The Effect of Local Emergency Policies on the Performance of the Italian Regional Health Care System

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the efficiency of the Italian regional health care system and how the emergency policy adopted by the local government can influence those performances. For this purpose, a two-step empirical analysis was performed. At first, a directional distance frontier model was used to assess the efficiency of the regional health care systems. Successively through a fixed-effect panel method, the effects of the policy on the performances were evaluated. The article presents evidence on how local policy influences the performance of the health care system. In particular, the two-step method proposed highlights how the reduction of the workload on the hospitals, obtained preferring home isolation of the infected to hospitalizations, and more stringent control on the public activities, by means of local ordinances, lead to higher performance of the health care system. Those results are considered useful to local government to identify more specific and efficient solutions for the management of creeping crisis as the Covid-19.