The data collected here contain expenditure levels of the Italian Regions, Provinces and Communes for healthcare, assistance and other welfare related services in the period of time from 1982 until 2001.
Public expenditure of Regions (and Autonomous Provices) come from ISTAT while information for Communes and Provinces come from the Ministero dell’Interno.
A brief description of the data sources and structure is provided in the readme file below. For additional information, please contact .
ISTAT (Italian Institute of Statistics) has been collecting and publishing final balances of these administrations since 1953, monitoring the economic conditions of Italian public administrations.
The final balances of Regional Administrations and Autonomous Provinces are collected by ISTAT itself once they are approved by each administration within October of the year after the one to which all expenses refer. Until 1986 ISTAT had to harmonise differences in the structure of the balance accounts of different Regions, but after 1986 a uniform method of balance structuring has been introduced according to Circolare n.18 by Ministero del Tesoro.
The classification of expenditures reported here is the one introduced in 1982 in the “Informazione” publication by ISTAT; at the moment this represents the most precise classification of regional expenditures collected from final balances of public administrations.
The types of expenditures considered are included in the section referring to the welfare field: expenditure for social assistance, public health service, social insurance are separately reported. Data also include other welfare related issues such as public buildings, construction of sewers and aqueducts, protection of the environment, expenditure for sport and free time. We also report expenditure for public housing, reported by ISTAT in a different section.
The final balances of Communes and Provinces are collected from the whole Italian territory by the Ministero dell’Interno, which forwards them to ISTAT to produce the above mentioned Regional Administrations and Autonomous Provinces. Since Italian communes are more than nine thousands, it takes more time than in the case of Regions to collect and harmonise the balance sheets of these administrations and for this reason these data are published by ISTAT with some delay.
The time series reported here is organized according to the classification imposed by d.p.r. 421/1979, which reports sixteen distinct sub-categories under the category Interventions in the social field; for our analysis we selected seven of them and reported a total social expenditure which refers to these seven and so differs from the wider one reported by ISTAT. Our sub-categories are:
- health and hygienic measures
- health and pharmaceutical assistance
- management of pharmacies
- childhood assistance and nursery schools
- management of the ex IPAB (Public Institutes for Assistance and Charity)
- other interventions in the welfare field.
As in the case of Regions, we also report expenditure for public house-building.
For all the data collected from ISTAT publications, we have taken into consideration the values of total current expenditure (money engaged). The values considered are in millions of Italian Lira.
We also reports the same data with the geographical aggregation considered by the European Community Household Panel (ECHP); the values reported in this case are in thousands of Euros.
In 1997 a new type of classification of balance for Communes and Provinces has been introduced by d.p.r. 194/1996; under this classification sub-categories referring to the social expenditure have been reduced to four:
- nursery schools, services for the childhood and the minors
- residential buildings for elderly persons
- assistance, public charity and other personal services
- necroscopy and cemeterial services.
This classification is not compatible with our historical series and, most of all, in 1998 ISTAT stopped publishing the final balances of all Italian Communes and Provinces with the usual regional aggregation.
Here we report data obtained directly from the Italian Ministero dell’Interno referring to final balances of Italian Provinces and Communes for the years from 1998 to 2001.
For what concerns Communes, the data report total current and capital account expenditure of all Italian Communes for welfare, divided into the four categories reported above, together with current and capital account expenditure for public house-building.
We also report expenditures of all Italian Provinces in the social field and in public health service, considering both current expenditure and capital account expenditure for the years from 1998 to 2001.