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AbstractThe privatization of public utilities marked a turning point in European capitalism, reshaping the relationship between the public and private spheres of the economy. However, the extent of state disinvestment varies greatly from country to country. While in some countries direct state ownership has disappeared, in others the state still acts as a reference shareholder in strategic companies. Despite their institutional similarities, Italy and Spain provide a puzzling example of this divergence. While Spain completed the privatization of all public utilities, the Italian state retains a controlling stake in many of them. Through historical case studies based on official documents, legal texts, archival research of newspaper articles, secondary sources and memoirs, this paper explains this divergence. Contributing to recent debates on patient capital and state-business interactions, it is argued that Spain completed the privatization process because the state was able to orchestrate the creation of shareholder alliances among private investors. Crucially, these investors were willing to ensure that management prioritizes long-term investment plans over the distribution of short-term financial profits. In the absence of domestic private providers of patient capital, the Italian state had to keep the role of anchor investor for itself after unsuccessfully experimenting with various privatization strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to explain why Spain experienced a full-fledged sovereign debt crisis and had to resort to euroarea financial assistance for its banks, whereas Italy did not. It undertakes a structured comparison, dissecting the sovereign debt crisis into a banking crisis and a balance of payments crisis. It argues that the distinctive features of bank business models and of national banking systems in Italy and Spain have considerable analytical leverage in explaining the different scenarios of the crises in each country. This ‘bank-based’ analysis contributes to the flourishing literature that examines changes in banking with a view to account for the differentiated impact of the global banking crisis first and the sovereign debt crisis in the euroarea later. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article asks the following question: what role did the political Left and labour organisations play in the development and furthering of neoliberal policies in Italy? In particular, I explore the relationship between the moderation of the Italian Left's economic proposals begun towards the end of the 1970s and the affirmation of neoliberal policy-making. The shift in leftist economic ideas rested on three main grounds: i) the acceptance that Italy had to solve its long-term economic deficiencies, ii) the opposition to clientelistic spending (associated first with the centrist governments of the 1980s and later with Silvio Berlusconi) and iii) the need to guarantee Italian anchoring to European integration. Focussing on a long-term historical perspective, the article contributes to a growing but still underdeveloped literature that has emphasised the role played by the Left in neoliberalism's development and resilience. In addition, it cautions against placing undue emphasis on the role of European integration as an 'external constraint'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, this article shows that since the 1990s, greater competition in Italy's banking industry has pushed commercial banks to develop some of the institutions of relationship lending (RL) typical of coordinated economies, namely to develop closer relationships with firms. While these developments do not amount to full-fledged RL, our findings have, first, implications for the assessment of institutional developments in Italy's political economy, providing evidence of increasing coordination against accounts, emphasizing stability or the disarticulation of existing institutional relations, and second, they qualify broader theoretical arguments on institutional change in national varieties of capitalism. Against standard arguments, the article suggests that increased competition can lead to tighter rather than looser coordination among economic actors. Finally, and more speculatively, the article presents some preliminary evidence that the commercial banks’ turn to RL might be contributing to the polarization of the Italian economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several analysts have explained the end of the postwar political system in Italy as an effect of the end of the Cold War. Deprived of the anti-communist glue, Italians were, so the story goes, finally free to replace the corrupted regime. The present article argues instead that the recent changes should be seen as the effect of transnational and societal dynamics on modern welfare states that have upset the consociational/clientelistic bargain on which Italy's domestic political economy rested. The success of the judiciary campaign manipulite ('clean hands') has been triggered by the concomitant financial crisis of the state, its parties and principal Italian industries which undermined the major actors' ability to uphold their clientelistic systems. Such a thesis presupposes a methodological shift away from simple 'outside-in' explanations. It focuses instead on the interaction between different transnational and/or societal self-sustaining networks whose borders need not necessarily coincide with state borders. In the present context of rampant globalization, the inner development and linkage between the party system, the welfare state, organized crime and the Italian version of capitalism are analysed as the main articulations of the overt/covert order upon which the Italian postwar social contract rested. As long as the basic problems of this contract remain unsolved, as for instance the insufficient distinction between the political and economic sphere or the systematic application of double standards, it seems premature to talk about a Second Italian Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]