La Cooperazione in Italia : Un’Overview (Cooperation in Italy: An Overview)

In Italy, social cooperatives are an economic reality that is constantly expanding and plays an increasing role in the national economy. Social cooperatives are economic organizations of small-to-medium size that are strongly integrated into the local environment where they happen to develop. Given the need to supply crucial services, including social, educational and work integration services, social cooperatives must interact with the local authorities and communities they serve. Over the years, a number of public bodies, institutions and organisations have investigated the evolutionary pattern of social cooperatives as a specific dynamic within the Third Sector, in order to monitor their development and to assess their economic impact as well as their capacity to generate new employment at the local level. Against this backdrop, our investigation analyses the contribution that social cooperatives make to local development, in order to provide evidence of their growing importance. This analysis is part of a much wider research project conducted by the research centre Euricse, through the development of an observatory focused on cooperatives. This research aims to analyse the role of social cooperatives from both a descriptive and an economic-financial perspective. More specifically, this investigation attempts to contribute to the literature through: i) a descriptive analysis of the main features of Italian social cooperatives that have been active since 2008; ii) a description of the territorial context in which they fit; iii) an analysis of balance sheet indicators that can play a role in measuring the profitability and weight of equity of such entities, through size, regional and sectorial differentiations; and iv) an in-depth investigation of the impact of the action of social cooperatives on both the employment and the economy of a given territory. From a methodological perspective, the analysis relies on a data warehouse that was created using the AIDA dataset, integrating additional datasets provided by representative organizations (federations) and public registers