On the dynamics of the municipal separate waste collection indicator: the case of Italy.

The transition toward circular economy targets requires effective monitoring of waste-management performance at the level where services are actually organized and financed. This paper analyzes the dynamics of separate source collection of municipal waste across Italian municipalities over the period 2012–2021. Using a novel panel dataset covering nearly 7,000 municipalities, we estimate β-convergence models to assess whether municipalities with lower initial levels of separate collection tend to improve more rapidly over time. The empirical analysis combines panel regressions with fixed effects and a set of structural controls capturing socio-economic characteristics, financial resources devoted to waste management, and technical efficiency in service provision. The results indicate the presence of conditional convergence in separate source collection. While unconditional convergence and conditional convergence with no fixed effects are estimated to be relatively slow, the speed of adjustment increases substantially once municipality-specific characteristics are taken into account. This finding suggests that municipalities adjust relatively quickly toward municipality-specific steady states, reflecting persistent structural differences in local waste-management conditions. Additional results show that higher technical efficiency and greater per-capita expenditure on waste management are associated with faster improvements in collection performance. From a policy perspective the results of our analysis, faster speed of convergence than previously documented and the importance of unobserved characteristics at the municipal level, provide evidence of more persistent dynamics that may call for place based