ITALIAN NATIONAL REPORTS - Università Degli Studi Di Palermo

ITALIAN NATIONAL REPORTS – WASHINGTON 2010
THE CARDOZO ELECTRONIC LAW BULLETIN, VOL. 16(1) - SPECIAL ISSUE
results from the need for the models of cooperation between the
administrations and private individuals to express a different mode of
conceptualising the role and action of the public authorities when pursuing
general interests.
These are not new questions for Italian law, since the issue of collaboration
between the public authorities and private companies arose, within the
academic literature, at least from the first half of the twentieth Century, when
the intervention by the state within the economy resulted in the birth of the
first forms of joint enterprises, variously classified depending on the activity
carried on by the private subject or the extent of public participation. 2 Indeed,
Italian lawyers quickly started asking themselves, when confronted with the
tendency towards the exercise of public functions through the private sector,
whether the essential task of the “new” administrative law was being set out
against these contours. 3
Accordingly, Italian legislation governing PPP does not simply reproduce
secondary Community law, but is rather shaped by notions developed within
the academic literature, case law and long-standing legislative contributions or,
in any case, those which reflect the Italian administrative tradition. Moreover,
not only is there no single European model for PPP, and even so, it cannot
even be said that certain more or less tried and tested forms of cooperation
between the State and private economic operators are regulated adequately on
a European level. This is not surprising: the national systems differ
significantly as regards the regulation of relations between the public
authorities and private individuals, since the issue does not come without its
more general implications both as regards administrative action to promote
the public interest, as well as the problem of the regulation of private
economic initiative.
2 L. GANGEMI, Le società anonime miste, Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1932, 5 et seq. On this point see also A.
ROSSI, Società con partecipazione pubblica, entry in Enc. giur., vol. XXIV, Rome, 1988, 1 et seq.
3 V. F. BENVENUTI, Profili giuridici dell’organizzazione economica pubblica, in Rivista delle società, 1962, 218.