Italian industrial districts (IDs) recently attracted international attention because their performance during the last few decades contradicted the alleged weakness of industrial structures based on SMEs in "traditional" sectors. The book analyses some developments taking place in Italian IDs...

The main idea behind this paper is that social capital is not, as generally suggested by the socio-economic literature, an individual attitude towards something which does not imply privately appropriable economic benefits. Actually, SC might and should be interpreted as a public component of an...