Suchergebnisse

- This article describes the important role of the co-operative sector in the Italian labour market. We will present original data concerning the dimension of the co-operative sector, its structure and the trend of the productivity among the co-operative firms. The difference between the trend in the employment and in the productivity of co-operative firms and the correspondent data of the Italian economy, in general, gives a good chance to maintain an institutional approach for the study of the labour market and of the economic organization. In this context we will present a brief review of the literature refereed to labour organization, with some interpretations of the difference of the co-operative organisation. In particular, in order to give an explanation of the better performance of the co-operative firms, we will use non main stream models of the labour market, and we will refer to the institutional and legal diversity of the co-operatives, to the motivational factors and to the social capital endowment of the co-operative sector.Keywords: labour market, co-operative firms, organisation, productivity, co-operative difference, institutions. Parole chiave: mercato del lavoro, imprese cooperative, organizzazione, differenza cooperativa, istituzioni.

Recently, several interesting attempts have been made at connecting comparative political economy (CPE) approaches, as the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) theory, with post-Keynesian (PK) research on different demand-led growth regimes in modern capitalism, and for the period of finance-dominated capitalism since the early 1980s in particular. However, we find several problems in the way Kaleckian and PK approaches are interpreted and integrated in modern CPE approaches. Therefore, we first clarify several ambiguities and misunderstandings of PK demand-led growth regimes and their empirical indicators in the recent CPE literature, and, following the recent PK literature, we provide a theoretically consistent and empirically applicable classification of demand and growth regimes under the conditions of finance-dominate capitalism. Second, instead of using the traditional VoC dual classification, we link and confront the PK demand and growth regimes with the recent evolution of Esping-Andersen's (1990) taxonomy which considers five welfare models. Third, we examine the relationships between demand-led growth regimes and welfare models, both before and after the 2007-9 global crisis. For this purpose, we share the qualitative taxonomy suggested by Hay and Wincott (2012), and additionally we quantitatively assess the degree of welfare of each country and its evolution by means of a "principal component analysis" (PCA), which allows us to synthesize four socio-economic indicators in a multidimensional measure of welfare.