Italian Experience in Cooperatives

* Article: Co-operatives: The Italian Experience. By Carlo Borzaga, Sara Depedri, Riccardo Bodini.

URL = https://www.academia.edu/13075416/Cooperatives_the_Italian_experience?

Excerpt

From the introduction:

"The Italian cooperative movement has a long history, as it contributed to the growth of the country since the second half of the nineteenth century In fact, it is not unusual to find Italian cooperatives today that have been in business for over years. Italian co!operatives operate in many sectors, and in some of them as well as in some regions of the country they have a very large market share. (moreover, over the last few years they performed better than the economy as a whole and managed to grow their business in new sectors, including for instance health, education and social services. Since the creation of the first cooperative , the Italian cooperative movement has experienced long periods of fast growth as well as some phases of stagnation, and is today a major component of the national economy. In order to provide a brief review of this evolution and summarize the current situation, this document is structured as follows. After a brief presentation of the main phases of development of the cooperative movement as a whole, the document will describe its structure and the evolution of the legislation starting from the end of World War II. The document will then analyze the more recent evolution of the cooperative system."