Le cooperative in Italia e nel Mezzogiorno Teoria economica ed evidenze empiriche

Modern studies on cooperative firms spread as a result of the interest created by the theoretical Ward-Vanek model in the years from 1958 to 1970. Unfortunately, the assumptions of this model were completely unrelated to the situation of western industrialised countries and grounded on the self-managed firm existing in some socialist countries, where property rights and legal environment were peculiar. This feature led to highlight an alleged misallocation of resources by the cooperative firms and was a major cause of the loss of interest of economists towards this type of enterprise. Chapter 2 demonstrates that the model of Ward-Vanek is inadequate to represent the operation of the modern production cooperative firm. An alternative and more realistic model is presented to prove that this kind of firm has no characteristic of sub-optimality with respect to the capitalistic one. The cooperative enterprise is, in many countries, a tool for the dissemination of social capital and the improvement of human capital and thus can be a tool for economic development. Chapter 6 analyses the role of cooperatives in Italy and in the Italian Mezzogiorno, with particular reference to the period 2001-2011, in which there is a divergence in the performance of ordinary cooperatives compared to social cooperatives: in terms of the changes of employed people, the results of the former are very poor, while those of the latter are excellent, in spite of the crisis that hit the second part of the decade. This result fills a research gap because the available studies consolidate data and report a general positive performance of coooperative firms as a whole.