Industrial Districts and Economic Decline in Italy

The economic and social vitality of industrial districts (IDs) depends on the interaction between two major sub-systems: a community of people and a population of firms. A range of circumstances determined inconsistencies between the rationales of these two sub-systems. The emergence of leader firms that substitute the ID as coordinating instances and cost scrapping as a strategy that bypasses quality enhancement undermine the ID as a system. The paper contends that this outcome is not the only possible one. An alternative would require a regulatory—as opposed to merely permissive—action of public actors.