This paper suggests that efficiency considerations do not explain why privatization policy is so appealing to the centre-left parties in Europe. Divestitures of state owned corporations in the UK and elsewhere were implemented by right wing parties with the over-arching objective to defeat trade...

This paper comments an invited opinion on the American crisis in the New York Times by Professor Casey Mulligan, University of Chicago. Accord-ing to Mulligan, the crisis is no more than a financial fluctuation, banks should not be bailed out, other financial actors can finance business...

In this paper we analyse data on the rates of return of investment projects sponsored by three international institutions: the European Union, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank. The focus of the paper is on the variability of ex-ante economic rate of returns...

Starting from an industry where production is provided by a public monopolist, we look at the effects on the consumers' surplus of a sequence of reforms in network industry. Using a simple comparative statics framework, we find indifference conditions in consumers' surplus between respectively...

In this paper we offer new evidence on the impact of British privatisations on wages in five selected industries: gas, electricity, water supply, railways and air transport. For the above sectors we construct long time-series of different measures of labour earnings, spanning from 1970 to 2002,...

In the late 1990s many European countries started comprehensive restructuring of their energy industries. The typical ingredients of the reforms are full or partial privatization, vertical disintegration, liberalization. In this paper we focus on the way in which energy sector reforms affect...

The case-study focuses on the strategies adopted by the Natuzzi Group, world leader of the upholstered furniture sector, located in the Bari-Matera district (Southern Italy), to face increasing global competition and on their effects. In particular we consider the modes and determinants of...

The aim of this paper is to study the characteristics of the internationalisation process and to identify its determinants in a representative sample of 786 firms in the Italian automotive chain. We carried out a a multinomial logit and an ordered probit analyses. The main findings of the...