L’Analisi economica del corporatismo: cooperazione per la produzione o per l'acquisizione di rendita?

Corporatism is a multidimensional social phenomenon combining sociological, political, legal and economic features with cultural and psychological ones. This essay focuses on its economics, namely its relation to the efficient creation of private and public wealth. In market economies there are two basic alternative modes of coordinating the economic activities of individual agents: competition and cooperation. Organized cooperation for the promotion of group interests may be aimed either at production or at rent acquisition. The impact of corporatism on the efficient creation of wealth will be neutral or positive in the first case, and negative in the second. As expected on the basis of this reasoning, no attempt to empirically estimate some general relationship between corporatist institutions as such and economic performance has produced so far univocal results. The relative extension of (corporatist) cooperation versus (non-corporatist) competition in a given political economy is linked to its specific rules, institutions and public policies, and the extent to which corporatist cooperation is directed towards rent acquisition instead of production, or viceversa, depends crucially on the structure of incentives embedded in them.