benefits deriving from integration, i.e. whetherEuropean integration makes individuals economically better off (utilitariansupport), has been common since the 1970s, but has never been the subject ofa formal treatment (Hix 2005). A small number of studies in the 1990s haveinvestigated econometrically the link between national economic performanceand mass support for European integration (Eichenberg and Dalton 1993;Anderson and Kalthenthaler 1996), but only making informal assumptions. Themain aim of Chapter 2 is thus to propose and test our model with a view toproviding a more complete and theoretically grounded picture of public supportfor the EU.Following theories of utilitarian support, we assume that citizens are infavour of membership if they receive economic benefits from it. To develop thisidea, we propose a simple political economic model drawing on the recenteconomic literature on integration and disintegration processes. The basicelement is the existence of a trade-off between the benefits of centralisation andthe costs of harmonising policies in presence of heterogeneous preferencesamong countries. The approach we follow is that of the recent literature on thepolitical economy of international unions and the unification or break-up ofnations (Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina and Wacziarg 1999, Alesina et al.2001, 2005a, to mention only the relevant). The general perspective is thatunification provides returns to scale in the provision of public goods, butreduces each member state’s ability to determine its most favoured bundle ofpublic goods.In the simple model presented in Chapter 2, support for membership of theunion is increasing in the union’s average income and in the loss of efficiencystemming from being outside the union, and decreasing in a country’s averageincome, while increasing heterogeneity of preferences among countries pointsto a reduced scope of the union.Afterwards we empirically test the model with data on the EU; moreprecisely, we perform an econometric analysis employing a panel of membercountries over time. The second part of Chapter 2 thus tries to answer thefollowing question: does public opinion support for the EU really depend oneconomic factors? The findings are broadly consistent with our theoreticalexpectations: the conditions of the national economy, differences in incomeamong member states and heterogeneity of preferences shape citizens’ attitudetowards their country’s membership of the EU.Consequently, this analysis offers some interesting policy implications forthe present debate about ratification of the European Constitution and, moregenerally, about how the EU could act in order to gain more support from theEuropean public. Citizens in many member states are called to express theiropinion in national referenda, which may well end up in rejection of theConstitution, as recently happened in France and the Netherlands, triggering aEuropean-wide political crisis. These events show that nowadays understandingpublic attitude towards the EU is not only of academic interest, but has a strongrelevance for policy-making too.Chapter 3 empirically investigates the link between European integrationand regional autonomy in Italy. Over the last few decades, the double tendencytowards supranationalism and regional autonomy, which has characterisedsome European States, has taken a very interesting form in this country,because Italy, besides being one of the founding members of the EU, alsoimplemented a process of decentralisation during the 1970s, furtherstrengthened by a constitutional reform in 2001.Moreover, the issue of the allocation of competences among the EU, theMember States and the regions is now especially topical. The process leadingto the drafting of European Constitution (even if then it has not come into force)has attracted much attention from a constitutional political economy perspectiveboth on a normative and positive point of view (Breuss and Eller 2004, Mueller2005). The Italian parliament has recently passed a new thorough constitutionalreform, still to be approved by citizens in a referendum, which includes, amongother things, the so called “devolution”, i.e. granting the regions exclusivecompetence in public health care, education and local police.Following and extending the methodology proposed in a recent influentialarticle by Alesina et al. (2005b), which only concentrated on the EU activity(treaties, legislation, and European Court of Justice’s rulings), we develop a setof quantitative indicators measuring the intensity of the legislative activity of theItalian State, the EU and the Italian regions from 1973 to 2005 in a largenumber of policy categories. By doing so, we seek to answer the followingbroad questions. Are European and regional legislations substitutes for statelaws? To what extent are the competences attributed by the European treatiesor the Italian Constitution actually exerted in the various policy areas? Is theirexertion consistent with the normative recommendations from the economicliterature about their optimum allocation among different levels of government?The main results show that, first, there seems to be a certain substitutabilitybetween EU and national legislations (even if not a very strong one), but notbetween regional and national ones. Second, the EU concentrates its legislativeactivity mainly in international trade and agriculture, whilst social policy is wherethe regions and the State (which is also the main actor in foreign policy) aremore active. Third, at least two levels of government (in some cases all of them)are significantly involved in the legislative activity in many sectors, even wherethe rationale for that is, at best, very questionable, indicating that they actuallyshare a larger number of policy tasks than that suggested by the economictheory.It appears therefore that an excessive number of competences are actuallyshared among different levels of government. From an economic perspective, itmay well be recommended that some competences be shared, but only whenthe balance between scale or spillover effects and heterogeneity of preferencessuggests so. When, on the contrary, too many levels of government areinvolved in a certain policy area, the distinction between their differentresponsibilities easily becomes unnecessarily blurred. This may not only leadsto a slower and inefficient policy-making process, but also risks to make it toocomplicate to understand for citizens, who, on the contrary, should be able toknow who is really responsible for a certain policy when they vote in national,local or European elections or in referenda on national or Europeanconstitutional issues." @default.
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• W95864179 date "2007-06-12" @default.
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• W95864179 title "Essays on the political economy of European integration" @default.
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