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Starting from 1950 the extraordinary intervention for the South was the tool with which the Italian government attempted to redress the dual nature of the national economy, the same dichotomy that earlier administrative and economic measures had failed to resolve adequately. The various studies aimed at evaluating the outcome of this policy, which ended at the beginning of the 1990s, usually investigated to which extent the differences between quantitatively measurable indicators of regional imbalance diminished during the period under consideration, mainly leading to the conclusion that the South-North gap was reduced only in terms of GDP per capita, and even there the reduction was insignificant. This paper tries to contribute to an assessment of the extraordinary intervention by adopting a different perspective, examining the role that the economic evaluation of public expenditure played within the political decision-making process of this measure of regional policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Sociologia del Diritto is the property of FrancoAngeli srl and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents a 10 years long evaluation experience of provincial Programs supporting enterprise creation in the form of self-employment financed in Italy by Pedemont Region with the contribution of European Social Fund (ESF). After a brief presentation of the most important evaluations of enterprise creation Programs carried out in Italy, mainly focused on methodological issues, Programs monitoring and evaluation design suggested by Pedemont Region and its following implementation are described. Implementation description concentrates specifically on evaluation techniques and evaluation models (intended as logics) that were activated with reference to the different areas of each Program; in this context, also the main changes that occurred in the evaluation systems and activities during the years covered by the experience are illustrated. Finally, the article proposes a list of the main elements that, in Author's opinion, fostered the utilization of evaluation results by technical and political local decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reform of Part V of its constitution in 2001 saw the entry of Italy into a federalist era. Is it possible to imagine the start of this process of change as credible without there having been any modification to the territorial distribution of local powers? Naturally no, and so federalism is at risk of self destruction as a result of the new tensions between different areas. The federal plan, in fact, has been constructed on a municipal arrangement which today still remains outmoded, and it is in that basic contradiction that the main difficulties lie today. The paper shows that we have entered an age of federalism without having resolved the problems that arose with the unification of the country. We therefore risk finding ourselves again in an ever smaller and more isolated world, organised around a multiplicity of powers of veto that will transform the country into a place where there is a perpetual negotiation of public decisions. To introduce greater efficiency and democracy we would in fact have to reorganise local authorities, starting with for example, a reduction of the approximately six thousand municipalities that have less than five thousand inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The only way to create a new world is by making a clean sweep of the history of the past, of its contradictions, of its ghosts and of its metaphysics, of the tremors of its knowledge. That is precisely what happened when the tidal wave of new ideas brought about by the Age of Reason swept away the Ancien régime, bringing about the progression, in the field of law, from uncertain law subject to the discretion of those in positions of power to a clear law, one that could at long last be known in advance, because it was enshrined in a text that made any interpretation other than the literal one of the expression of the legislator's intention completely superfluous. The theories of Montesquieu, of Beccaria, of Filangieri, of Dragonetti and of the thousand other enlightenment philosophers, but above all the work of Bentham, provided the theoretical basis for the passage to legal positivism that then became the dominant ideology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The advent of postmodernism, with its new economic and institutional scenario dominated by the phenomenon not so much of transnationalism as of globalisation, called all the certainties so strenuously constructed starting from the philosophies of the Enlightenment into uncertainty, putting the focus back on the crucial question: "what is law?" The result is to question the very foundations that for more than two centuries underpinned a thoroughly rational law that was so clear as to tolerate not even the expert hands of the robed and bewigged interpreting judge. The legal order is rapidly being reabsorbed within the conflict between the forces in the field, from which it had done its utmost to escape, crystallising into codes and laws whose intrinsic fragility is now all shown up by postmodernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]