BOOKS BY ENRICO GIOVANNETTI

Gli autori intendono esplorare il ruolo delle politiche pubbliche della Regione Emilia-Romagna in tema di sviluppo locale e formazione professionale, come queste si propongano di incidere sulla natura delle relazioni e sui modelli di comportamento delle istituzioni e dei soggetti economici privati (le imprese ma anche gli enti di formazione). In particolare, si indagheranno gli strumenti di politica che mirano ad intensificare la rete dei rapporti istituzionali e aumentare la propensione all’azione collettiva, promuovendo una nuova definizione della formazione come leva di sviluppo. Allo stesso tempo si proporranno – in modo dialogico - alcune riflessioni sui processi avviati all’interno del tessuto imprenditoriale manifatturiero. La metodologia utilizzata è di natura qualitativa: da una parte, l’analisi della documentazione amministrativa prodotta dalla Regione Emilia-Romagna sarà integrata con interviste ai dirigenti del Servizio Formazione; dall’altra, vengono utilizzate interviste in profondità a responsabili del personale o amministratori delegati di imprese manifatturiere, presenti sul territorio regionale, ad alta vocazione innovativa.

La mobilità come common ambientale: uno schema per la valutazione delle politiche - The debated issue of sustainable mobility has become one of the main points on every decision-maker agenda since the last thirty years. The idea proposed in this work is to redefine the resource «mobility» as a common good, which is produced by a collective action. In other words, the mobility of people and goods is both a structural aspect of the issue of environmental common reconstruction and a fundamental asset of a community of agents’ social capital. The common good is thus socially constructed through the system of rights related to its use, reproduction or destruction, generated by the relationship network between agents. In the literature the debate seems mainly focused on the regulation of competition under conditions of «externalities » or market «failures», or on regulator failures, while a careful consideration of the strict linkage between structural generators (economic growth, demographic pressure, infrastructural weaknesses) and simultaneous failures both of the market and of the regulation policies can be rarely found. For this reasons, the aim of the present work is the construction of appropriate methodologies for the evaluation of scalable mobility policies suitable to be adopted from local level decision-makers to wider areas. Using an institutional framework that includes this social and iterated definition of the resource «mobility», we build indicators capable of modelling a traffic jam in its subjective determinants, and in order to check their reliability we test them against several case studies. The paper is completed by the formalisation of an example mobility policy, carried out using the proposed indicators. JEL Q01, D62, D85, L91, K23

The paper discusses the mechanisms involved in the establishment of cooperative institutions and their roles. These institutions are based on a pact of indivisibility, agreements regarding resources and employment - and their use, according to coherent distributive rules - in a long-term perspective. Such a pact allows for the establishment of a common-by-contract, corresponding to the creation of a «process fund» needed for the integration of the production processes, the division of the labour and the specialisation of the labour force. Several commontypes are defined, as separate forms of co-operative enterprises. Particularly, these different forms display their competitive advantages on high contestable markets (agriculture, building, transports, services, etc.). The cooperative commons are the establishment of «public goods» on the filierewhich on the one hand, allow for economies of scale (and scope) and on the other hand, cut down transaction costs. The enterprise classification proposal, connected to the different types of commons, gives visibility to the different functional roles of the cooperatives. The empirical work is based on original data related to the 1948-2000 period.

The cooperative enterprises in the Province of Modena are ‘long life’ economic species. Their longevity increases as their ability in developing a network interactions increases. The definition of economic efficiency of the cooperative enterprise is discussed from an institutional perspective attempting to identify a connecting path, from the traditional to the evolutionary-historical point of view. The key-concept examined is that of transaction costs, as the costs of altering the division of labour. Then, the cooperative enterprise appears as both an individual firm and as aggregate movement of firms, that is network of firm relationships, which focus on economising on such costs. In fact, the cooperative movement has deeply reduced the number and the cost of many transactions in the economic system. Overall cooperatives - like enterprises - profited from reduction of such costs, which are often present in other areas and economic contexts. The present paper finds that all of these factors tend to indicate an evolutionarily, efficient path of development, and are the principal reasons for the greater longevity of this enterprise form.