Reappraising State-Owned Enterprise

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Finance and Structure of the State-Owned Enterprise in Italy IRI from the Golden Age to the Fall

Leandro Conte and Giandomenico Piluso

The state-owned enterprise has had a first-rank place in Italian economic growth in the last century, although its ability to overcome gaps in technology and institutions proved to be somewhat insufficient. At a certain point, in the 1960s, it was so successful in coping with modernization processes that even in Britain it seemed reasonable to argue about the advantages of adopting the Italian model of public enterprise (Posner and Woolf 1967; Tomlinson 1999). The ensuing decline and, eventually, the dramatic fall of the Italian state-owned enterprise have been related to a vast array of factors. Some factors ...