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This paper analyses the role of pork-barrel politics in the allocation of public investment expenditures in Greece. It proposes a model which explicitly relates the allocation of public investment to electoral results using a unique dataset covering the period from the restoration of democracy in 1974 until 2009, just before the Great Recession that radically transformed the political panorama of the country. The analysis includes 10 legislative periods marked by governments of the two parties that dominated the political arena in Greece: the Liberal and the Socialist Party. The results show that Socialist and re-elected governments applied more expansionary fiscal policies relative to Liberals. The two main parties also used different tactics when it came to pork-barrelling: while the Socialists when in government rewarded/groomed their electoral fiefs, the Liberals invested in areas controlled by the opposition to win over new votes or seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of transport networks requires public investments, in terms of government expenditure, on several types of (road, rail, port, airport, and urban public transport) infrastructure, including their operational and maintenance services. This paper develops and implements a system-wide spatioeconomic model to analyze the expenditure competition among different types of investment in the Greek transport sector. The suggested approach can offer valuable insight into the economies of scale and synergies associated with a particular transport investment. It is also extended to consider how such investment determinants as population concentration, economic growth, and political considerations at the prefecture level affect expenditure allocation to different types of transport infrastructure. The results indicate the statistical significance of scale effects of transport investment, substitution effects of road investment on other types of transport investment, and political factors on different types of transport investment. Airport investment relates to the most significant synergistic effects on expenditures in other types of public transport facilities. Thus, policy makers must take these fiscal externalities into account for the strategic planning and evaluation of infrastructure supply, and coordinate or subsidize public transport projects with significant positive externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]