This report has been written in the framework of the EU-funded research project “Support for Farmers’ Cooperatives”. This project was commissioned by the European Commission DG Agriculture and Rural Development, and carried out in 2011 and 2012 by a large consortium of researchers from...

The paper discusses the role of the state in shaping an economic system which is, in line with the welfare economics approach, capable of performing socially important functions and achieving socially desirable results. We describe this system through a set of indexes: the IHDI, the World...