Administrative Capacity

Administrative capacity: definitions, measurement, policy interventions and economic impacts

This multi-disciplinary project investigates the issue of administrative capacity (AC) of regions and municipalities: its definition, measurement, impact, and the policies to improve it. AC, although often vaguely defined, has been assessed to be a determinant of both regional growth and regional policy impacts, leading to specific capacity building efforts by national governments and the EU. Most of these studies use the European Quality of Government Index (EQI), which heavily relies on citizens’ perception and thus might be influenced by the local situation in which the different administrations operate. Moreover, the EQI is a broad measure of government quality not capturing AC specifically and is only available at regional (Nuts2) level. In this project, new, factful, measures of AC will be developed and applied, based on the actual ability of Italian regional (Nuts2) and local (Lau2) administrations to perform their tasks in key policy areas.