Institutional quality effects on separate waste collection: some evidence from Italian provinces

Abstract

Separate waste collection in Italy comes under the responsibility of local authorities, provinces, while national laws set quantitative targets to be achieved over time. Overall, just a few provinces have reached the thresholds set by the latest law (Legislative Decree 152/2006) and some territorial differentiation has been detected. The aim of this paper is twofold: to verify the effectiveness of Legislative Decree 152/2006 in promoting higher levels of separate collection and to test whether institutional quality (considering the following indicators: voice and accountability, regulatory quality, rule of law and corruption) affects provinces’ efficiency in the separate collection process. For this purpose, we implement the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Results suggest that the effectiveness of Legislative Decree 152/2006 has been affected by provinces’ institutional quality. In particular, the presence of institutional constraints did not allow the most virtuous provinces to achieve the targets set by law.

Keywords:

• recycling
• government policy
• stochastic frontier approach
• environmental law
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Institutional quality is a broad concept used in several economic fields by researchers and policy-makers and a number of different measures have been created to capture key dimensions of governance, focusing mainly at the country level (Thomas 2009). Among them, the most widely used are the Worldwide Governance Indicators that consider six aggregate indicators: (i) voice and accountability; (ii) political stability and absence of violence; (iii) government effectiveness; (iv) regulatory quality; (v) rule of law; (vi) control of corruption (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2010). Recently, some authors have stressed the importance of considering the quality of government at subnational level. In particular, two studies have addressed the differences among the regions within the EU, highlighting significant disparities (Charron, Dijkstra, and Lapuente 2014, 2015). In Italy, Nifo and Vecchione (2014) taking the cue from the World Governance Indicator, calculated five out of the six different dimensions of Institutional quality indicators at provincial level and for a long period of time (2004–2012) (Political Stability and Absence of Violence has been excluded).

2. We consider, in addition to truncated normal distribution, three other different distributions of the inefficiency term: half-normal, exponential, and gamma distribution. We omit these results because they are very similar. Interested readers are welcome to request these results from the authors.

3. This problem is known in the empirical literature as the ‘incidental parameters problem’.

4. Data at the municipal level are available only for the period 2010–2015 (http://www.catasto-rifiuti.isprambiente.it/index.php?pg=nazione&aa=2014, accessed June 2017). This does not allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of the Legislative Decree 152/2006 due to the lack of municipal data available before the decree came into force. In addition, there is a lack of data at the municipal level for covariates used in this paper. Indeed, the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) provides municipal data only for censuses (carried out every 10 years).

5. Art. 183 of Legislative decree 152/06 considered the following groups of urban waste homogeneous categories within the separate collection: organic waste (wet waste and garden waste); packaging waste (paper and cardboard, plastic, glass, wood, metal) and multi-material; bulky waste subject to recovery (plastic, glass, wood, metal); electrical waste; textile waste and second-hand clothing; waste from selective collections (batteries and accumulators, expired medicines, paints and inks, vegetable and mineral oils, etc.). Waste from building sites is not included in the calculation of urban waste as it is classified as special waste.

6. ISPRA (The Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) acts under the vigilance and policy guidance of the Italian Ministry for the Environment and the Protection of Land and Sea. In particular, the data on the production and collection of municipal waste are collected through questionnaires sent and compiled by public and private organizations dealing with the management of municipal waste (i.e., regions and provinces).

7. Although the Legislative Decree 152/2006 is operational from 2006 onwards, we consider only the 2006–2012 period because the data on the Institutional Quality Index are available until 2012.

8. We have implemented other regressions, including among covariates other variables (e.g., the value added per capita [Mazzanti, Montini, and Zoboli 2008; Pearce and Brisson 1995]; the population density and the tourist attendances per capita [Mazzanti, Montini, and Zoboli 2008]). Since neither of these covariates are statistically significant, we omit these results because they do not add any information. Interested readers are welcome to request these results from the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The current research was funded by the University of Naples “Parthenope” within research project “Sustainability, externalities and efficient use of environmental resources”.