Italian Abstract: Le cooperative di comunità che si stanno diffondendo in molte parti del mondo sono il punto di arrivo di un processo evolutivo che ha visto il progressivo spostamento del baricentro delle cooperative da particolari gruppi sociali e professionali alla società nel complesso....

The banking industry is consolidating at an accelerating pace, yet no conclusive results have emerged on the benefits of mergers and acquisitions. We analyze the Italian market, which is similar to other main European countries. By considering both acquisitions (i.e. the purchase of the majority...

In recent years an increasing amount of efforts has been devoted, both in the U.S. and within the E.U., to perform impact evaluation of geographically-targeted economic development (GTED) programs. The surging interest for the evaluation of GTED programs is challenged by the difficulty to assess...

Postal Services play a fundamental role in each nation, because of the double impact they generate from a social and economic point of view. The introduction of the European directives opens the way towards a larger importance of free competition. But, even if liberalisation of postal markets...

After a review of the governance of welfare policies and of subsidiarity experiences in the third sector, the Social Agency Model is proposed. It integrates in a structured way public and private action against poorness, above all the activity of the third sector. The model is based on the...

The paper discusses the evolutionary path of the European postal industry turned from a inefficient state-owned monopoly into highly competitive market, in sight of the envisaged market liberalization by the year 2011. National operators adopt different strategies toward the increasing...

The paper summarizes the framework used in a research project on local public services carried out by Bank of Italy researchers. It discusses motivations, characteristics, results and general lessons of the project, whose sector-specific results are detailed in individual papers. The project was...