The Making of Public Works in Italy: Institutional Features and Regional Characteristics

Project duration is a major metrics for performance assessment in the procurement of public works. The overall time to completion amounts to the sum of the duration of three sub-phases (project design, awarding and execution) and is a composite variable, influenced by factors as diverse as project complexity, local market conditions, and procurement offices' composition. In Italy, there exist stark differences between Northern and Southern administrations in public works' management that include, to different degrees, all the above components. In this paper, we use very granular data on Italian public procurement to investigate the dynamics of public works durations in the last decade, unveiling performance differential across regions and analysing their drivers. We find that (i) Southern regions underperform with respect to the Northern ones, in particular when dealing with administrative tasks; (ii) the durations are negatively correlated with the share of female and young employees within the administrations' workforce; (iii) the experience, as well as the administrative efficiency, play a role in determining shorter times to completion.