Abstract

From the late 1980s, the so-called economic infrastructures are proven to play a relevant role in stemming development and growth, in spite of the little scientific consensus about what business model can deliver better results. European Union has entered the debate since the early 1990s, and tipped the historically different national preferences of the Member States by furthering the adoption of specific procedural and substantive policy tools. The article focuses on the Italian case on the way domestic tools fit European prescriptions. Qualitative analysis of tools and implementations in use from 1990 to the early 2000s will argue that likely explanations lay less in the substantive than in the procedural dimension. The resulting hypothesis thus relates intergovernmental conflicts to specific bias in governance designs.