Evaluating public expenditures on tourism: the utility of the Italian public accounting reforms

Abstract

The accounting reforms of the state, regional and local budgets that began in 2009 and finished in 2016 have improved the quality of accounting data. Mainly, these reforms were completed for the adoption of the functional classification of in the administrative balances of all Public Administration (PA) entities. This process is the same one that is utilized in government financial statistics for the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP), even if some differences remain. However, to evaluate the effectiveness of political actions it is necessary, first of all, to have a reference scheme, identifying a recognized set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Public expenditure after the accounting reform, is linked to the policies undertaken and this is particularly useful to assess it. As far as tourism is concerned, in order to have an adequate measure of the resources managed in tourism field, it is necessary to consider as domain the Enlarged Public Sector (EPS), including also enterprise. Using arrivals and nights spent as KPIs in a panel econometric model, this research examines the net change over time. In the model, the explicative variables are public tourism expenditures and environment, transport and mobility expenditures considering the EPS sector as referred domains in the period 2000–2017.