ABSTRACT
For the most part of the last century, the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) was probably more pronounced, continuous, and prolonged in Italy than elsewhere in the West: in 1990, the economic weight of the public sector was still around 20% of gross national product (GNP) (Malgarini 2000). This was the response to the fact that Italian economic growth had long been penalized by structural frailties such as a narrow internal market, a shortage of capital, financial weakness, and a decline of entrepreneurial initiative and the state. Yet, as shown in a previous chapter (see Amatori and Toninelli, Chapter 3), the complexity of forms and organizations assumed by the state direct intervention in the economy (just to limit our analysis to the central level) reached heights of imagination and ingenuity in Italy that were probably unknown abroad: State companies, State shareholding companies, State concerns, and so on, coexisted throughout the 20th century. This helps in explaining why we do not yet have a precise and thorough measure of the weight of public enterprise on the entire economy, not to say of more specific data concerning their sectoral and/or regional distribution. In fact, only a limited number of empirical studies is so far available (Rapporto Saraceno 1956; Sartori 1957; Posner and Woolf 1967; Arrighetti, Stansfield, and Virno 1982; Rapporto Marsan c. 1992; Bognetti and Spagnolo 1992), and thus it is difficult to identify precisely, at a micro level, the real dimension of Italian public enterprise and hence assess a phenomenon whose actual magnitude remains unknown to us.
