Opinions & Interviews

2024-01-24 Roberto Vona

Management Returns to the Centre of Communities

The forthcoming Sima’s (the Italian Society of Management Scholars) Festival of Management is approaching. It is still growing and evolving thanks to positive feedback received after the first edition. We are coming back to Milan and to Bocconi University on 7th and 8th of March 2024, thanks to precious support of our colleagues and to the great effort of the Sima’s Past President, Sandro Castaldo, who believed in this project from the very first moment. We have been working for a long time to the several financial and organizational elements as well as to the “editorial” and communication ...

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Il lavoro bancario in Italia, dal 1990 a oggi

2023-03-21 Roberto Ruozi

Bank Employment in Italy: the Prospects for the Future

On January 23 of this year, the Financial Times published a long article by O. Walter and K. Martin, who discussed some considerations shared during the recent Davos Forum regarding the prospects for employment in banks, with specific reference to the situation in the U.S., but also to that of some European banks. The central point of the article concerns the fact that the main American banks – among which Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of New York Mellon are cited – and some large European banks, citing UBS and Credit Suisse (the protagonists of global economic news in recent weeks, ...

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2022-11-16 Roberto Ruozi

Financing the Ecological Transition

The ecological transition has been a subject of debate for many decades now, with much said and written. In reality, in recent years it has reached crucial importance for the economic and social development of our planet. It is in fact a very complex subject, that is difficult to define, especially in practical terms, and changes continuously while regarding various areas, including the decarbonization of the economy, the circular economy, the reduction of the use of plastic, urban regeneration, sustainable tourism, and adaptation and mitigation of risks due to climate change. The solution to ...

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2022-09-05 Roberto Ruozi

A (Positive) Glance at the Future of Italian Banks

The economic situation in our country is fairly confused, making it difficult to develop forecasts for the future, even in the short term. Apart from the question of energy, that will have a considerable impact on our economy – and it is not known how it can be solved, with all of the potential consequences – numerous other indicators seem to suggest that we are beginning to return to a model of development that had disappeared for years, but has not been substituted by valid alternatives. The new and most important indicators that will characterize that model are inflation, “normal” levels ...

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2022-02-04 Roberto Ruozi

Past, Present, and Future of Bank Concentrations

The phenomenon of bank concentration, as I have said on multiple occasions also with reference to other types of financial operations, lends itself to varied judgments in relation to both its formal intrinsic value and its practical application. Indeed the objectives and results of bank concentration, a phenomenon which has had significant effects in almost all countries in the world in the post-WWII period, have changed over the course of time, and the evaluations that have been expressed on it in different periods have been conditioned by the respective historical contexts. In our country, there ...

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2021-11-27 Francesco Panié, Valentino Affinita

How the First Bottom-Up Food Policy Can Be Born in Rome

According to the United Nations, over 55% of the global population lives in urban environments today,[1] and the global trend continues to grow, with projections indicating that the percentage will reach 68% by 2050. In our country, this threshold was already passed in 2018, and today more than 70% of Italians live in urbanized contexts. Thus, in a perspective in which food demand in cities will continue to increase, it has become essential to plan the environmental development of urban food systems. This need is based on the data published in 2019 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ...

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2021-11-17 Roberto Ruozi

Interesting Developments in the Relationship between Banks and SMEs

An analysis of what is happening in our country in recent years indicates that the relationship between banks and SMEs is changing, even though the problem is not simple, and to understand it we must differentiate the two worlds. On the one hand, there are big banks (hereinafter BBs), local banks (hereinafter LBs), and new banks; on the other hand, there are SMEs operating in very different sectors, such as manufacturing, construction, ICT, professional services, and so on, but also with varying dimensions, as well as track records that can be more or less consolidated, or that remain to be invented, ...

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2021-08-23 Roberto Ruozi

The SPAC Market: the Cases of the United States and Italy

SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) are financial instruments created almost twenty years ago in the United States. Economia&Management dealt with these types of companies back in 2017 and 2018,[1] assessing the situation in the US and Italy; in the latter, SPACs emerged in 2011 not structured based on specific regulations or laws, but through a combination of legal forms allowed for other types of financial companies. When we speak of SPACs, we always need to refer to the regulation based on which each has been constructed. Despite having the same goals, different jurisdictions can ...

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2021-07-16 Claudio Cosentino, Adelina di Pietro

Sustainability in Water Companies: The Case of ACEA ATO2

Sustainability is one of the largest challenges that every company has to face in order to evolve towards an economic system that is able to combine protection of the environment, social and economic development. Water service managers are defined as "sustainable by vocation," since their fundamental mission is to guarantee present and future generations access to water services, a primary good for survival, ensuring the protection of the quality and quantity of water resources. They integrate the environmental dimension with economic development and the ethical-social dimension to simultaneously ...

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2021-02-23 Veronica Vecchi, Manuela Brusoni

Public Procurement as a Driver of Economic Growth

In the coming months, Italy will begin to benefit from a considerable volume of resources, in the context of both the Next Generation EU and the new cohesion policy pushed by Prime Minister Mario Draghi. This is an opportunity that the country and its public administration have the duty to exploit productively, to sustain the society and the economy. Using these resources well implies not only selecting priorities and making plans, but also using purchasing tools and logics differently, an area that has always been considered a "minefield" by most of the personnel in the PA. In recent years, purchases ...

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