PRIN2017 - Administrative Reforms: Policies, Legal Issues and Results

The research project aims to analyze administrative reforms as a tool for modernizing and strengthening the country’s competitiveness. It is inspired by the intense period of administrative reforms that has started in 2015, characterized by the numerous measures provided for by law n. 124 of 2015 ("Madia").

This law envisages a wide-ranging intervention on the Italian administrative system, in order to modernize it and make it competitive.

The research, however, does not only intend to verify whether the answers to the need for modernization contained in the Madia law and its implementing decrees are adequate, as it also aims to assess these interventions in the broader framework of the administrative reform policies that have emerged in recent years, in Italy and in other legal systems, and to study the implementation activities currently underway.

Within this framework, the research Unit of the Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna purports to  reconstruct and analyse the current status and the future prospects of municipal capitalism; in particular, the study will be built within a legal order of time frame deeply influenced by the profound transformations of the local systems generated by the burst of economic and financial crisis.

Starting from the premise that a local area makes a market, the research activity of the research Unit of Bologna will focus on the study of the existing gap between the model of public intervention in the economy provided under domestic level and the complex economic dynamics inspired by international and European rules and principles.

Notwithstanding the changes triggered by the economic crisis, the Italian solution is still traditionally anchored to organisational structures having a “more or less” public imprinting, but this latter seems to be no longer suitable to overcome the extent of the challenges encountered.

The coexistence between the public and the private natures clearly remains problematic and it still gives rise to inconsistency; not even the latest law reforms of the Italian legislator have been enough to solve the large number of issues arisen such as the creation of a new regulation for the public enterprise.

This framework thus implies a continued legal uncertainty both for the public administrations and the economic operators compromising the quality and the amount of the services supply to the community.