Italy: Emerging forms of entrepreneurship

In Italy, small-scale entrepreneurship and self-employment have long characterised the country’s entire productive system. In the past 20 years, major changes in the economy and the labour market have favoured the growth of new forms of entrepreneurship and self-employment in many respects different from the more traditional ones. In recent years the debate has mostly concentrated on the introduction of different criteria with which to distinguish dependent employment from self-employment, ways to simplify bureaucratic procedures, and reform of social security provisions for self-employed workers and micro-entrepreneurs. Overall, the forms of entrepreneurship considered by the ERM study have been the object of sporadic debate in Italy, while quantitative and qualitative data on such forms are generally scarce.