State, Market and Social Regulation

Recent scholarship on the role of the state in designing regulatory policies in the industrialized democracies has identified a shift from the increasingly direct role of the state in the 1970s to a diminishing role in the 1980s. The essays in this volume provide a systematic analysis of the contemporary means of regulation employed in a range of economic and social policy areas in Italy. They support the general thesis that policy in Italy is characterized by a complex interaction of state, market and social regulation, rather than by a general trend away from state intervention.