1

IPSA CONGRESS MADRID 2012

PANEL: PROVISION OF PUBLIC SERVICES: FROM PUBLIC/MUNICIPAL DELIVERY TO
PRIVATIZATION (AND REVERSE TO "RE-MUNICIPALISATION"?)
Chair: Prof. Hellmut Wollmann; Co-Chair: prof Harald Baldersheim
Discussants: Mr. Jens Libbe




PRIVATE GOVERNMENT WITH PUBLIC MONEY?
Municipal corporations and local utilities in six Italian regions
by
Stefania Profeti (University of Bologna [email protected])
Andrea Lippi (University of Firenze [email protected])
Giulio Citroni (University of Calabria [email protected])





Abstract: Since the early 1990s, in Italy the corporatization of public bodies has become a
prominent phenomenon, especially at the local level and in the domain of public utilities. In the context
of a very fragmented and somewhat contradictory national legislative framework, the number of Italian
municipal corporations has recently passed 5000 units, and represents a complex puzzle of diverse
governance models and ownership structures. The paper aims at discussing the state of the art of the
public-private balance in the Italian municipal corporations, providing a quantitative analysis of the
composition of the share capital of the Italian municipal companies involved in the management and
delivery of public services, and trying to sketch a general picture of the composition of their
shareholders Assemblies. Aggregate data will be limited to six Italian regions, and will refer to all the
companies in which at least one municipality is direct or indirect shareholder. The analysis will take
into account: a) the composition of companies share capital, in terms of both numerical representation
(heads) and financial weight (shares) of public, private and mixed shareholders; b) the distribution
of heads and shares among the various types of public utilities; c) the identification of the different
categories of actors that make up the public, private or mixed quotas, and the analysis of their
presence and financial contribution in the various public services sectors.
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1. Introduction

Since the early 1990s, in Italy the corporatization of public bodies, i.e. the creation of
organizationally and financially self-standing companies for the fulfilment of public-
interest activities, has become a prominent phenomenon, especially at the local level
and in the domain of public services. In the context of a very fragmented and
somewhat contradictory national legislative framework, the number of Italian
municipal corporations has recently passed 5.000 units (Unioncamere 2009; Corte
dei Conti 2010), and represents today a complex puzzle of diverse governance
models. In fact, while the number of private law companies fully or partially owned by
the Italian municipalities has increased dramatically in the last twenty years, many
differences exist as far as two key conceptual dimensions are concerned, which
define the degree of privatization, i.e. the ownership structure and the operational
principle/rationale that shapes the modality of service delivery (Wollmann 2012).
Our basic hypothesis is that the scattered process of corporatization which
invested the management and delivery of local public services in Italy is the result of
a complex mix of rationales (and, to a certain extent, unintended consequences of
the national regulation), which are largely (re)shaped by local actors and only
partially have to do with the taken-for-granted advantages justifying the increasing
recourse to private-law companies and managerial tools (e.g. economies of scale,
leverage for loans, dividends, increases in efficiency etc.). In other words, we agree
with those who emphasize the political facet of corporatization (see, among the
others, Christensen and Pallesen 2001; Flinders 2005; Pollitt et al. 2005; Thynne
2011) in saying that the creation of private-law companies at arm's length from
political power may also allow local public actors, such as elected and politically
accountable decision makers, to exploit market-like instruments for the attainment of
(often undeclared) political objectives.
In fact, over the last two decades local governments in Italy (as in many other
European countries) have experienced a severe reduction of financial resources,
coupled with a significant increase in their competences and tasks; in this context,
making recourse to private-law companies instead of in-house mechanisms for
service provision may grant mayors a greater ease in human resource management,
as well as an easier interface with banks and with the market in general, including the
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possibility of developing public-private partnerships; or, again, the opportunity to
develop debt outside the limits of the (Internal) Growth and stability pact (Citroni,
Lippi and Profeti forthcoming a), as well as the opportunity to avoid or shift the blame
(Fiorina 1986) to managers for policy errors or unsatisfactory services in a context of
poor financial resources (Christensen and Pallesen 2001; Yamamoto 2004).
Furthermore, municipal corporations (and their shareholders assemblies) may
also be conceptualised as strategically built local arenas of representation, where
local elites can be recruited or find new career opportunities, new coalitions can be
arranged, and decisions can be made in an attractive and unobtrusive place far from
the traditional mechanisms of democratic control. This holds true for both fully-
publicly owned and mixed public-private companies, where the interests of local
administrators and private shareholders can be adjusted in a governance fashion,
contributing to strengthen territorial networks of influence and allowing public actors
to maintain political control over sensitive policy areas which are crucial for local
governments perceived legitimacy (such as local utilities).
Understanding what the specific reasons (and consequences) of
corporatization may be is a task that would certainly profit from in-depth analysis of
specific cases and techniques such as qualitative surveys and interviews. However,
a quantitative analysis of the overall phenomenon and its characteristics is no doubt
a necessary step to frame the problem and better define research hypotheses; this
is all the more important because in Italy no official (institutional) register of
municipal corporations exists and, although recent attempts to shed light on the
phenomenon
1
, information is still fragmented and let alone the financial dimension
and sectors of activity the population of such companies is still largely unknown by
decision-makers and the public. Drawing upon the results of the first phase of the
Citygov research project
2
, this paper aims thus at discussing the current state of the
art of the public-private balance in the Italian municipal corporations involved in the
delivery of public services, through a quantitative analysis of their share capital, and

1
See Bortolotti, Pellizzola and Scarpa (2007); Scarpa, Bianchi, Bortolotti and Pellizzola (2010); the
annual reports of Mediobanca-Civicum foundation (available since 2002), Unioncamere (2007 and
2009), Confservizi and the national Court of Accounts.
2
The Citygov (Public and private in the government of cities) research program has been scheduled
for the period 2010-2013 and it is funded from the Tuscany Region for 300,000 euros on the the ESF -
POR EU program
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a closer look on the composition of their shareholders Assemblies. Aggregate data
will be limited to six Italian regions representing all the geographical areas of the
country (Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Latium, Apulia and Campania), and
will refer to all the companies in which at least one municipality is direct or indirect
shareholder. Compared to other available researches on the topic (see footnote n.1),
our database
3
includes detailed information on all the companies shareholders (then
classified by nature public, private or mixed and category) and subsidiaries, and
distinguishes companies according to the relationship they have with municipalities
(i.e. direct or indirect municipal shareholding).
After a short presentation of the national legislative framework on
corporatization and public service delivery, the analysis will try to account for the
diversity of corporatization paths which exist in Italy today; to assess how and to
what extent the two aforementioned dimensions of privatization, namely the
operational logics and ownership structures which characterise municipal
corporations, have developed so far; and which kind of public-private balance
emerges from the collected evidence. To this purpose, we will take into account:
a) the general profile of private-law municipal companies (i.e. number, territorial
distribution, legal form, sector of activity, share capital and territorial borders of
municipal share ownership), with a specific focus on companies involved in the
delivery of public services;
b) the composition of companies share capital, in terms of both numerical
representation (heads) and financial weight (shares) of public, private and
mixed shareholders;
c) the identification of the different categories of actors that make up the public,
private or mixed quotas respectively, and the analysis of their presence and
financial contribution in the various public services sub-sectors.

3
The database was created between 2006 and 2008 thanks to the lists of municipal companies
created by regional administrations for the national accounts on public expenditure; starting from these
regional lists, a research on the database of the Chambers of Commerce was made to find further
data on the companies: the list of other shareholders, the field of activity, the list of subsidiaries which
the companies owned shares of, and so on. The database thus contains 740 companies directly
owned by municipalities and 595 companies indirectly owned by the same municipalities (i.e. owned
by one or more of the previous 740 companies). A list of 11.391 stockholders (including 2.652
municipalities) and of their ca. 26thousand ownership relationships to municipal companies
(expressed in Euros) is used to describe the ownership structure of companies.

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Finally, some conclusions will be drawn discussing our hypothesis in the light of the
data previously illustrated, with an eye to further developments of the empirical
research.

2. The legislative framework

In Italy, legislation on corporatisation is mainly a by-product of sector-specific
regulation of public utilities. Repeated attempts at an overall reform of public utilities
imposing compulsive competitive tendering have always been aborted or have, most
recently, faced repeal through a referendum. Over the last one and a half centuries
only three acts of parliament have dealt explicitly with the regulation of municipal
corporations (namely law 103 of 1903 - Legge Giolitti - reforming local government
and establishing formal acknowledgment of public-law municipal enterprises, so-
called aziende municipalizzate; law 142 of 1990 reforming local government and
providing municipal enterprises with increased autonomy in budgeting procedures,
and legal personality; law 127 of 1997 - Legge Bassanini bis - giving municipalities
the possibility to transform their enterprises into private-law joint-stock companies -
societ per azioni), and none of them appear to be decisive in explaining
corporatisation and its development in the Italian case: all three have in fact come to
sanction phenomena which had already come about in practice, and none of them
forces municipalities to create municipalizzate or to transform them into joint-stock
companies, they only allow them to do so.
Instead, corporatization seems to be influenced more by the regulation
concerning local public services. Compulsive competitive tendering, independent
regulation and purchaser/provider split, inter-municipal cooperation in service
delivery, unbundling of service production processes, full cost recovery have all been
on the agenda since the early 1990s, and may have indirectly influenced local
strategies of administrative reform.
This strand of legislation, however, is itself quite a complex system of very few,
uncertain and unstable overarching norms, and many sector-specific acts:
o Norms favouring tendering or limiting the recourse to in house providing have
been inserted in budget laws (most notably Laws 448/2001 and 133/2008) or
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other omnibus bills (most recently, Ronchi Law n. 166/2009, dealing with
the implementation of EU requirements). Such laws, however, once approved
have either been ruled out by the Constitutional Court and revised (e.g. law
448/2001 and its article 29 on externalizations, whose legitimacy had been
questioned by some Regions), or have left ample margin of manoeuvre at the
local level (e.g. law 133/2008, which allows a number of exceptions to the
principle of compulsive competitive tendering), or have been repealed through
a referendum (e.g. the provision for more privatisation in the domain of public
services established in law 166/2009 has been repealed through a popular
referendum in June 2011).
o Overarching, encompassing norms on local public service delivery have been
the object of many bills proposed in Parliament by both the left and the right
wing since 1997
4
; but none of them reached the stage of final approval due to
political resistances within the ruling majorities. Principles such as separation
between service delivery and regulation, full cost recovery in the delivery of
service, inter-municipal cooperation within optimal territorial districts, and
unbundling of activities, have instead been established through different laws
concerning sector-specific regulation
5
, with consequent piecemeal and
incremental overall effects.

This synthetic account of legislation on corporatisation and public service
delivery is in fact a dramatic oversimplification of an ongoing process of reform, stop-
and-go intervention, revision and correction of norms, the latest being article 25 of
the so called Decreto Cresci Italia, a Decree Law issued by the new Prime Minister
Mario Monti and enacted by the Parliament in March 2012. The article, which deals
directly with market competition in public services, sets some new restrictions to in
house providing, and further promotes competitive tendering as the normal

4 Several bills were proposed over time: Napolitano (1997), Vigneri (1999-2000), Lanzillotta
(2006) each named after the proposing Member of Parliament.
5
The Galli law on the water sector (n. 36/1994); Decrees 22 (Ronchi, on waste disposal) and 422
(Burlando, on public transport) of 1997; decrees 79 of 1999 (Bersani) and 164 of 2000 (Letta) on
electricity and gas respectively.
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procedure for the selection of service providers
6
. However, many areas of uncertainty
continue to characterise the national legislation, concerning in particular the
companies ownership structure (e.g. the public-private balance) and legal form, thus
leaving considerable room for manoeuvre to municipalities and paving the way for
the development and consolidation of local paths towards corporatization.

3. Municipal corporations in Italy: how, how much and why?

As anticipated in the introduction, corporatisation namely the process of
transformation of former public-law enterprises into private-law companies, as well as
the creation of ex novo joint-stock or limited companies is today a widespread
phenomenon in Italy, which mostly involves the local levels of government. In fact, a
recent survey by the Court of Accounts (Corte dei Conti 2010) enumerates 5.860
companies fully or partially owned by 5.928 Italian municipalities (out of about 8.000),
testifying a constant increase of their number since the mid-Nineties (see also
Citroni, Lippi and Profeti forthcoming b). In addition, more than 50% of such
companies are joint-stock or limited corporations, i.e. they have the legal form which
is normally associated with a pure private/market orientation. Corporations are even
more diffused in the domain of local utilities, and in particular in sub-sectors such as
local transports (87,5% of all the municipal companies involved in service provision)
and energy production/delivery (75%) (ibidem). Whilst no legislative act ever
compelled local administrations to create municipal corporations, a tendency towards
the use of such instrument is quite clear.
The relevance of corporatization is confirmed when we take a closer look at
municipal companies in the six regions which compose our dataset (table 1): here we
find 740 companies directly owned by municipalities and 595 companies indirectly
owned by the same municipalities (i.e. owned by one or more of the previous 740
companies), whose share capital accounts for over 8 billion euro of municipalities
money and over 14 billion overall. They involve a very large number of municipalities

6
More precisely, the recourse to competitive tendering which cannot be made compulsory due to
the referendum results will become an indicator for the evaluation of local governments
performance and for the consequent attribution of State financial transfers (Law n. 27/2012, art. 25,
comma 2).
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with an average of 2.5 companies each, reaching an average of 9.5 companies for
municipalities over 100,000 inhabitants (Citroni, Lippi and Profeti forthcoming b). Also
the dominance of pure corporations is confirmed: joint-stock companies are 48% of
the total, while limited companies are 41%, the rest being consortia (ibidem) i.e.
companies which are only meant to carry out tasks for the partners and not for the
market.

Region
Companies
directly owned
Companies
indirectly owned
Total N.
Municipal
capital (in )
Total share
capital (in )
Lombardy 169 171 340
2,812,055,622 4,887,604,891
Emilia-Romagna 234 145 379
1,801,949,929 2,900,846,252
Tuscany 211 160 371
924,975,949 1,764,341,328
Latium 45 74 119
2,055,449,170 3,856,456,524
Campania 43 25 68
358,593,707 437,801,500
Apulia 38 20 58
119,405,282 156,654,657
Total 740 595 1335
8,072,429,659 14,003,705,152
Table 1 The population of companies in the Citygov database

However, the large presence of municipal corporations and the dominance of
market-oriented legal forms, taken in themselves, are not necessarily unequivocal
indicators of the existence of a genuine private, market-oriented rationale behind the
creation of private-law companies. Instead, several signals seem to point to
opposite directions.
A first hint at the fact that the use of such companies may respond to a wide
range of specific local strategies, and not to a given and consistent new paradigm
for the reform of administrative action, is no doubt the strongly diverse diffusion of
municipal corporations across the national territory, as our data show with reference
to regions of the North (Lombardy and Emilia Romagna), Centre (Toscana and
Latium) and South (Campania and Apulia) of Italy (table 1): Southern municipalities,
in fact, appear to make much more limited use of such kind of companies and to
contribute significantly smaller amounts of money than do the Northern and Central
municipalities, plausibly due to the persistence of the well know cleavage between
the political and administrative traditions in the two macro-areas of the country (see,
among the others: Putnam 1993; Fargion, Morlino and Profeti 2006; Vassallo
forthcoming).
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The strategic dimension of corporatization is further confirmed by the fact that
municipalities make recourse to private-law companies well beyond the purpose
explicitly envisaged by the national legislative framework, i.e. the management and
delivery of local utilities. In fact, it is true that corporations involved in the public
services domain absorb 75% of the municipal share capital, but numerically they
represent just 35% of the total, the remaining 65% being spread over many other
sectors such as research and training, economic development, infrastructures,
housing and so on (table 2). Apparently, thus, corporatization is perceived by the
municipal political actors as a tool which is flexible and convenient enough to govern
several policy areas, and adaptable, if needed, to local policy making necessities.

N. companies Capital owned by municipalities
Infrastructure, constructions, real estate 15% 7%
Pharmacy 4% 2%
Research, training, consulting 17% 3%
Public services 35% 75%
Economic development 15% 11%
Other 4% 1%
(n.a.) 10% 0%
(Total) 100% 100%
(1335) ( 8.072.429.660)
Table 2 Fields of activity of municipal companies in the 6 regions.



Min Max Median Mean
All sectors 0.41 1,265,622,563 26,650 1,208,100
Public Services 1 1,265,622,563 33,187 1,499,351
Table 3 Descriptive statistics on companies municipal shares

Variations in local strategies of corporatization, as well as some indications on
the frail market dimension of many Italian municipal corporations, emerge also from
descriptive statistics concerning municipal share capital (table 3). Not only the range
between the minimum and maximum shares is impressively high, but the distribution
is also very asymmetrical and overbalanced towards lower values: in half the cases
(companies) municipal shares are in fact under 26,650 (little more than 33,000 for
companies involved in public services) and the median value is far much lower than
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the mean (both in general and in public services only), the latter being uplifted by few
but very high municipal shares contributed by the largest Italian chief-towns (e.g.
Rome and Milan)
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.
Indeed, not surprisingly the total amount of money a municipality decides to
contribute strongly co-varies with its demographic size (r=0.94). What is more
surprising, however, is that the relation between corporate attitude and municipal
size albeit remaining positive and significant tends to weaken a lot if we consider
the number of companies in which the municipality participates (r=0.18). These data,
combined with data in table 3, clearly show that a conspicuous part of Italian
municipalities do not invest large sums of money in corporations, thus revealing a
weak propensity towards a genuine market orientation; but, at the same time, they do
not lay aside the possibility to play the corporatization game, in a sort of cos fan
tutti (thus do they all) fashion. This of course calls into question what the specific
reasons may be.
The question becomes even more challenging if we consider that no less than
17% of our 740 companies directly owned by municipalities are set up by a single
municipality, with no other partners involved in the share capital. Single-municipality
companies are mainly used in the public services domain (22%) a fact which could
be partially explained by the existence of specific sub-sector regulations promoting
the creation of private-law municipal companies and in pharmacies (33%) i.e. a
traditional field of municipal enterprises in Northern Italy but they are also pretty
relevant in sectors such as economic development (11%) and infrastructures (16%),
two policy areas where the municipality could have done with an internal office what
it now does with a private-law company. This is an interesting figure which would be
certainly worth further attention and a supplement of qualitative research to detect
the political rationales behind such kind of choice.
Municipal corporations are also largely used as a means to foster partnership
among public institutions (32% of all 740 directly owned companies are made of
public capitals only coming from two or more public entities), whether they be
municipalities or other public partners such as Regions, Provinces, Chambers of
Commerce etc. This holds true especially for local utilities, following a rationale which

7
The maximum value shown in table 3, in fact, is the share capital that the municipality of Rome
contributes to ACEA, a joint-stock company in which Rome holds 51% of shares.
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is related to the realization of economies of scale and savings in the management of
services, and complying with specific requests of inter-municipal cooperation set by
the national regulation on specific services, such as water and waste management.
Indeed, public-public partnership is pretty diffused also in other policy sectors
(especially economic development, infrastructures and research&training), with a
significant part of companies (74%) being the result of inter-municipal cooperation in
its pure form or combined with the presence of other public partners. As a matter of
fact, as previous studies have pointed out, corporatization in itself is today the most
relevant vehicle for inter-municipal cooperation in Italy, which is far more diffused and
appreciated than the institutional, formal settings envisaged by the national
legislation on local governments reform (i.e. municipal associations etc.) (Citroni,
Lippi and Profeti forthcoming b).
However, inter-governmental networks created through corporatisation remain
mainly local in nature: although it may also serve as a new and flexible form of inter-
municipal cooperation (Citroni, Lippi and Profeti, forthcoming a), only rarely do
municipalities contribute money and buy shares in companies located outside the
territory of their respective provinces, and hardly ever do they own capital in
companies which lie in regions different from their own. Table 4 shows that this is
particularly true for large municipalities, while on the other extreme the smaller ones
find it very difficult to establish their own companies in their own territory. The most
recurrent pattern of cooperation takes thus on the shape of a network with the largest
municipality (usually the capital city of the province) at the centre and other
neighbour small and medium municipalities which gravitate around it, with predictable
differences in their strategic attitudes towards corporatization.
Faced with these data, and adopting an organizational perspective, we may
hypothesize that public-public partnership through corporatization is first of all a
strategy municipalities can use to "reinvent" their policy-making style, to protect
themselves against various "environmental" challenges (scarcity of financial
resources; increasing social demands; uncertain and contradictory national
legislation on local autonomy etc.), and to provide local administrators with larger
room for manoeuvre (with respect, for example, to the control exercised by the
elected assemblies and the opposition parties) in their inter-institutional relations. In
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other words, Italian municipalities may have tailored the private-like instruments and
rationales promoted by the hegemonic paradigm of public administration to their
needs, although recent case studies on specific companies operating in the domain
of local utilities (see e.g. Citroni et al. 2008) seem to suggest that the concrete
outcomes of such a strategy are often far from intentional.

(inhabitants)
Capital outside the
territory of the
municipality
Capital outside the
territory of the province
Capital outside the
territory of the region
Up to 5.000 97,7% 23,1% 1,0%
5.001 to 30.000 80,2% 19,0% 0,3%
30.001 to 100.000 36,8% 13,1% 0,0%
Over 100.000 6,2% 5,3% 0,0%
Total 25,1% 9,2% 0,1%
Table 4 Share of capitals owned by municipalities in companies lying outside their terrirory


Last but not least, municipal corporations in Italy may also take on the shape
of public-private partnerships (PPP), as in fact they do: PPP concerns over of the
companies in our database, and although it is slightly under-represented in public
services it is widely employed in important fields such as research and training,
economic development and infrastructures. The opening up of shareholdings to
private actors is frequently justified by the need to foster companies efficiency and
pad out their share capital. But is that really so? In the following section we will try to
answer this question by examining the composition of companies share capital, and
assessing the current state of the public-private balance as far as the ownership
structure is concerned.

4. The ownership structure: heads and shares in municipal corporations

In this section we provide a quantitative analysis of the composition of the Italian
municipal companies share capital, focusing in particular on companies directly
involved in the management and delivery of public services, and trying to sketch a
general picture of the public-private balance in the Assemblies of shareholders.
Aggregate data are limited to the six Italian regions mentioned above, and refer to all
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the companies in which at least one municipality is direct or indirect shareholder. The
analysis takes into account two dimensions:

a) The composition of companies share capital, in terms of both numerical
representation (heads) and financial weight (shares) of public, private and mixed
shareholders; and the distribution of heads and shares among the various types of
public utilities, in order to identify the activities that most attract private interests and
capitals.
b) The identification of the different categories of actors that make up the public,
private or mixed quotas respectively, and the analysis of their presence and financial
contribution in the various public services sectors.

Looking at the financial contribution to the companies share capital, we note
that municipal corporations are first of all a matter of public money: on average,
about 71% of shares is made of public capitals (corresponding to 10.9 Billion euro),
while private quotas amount to just 11% (1.6 Billion euro), and mixed quotas to 18%
(2.8 Billion euro). The dominance of public shares is even higher in companies
involved in the management and delivery of public services, where public capitals
reach over 73% and private money amounts to just 8% (table 5).

Private Mixed Public
Heads 49% 4% 47%
All companies
Shares 11% 18% 71%
Heads 37% 3% 60%
Public services
Shares 8% 19% 73%
Table 5 Public, private and mixed Heads and shares in the ownership of municipal companies

Actually, average values result from a general picture which is more nuanced
and complex: while in water and sanitation services, waste management, and
especially in local transports and multi-utilities (both pure multi-utilities and
companies combining water or waste management with energy provision), the share
capital is almost totally and directly controlled by public institutions, with a very
residual weight of private funds, the percentage of private capitals tends to grow in
other sectors, such as telecommunications (43%) and energy (20%), that is those
14
public services that have been touched the most by European legal provisions
fostering liberalization and free market competition. Here, in fact, private shares are
even higher than the public ones, which amount to 6% and 14% respectively. This
does not imply, however, that municipalities and other public institutions are not
interested in such domains: rather, they choose to invest there indirectly, as it is
demonstrated by the very high percentage of mixed shares (51% in
telecommunication and 66% in gas & energy), i.e. capitals contributed through
companies in which they are shareholders.

Private Mixed Public
Heads 36% 4% 60%
Transports
Shares 1% 1% 98%
Heads 49% 1% 50%
Welfare services
Shares 19% 2% 79%
Heads 22% 23% 55%
Telecommunications
Shares 43% 51% 6%
Heads 47% 3% 50%
Multiutility
Shares 1% 1% 98%
Heads 52% 4% 44%
Energy
Shares 20% 66% 14%
Heads 9% 2% 89%
Water
Shares 3% 25% 72%
Heads 0% 10% 90%
Water + energy
Shares 0% 1% 99%
Heads 16% 4% 80%
Waste&Environment
Shares 9% 14% 77%
Heads 10% 0% 90%
Waste&Environment + energy
Shares 19% 0% 81%
Table 6 Public, private and mixed Heads and shares in the ownership of municipal companies

It is also worth to note that the percentage of mixed heads, where they are
present, is particularly low if compared to the large amount of money they contribute
to the companies; faced with this evidence, we may hypothesize, on the one hand,
that mixed companies represent a sort of safe for municipalities, since they allow
them to diversify their shareholdings without increasing their direct expenditure; and,
on the other, that public-private corporations themselves are few but rich players in
15
some policy sectors, thus being worth to be analysed as both actors and arenas of
the corporatization game.
On the contrary, in spite of their modest financial contribution, private
shareholders are very numerous: in general their presence almost equalise that of
public shareholders, and also in the domain of public utilities, where they are slightly
under-represented, the percent of their heads is far much higher than the amount of
their shares (table 5), the only exception being the telecommunications sector (table
6). Still, this exception does not invalidate the general tendency which points toward
a numerical representation of private actors which is greater than their financial
weight.
The common hypothesis that the opening up of shareholdings to private actors
should bring new and fresh money into the companies share capital is therefore
rejected, at least as far as our sample is concerned, raising the question of which
kind of rationale lays behind such a massive private presence within companies
shareholdings. And, freely quoting Heclo and Wildavsky (1974), one could wonder
whether corporatization in Italy paves the way to a sort of private government with
public money, where decisions are made by private actors through private-like
channels but costs are mostly paid by public institutions.
Actually, the large number of private shareholders, whereas they do not hold
the majority of shares, does not automatically and formally imply that they exercise
considerable influence over decisions made by the shareholders assemblies. In fact,
one should bear in mind that joint-stock companies i.e. companies whose majority
rules are based on shares according to the civil code (artt. 2368 e 2369) are the
prevalent legal form among the companies directly and indirectly owned by the Italian
municipalities. However, the large presence of private shareholders, even with a
financial minority, can be concretely relevant for the overall companies governance
(and for its implications on policy-making) for at least three reasons:

1) first, with respect to the companys internal organisation, all shareholders
(including the private ones) participate in the appointment/election of the
companys board and the President, i.e. the two bodies which make crucial
16
decisions on strategic management, represent the company and interact with
other local stakeholders (e.g. trade unions, providers, contractors etc.).
2) Second, sitting in the shareholders assembly provides private actors with several
occasions to meet representatives of local governments, to bargain with them
outside the conventional loci of representative democracy, and to consolidate
their relationship with local institutions.
3) Last but not least, the private nature of the companies gets the aforementioned
public-private relations out of public scrutiny, allowing shareholders to discuss
broad policy and political strategies away from prying eyes. Of course, this is not
to say that such private relations are necessarily negative or even against the
law: formally they are perfectly legal, and it may be that people involved therein
act in good faith with an eye to safeguarding collective interests (Pizzorno 1993,
82). However, one must consider that today, in Italy, local elected assemblies (i.e.
municipal councils) play a very residual role in the monitoring and control of
municipal corporations: on the one hand, due to the very complex structure of
municipal budgets, the direct financial impact of municipal companies is very
difficult to detect (Sciandra 2011), thus limiting the possibility of councillors to
have sound and consistent information on the financial dimension of
corporatisation in their own municipality; on the other hand, after law n. 81/93
(which sets the direct election of mayors) the power to appoint/remove
representatives within the companys boards is up to the mayor and no longer to
the assemblies (that now must only be informed in advance). All these conditions
determine clear limitations on the horizontal accountability mechanisms (Morlino
2003), especially as far as the opposition parties sitting in municipal councils are
concerned.
In other words we may hypothesise that, beside representing an instrument to govern
several policy areas, municipal corporations and shareholders assemblies - may
also generate autonomous arenas of representation which develop alongside the
traditional procedures and loci typical of elective representative democracy,
providing both local private stakeholders and local elected politicians with more
comfortable and safe ways to co-decide and accommodate their respective
interests.
17
In the light of this hypothesis, it is therefore worth to examine in detail which
kind of actors are composing the broad categories of public and private shareholders,
and to take a glance at their respective contribution to the companies share capitals
and assemblies in general (table 7) and in various sub-sectors of public services
(table 8). The analysis is limited to public and private actors, since the mixed ones
may be easily reduced to two options, i.e. public-private companies and public-
private consortia, with the latter representing just 6% of the mixed shareholders and
0% of mixed shares. Our aim is to assess how, and how much, the companies
shareholding structure resembles the networks of stakeholders normally involved in
the governance of the various policy sectors.
Since our analysis focuses on companies partly or totally owned by the Italian
municipalities, it is not surprising that municipalities are the leading actors, in terms of
both financial contribution and numerical representation: in fact, they cover 58% of
the overall companies share capital, and 36% of heads represented in the
shareholders assemblies; their relevance is even higher in the public services sector
(65% of shares and 52% of shareholders), with peak shareholding values in very
locally rooted activities such as multi-utilities, waste management, local transports
and water services combined with energy delivery (see tables 7 and 8).
Municipal heads are instead somewhat over-represented with respect to the
amount of money they directly bring into the companies dealing with energy, pure
water management and welfare services; in these sectors, however, relevant shares
of public capital are provided by other categories of public actors, such as fully
publicly owned companies or public consortia, which are usually in turn controlled by
municipalities themselves thus representing an indirect source of municipal
financing. Other categories of public actors, such as Regions and Universities (other
public institutions), are pretty relevant in companies dealing with economic
development and research&training (with 8% and 3% of shares respectively) but do
not participate significantly in public services corporations (at least with direct
financing), nor do they find meaningful numerical representation there (tables 7 and
8). It is also worth to note that public-law municipal enterprises, i.e. the old municipal
instruments for the management of public services that were able to outlive the wave
of corporatisation, still represent 9% of shareholders in companies that combine
18
water and energy management (i.e. the closest to the ideal type of gas-and-water
socialism, see Marquand 2004, 51), in spite of their irrelevant financial contribution
to that sector (table 8).

Public services All companies
Heads Shares Heads Shares
Public shareholders
Municipalities 52% 65% 36% 58%
Other local governments 1% 2% 2% 2%
Municipal Associations 0% 0% 0% 0%
Mountain Communities 0% 0% 1% 0%
Public-law municipal enterprises 0% 1% 0% 1%
Chambers of Commerce 1% 1% 1% 2%
Public agencies 0% 0% 0% 0%
Public Companies 4% 4% 4% 6%
Public Consortia 1% 1% 1% 1%
Other public institutions 0% 0% 1% 1%
Mixed shareholders (mixed companies) 3% 19% 4% 18%
Private shareholders
Private companies 12% 6% 24% 7%
Individuals 20% 0% 13% 0%
Associations, clubs and committees 0% 0% 1% 0%
Interests organizations 1% 0% 4% 0%
Private consortia 1% 0% 1% 0%
Cooperatives 1% 0% 3% 0%
Foundations 0% 0% 0% 0%
Banks 1% 0% 2% 1%
Multinationals 0% 1% 0% 1%
Total 100% 100% 100% 100%
Table 7: Numerical presence (heads) and financial contribution (shares) of various public and private
shareholders in all companies and in the public services sector

As far as private shareholders are concerned, private companies (joint-stock
companies, LTD etc.) located in the territories served by municipal corporations are
the most relevant actors in both financial and numerical terms: they cover about 56%
of private shares and 7% of the overall companies shareholdings (table 7). Their
financial contribution to the public services sector is slightly more limited (6% of
shares), but they contribute significantly in telecommunications (43%) and energy
(16%) sectors (table 8). With the exception of the telecommunication sector, their
presence in the shareholders assemblies is usually slightly higher than their financial
contribution.
19
However, numerical over-representation mostly concerns very small local
firms, i.e. those business entities owned and run by one individual (and in which
there is no legal distinction between the owner and the business) which we have
labelled as individuals in our database: they cover in fact the majority of private
heads in several domains (especially multi-utilities, transports and social services) in
spite of their very modest financial contribution, thus revealing the very local nature of
the companies under examination and, on the other hand, the similarity in the
composition of shareholders assemblies and ordinary arenas of stakeholders in local
policy-making.
This observation is further corroborated by the fact that specific kinds of actors
concentrate their presence in sectors that interest the most their business: for
example, in the companies dealing with social services a large amount of private
capital comes from associations, cooperatives and foundations, while multi-national
companies appear to be most interested in corporations that combine waste
management with energy production and delivery, i.e. those companies which are
more projected toward the national and international markets; private consortia, i.e.
groups of small-size enterprises operating at the local level, concentrate their
financial contribution in local companies dealing with water and sanitation services
and in pure multi-utility companies; and so do the banks, that often are local and
well entrenched in the territorial system.
Drawing upon this evidence, it could be argued that the presence of private
shareholders in companies operating in specific sectors of activity tends to overlap
with the range of stakeholders normally involved in the governance of the
corresponding policy areas, thus reproducing a sort of parallel arenas where public
and private interests may interact away from prying eyes. In such arenas
consolidated networks of local public and private actors and traditional forms of
interests intermediation are reshaped through new organizational settings (corporate
governance mechanisms) and thanks to the frequent presence of new market
oriented players, such as prominent mixed or private companies operating in the
delivery of public services (also at the national/trans-national level). Which kind of
implications on interest representation and local democracy these arenas may
20
produce is no doubt a relevant topic to be further investigated through the lenses of
political science.

Public shareholders Private shareholders Public
services Heads Shares Heads Shares

Transports
Municipalities 52%
Public companies 6%
Other local gov.ts 2%
Total: 60%
Municipalities 94%
Public companies 2%
Other local gov.ts 2%
Total: 98%
Individuals 28%
Private companies 8%
Total: 36%
Private companies
1%
Total: 1%
Welfare
services and
cemeteries
Municipalities 40%
Public companies 6%
Mountain communities 1%
Public agencies 1%
Public consortia 1%
Other public institutions 1%
Total: 50%
Municipalities 31%
Public companies 46%
Public agencies 2%
Total: 79%

Individuals 27%
Cooperatives 7%
Private companies 5%
Foundations 4%
Interests organisations 3%
Associations 2%
Banks 1%
Total: 49%
Cooperatives 11%
Foundations 4%
Private companies
2%
Associations 2%
Total: 19%
Telecommunic
ations
Public companies 19%
Other local gov.ts 11%
Mountain communities 8%
Public consortia 8%
Municipalities 3%
Chambers of Commerce
3%
Other public institutions 3%
Total: 55%
Public companies 3%
Public consortia 3%
Total: 6%
Private companies 19%
Individuals 3%
Total: 22%
Private companies
43%
Total: 43%
Multiutility
Municipalities 49%
Public companies 1%
Total: 50%
Municipalities 92%
Public consortia 4%
Public-law municipal
enterprises 2%
Total: 98%
Individuals 44%
Private companies 2%
Banks 1%
Total: 47%
Banks 1%
Total: 1%
Energy
Municipalities 28%
Public companies 10%
Other local gov.ts 1%
Municipal associations 1%
Public consortia 1%
Public agencies 1%
Chambers of Commerce
1%
Other public institutions 1%
Total 44%
Municipalities 7%
Public companies 7%
Total 14%
Private companies 25%
Individuals 23%
Interests organisations 1%
Private consortia 1%
Banks 1%
Multinationals 1%
Total: 52%
Private companies
16%
Multinationals 4%
Total: 20%
Water and
sanitation
Municipalities 84%
Public companies 3%
Other local gov.ts 1%
Public consortia 1%
Total: 89%

Municipalities 54%
Public companies 11%
Other local gov.ts 6%
Public-law municipal
enterprises 1%
Total: 72%
Private companies 8%
Individuals 1%
Total: 9%
Private companies
2%
Private consortia
1%
Total: 3%
Water +
Energy
Municipalities 45%
Public companies 27%
Public-law municipal
enterprises 9%
Public consortia 9%
Total: 90%
Municipalities 88%
Public consortia 8%
Public companies 3%
Total: 99%
Absent Absent
Waste and
environment
Municipalities 73%
Public companies 5%
Other local gov.ts 1%
Public consortia 1%
Total: 80%
Municipalities 70%
Public companies 4%
Other local gov.ts 2%
Public consortia 1%
Total: 77%
Private companies 10%
Individuals 2%
Private consortia 1%
Cooperatives 1%
Banks 1%
Multinationals 1%
Total: 16%
Private companies
7%
Individuals 1%
Cooperatives 1%
Total: 9%
Waste +
Energy
Municipalities 85%
Public companies 3%
Other local gov.ts 1%
Public-law mun. en. 1%
Total: 90%
Municipalities 60%
Public companies 13%
Other local gov.ts 6%
Public-law mun. en. 2%
Total: 81%
Private companies 7%
Multinationals 1%
Cooperatives 1%
Banks 1%
Total: 10%
Multinationals 12%
Private companies
6%
Banks 1%
Total: 19%
Table 8: Numerical presence (heads) and financial contribution (shares) of various public and private
shareholders in all public services sub-sectors
21
5. Conclusions

Drawing upon the empirical evidence presented in this paper, some conclusions can
be proposed with respect to our initial question, that is how, and to what extent,
privatisation in its two key dimensions (operational logic and ownership structure) has
affected local public services in Italy so far. In order to ask that question we
concentrated on municipal corporations, i.e. private law companies directly or
indirectly owned (fully or partially) by local governments, which are no doubt a
growing and relevant phenomenon in the Italian political and administrative system.
As for the municipal corporations operational logic, some contrasting signals
have emerged from our analysis: on the one hand, the continuous blossoming of
private-law municipal companies, as well as the prevalence of market-like legal forms
(i.e. joint-stock and Ltd) among them, seem to respond to a private, market-oriented
rationale oriented toward better and more efficient services, which is indeed very
often claimed by local decision-makers to justify their choice to externalise services
production and delivery as well as to transform old municipal enterprises into
corporations. On the other hand, however, the very different diffusion of the
phenomenon across the North and the South of the country, the large use of
corporations well beyond the domain of local utilities and legislative provisions, and
the frail market dimension of several municipal corporations, let us hypothesise that a
plurality of strategies may exist behind the corporatisation strand, and that the
economic rationale probably is not the most relevant among them. For instance, our
data show that municipal companies are largely used as an instrument to foster
partnership among local public institutions, to consolidate territorial networks built
around the capital cities and, in their PPP format, to reproduce real arenas of
decision-making where the pre-existing relations between local public and private
stakeholders may be strengthened through mechanisms of joint shareholding.
The same contradictory signals characterise also the companies ownership
structure: although private shareholders are very numerous in shareholders
assemblies, their financial contribution is generally very poor. This holds true
especially in the domain of local utilities (in particular transports, water services and
multiutility companies), where indeed the need of private money to realise new
22
investments is often claimed to be the main reason to open up the companies share
capitals to private actors. As for the ownership structure, thus, we are facing a
situation of ambivalent privatisation: a large presence of private heads sitting in the
decisional bodies of private law companies, coupled with the absolute dominance of
public financial resources (contributed directly or indirectly) in the nourishing of
companies share capitals. It is a situation, which provocatively we have labelled
private government with public money, whose concrete implications on local
democracy are worth to be further analysed.
Our analysis of the different types of actors represented in the assemblies, in
fact, reveals that the composition of shareholders assemblies in companies dealing
with specific subsectors of public services tends to replicate the network of
stakeholders interested in such sectors and normally consulted (or directly involved)
by public institutions in ordinary decision-making processes. All in all, we may thus
hypothesise that in municipal corporations old and new forms of governance coexist,
generating new power configurations in the domain of public services which develop
in private although still largely nourished by public resources.
If it is true that municipal companies are becoming not only prominent actors in
the management and delivery of public services, but also the most relevant arenas
where decisions on concrete actions (e.g. investments, tariffs, type of service delivery
etc.) are made, this hypothesis may have some important implications which have to
do with a third dimension of the public-private dichotomy not mentioned so far, that is
transparency. In fact, publicity is also inherent in the transparency, officialdom and
openness of government: this is explicitly stated by Norberto Bobbio who moving
from Kantian foundations points out that no authoritative decision is legitimate if it is
made without public scrutiny (Bobbio 1984). The public may thus be defined as being
in public, made accessible to citizens and thus inherent to the concept of citizenship
itself (cfr. Crouch 2004) It calls democracy into question, and the range and scope of
social decisions to which democracy should apply. An ever increasing number of
decisions is taken in an ever more complex setting of public, public-public and public-
private arenas, with the ever stronger involvement of managers from the public and
the private sectors representing interests, territories and institutions that are selected
through their ability to pay and to access shareholders assemblies and boards of
23
directors. The autocratic power of mayors is relied upon to guarantee accountability,
but mayors themselves are not all equal: small municipalities depend on larger ones
in their strategies (see section 3), and local resources may not be sufficient to
undergo the same strategy in different parts of the country (see the North-South
divide in table 1). And the networks revolving around mayors and boards of directors
pose serious conflicts of interest and lack the transparency and clarity that makes the
public public.
Obviously aggregate data presented here do not allow us to draw sound and
reliable inference with respect to the variety of shapes such networks may take, and
the resources actors may spend to occupy central positions therein; these questions,
as well as their implications on accountability mechanisms, are currently the object
the Citygovs second phase, and represent the core topics of our future research
agenda.

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