Abstract

Local development needs investment projects connected each other, and each and as a whole based on proper evaluation and selection techniques. Finance system may have a role in favouring the realization of such more complex patterns of public intervention. Nowadays banks, and the Bank for Deposits and Loans as well, grant only a "loan for a legally-defined purpose" to local Authorities, but such credit transaction does not refer to the credit of the financed project, nor to debtor solvability; indeed, it relies on a robust system of guarantees fixed by law. Also in case of an issue of bonds, it is not so much important the investment quality, as the rating of the Authority. The question of rating in public bodies should be faced paying more attention to accounting specificities of such subjects, which don't have significant budgets. Financing institutions should be interested in finding new tools for evaluating the risk of credit to public bodies. Of course, this would incite bodies to provides themselves with a more precise evaluation of expected costs and benefits deriving from an investment, or from an integrated investment programme. It should be necessary to find new procedures for granting a loan, characterized, as qualifying points, by a synchrony of decisions, a variety, but also a single significance, of projects, and the presence of more debtors linked each other just by the interest to carry on an important initiative for local economic development. Region has to develop its capacities of regulation and planning, renouncing its own strong spending power, or, at least, using it on co-financing plans.