Il debito delle Amministrazioni locali in Italia

Abstract

- The paper provides a survey of the borrowing strategies of Italian local administrations. It examines the evolution of regulation about local government debt, outlining recent trends. In addition, it forecasts future normative scenarios informed by the decentralization process and Italian national budget policies. The implications of the "golden rule" clause and of the ceiling to indebtedness (tied to local entities' revenues) set by the Italian legislation are also accounted for, as is the impact of specific financial techniques such as derivatives instruments. The paper evaluates the margins that could afford a higher financial market control and recommends a few changes that could better align the regulations governing local bodies' resort to debt to a decentralized institutional structure.