Infrastructure and Convergence in the EU: Introduction

Abstract

This Special Issue of Transition Studies Review on ‘‘Infrastructure, convergence and investment decisions in the EU’’, is a collection of selected papers presented at the VIII Milan European Economy Workshop (11 and 12 June 2009) in the context of the EIBURS project on ‘‘Public investment under budgetary constraints in new member states’’, funded by the European Investment Bank. The Department of Economics, Business and Statistics, DEAS (Universita degli Studi, di Milano, Italy), in partnership with CERGE-EI (Charles University, Prague), with a network of international experts in the EU Member States, has addressed issues related to public investment in infrastructure by a combination of theoretical and empirical analysis, with a particular attention given to offering recommendations to bodies in charge of budgetary and investment decisions. The research papers included in this Special Issue aim at analyzing public investment in the European Union, with an explicit focus on the New Member States in the presence of financial constraints (for the related papers see Florio 2011). The contributions address important issues related to infrastructure public investment by adopting different perspectives and techniques. The main conclusions relate to the choice of methods of funding and to the evaluation of different projects and schemes in the presence of fiscal constraints, an issue of paramount importance for the EU New Member States and offer a novel perspective on the growth potential of public investment in regional and national European economies. Below I briefly summarise the papers and then conclude by providing some personal remarks.