This book provides an up-to-date analytical and empirical treatment of some important interactions between paid and unpaid labour and the social economy. 1 The emphasis on the preferences of paid and unpaid labour and on their role in the efficient provision of social services makes a vital contribution to clarifying the definition of social economy, a concept which has attracted considerable interest in the recent literature on the welfare system. Particular attention is paid to the differences among different countries' experiences.
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Notes
- 1.
We shall use the expressions nonprofit, third sector, and social economy interchangeably. Even though there are some differences among them, they broadly stand for the same area of economic activity and the same set of issues for economic analysis. However, we believe that social economy, by explicitly referring to the social mission bestowed to organizations engaged in the provision of social utility services, best conveys the broadness of the topic.
- 2.
As all these data are basically taken from national censuses, comparable data for more recent years are not readily available. However, also the latest period has been characterized by a strong presence of the nonprofit sector in advanced economies. See for instance the data available from the Center for Civil Society Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
- 3.
Note that the above quoted statistics are likely to underestimate the weight of the social economy, because they are based on a fairly restrictive notion of nonprofit sector, stressing the role of the profit non-distribution constraint. Broadly speaking, these figures leave out most cooperatives, whose social mission is very close to that of the pure nonprofit organizations.
- 4.
In Italy, according to various surveys by ISTAT (the Italian National Statistical Institute), between 1991 and 2001 nonprofit organizations more than doubled, nonprofit employees increased by 75%, and voluntary workers increased tenfold to over three million.
- 5.
This point is well illustrated by the analyses of Musella and Troisi, Galera, and also Young (from a slightly different perspective).
- 6.
The case in point is here the paper by Tortia. Yet Michelutti and Schenkel, Mosca and Pastore, Destefanis and Maietta, Livraghi and Pappadà also bring about indirect pieces of evidence on this issue.
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Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (PRIN 2005) and from the DISES, University of Salerno. We also wish to thank Francesco Amati, Sharon Gleave, Alexander Kirichenko and Roger Meservey for editorial assistance.
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Destefanis, S., Musella, M. (2009). Introduction and Overview. In: Musella, M., Destefanis, S. (eds) Paid and Unpaid Labour in the Social Economy. AIEL Series in Labour Economics. Physica, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2137-6_1
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