Change in contemporary Italy's social concertation

This article examines the crisis of social concertation in Italy since 2000. It is argued that this crisis is not due exclusively to the political shift from a centre-left to a centre right government or the end of the European integration. It reflects the continued failure to address problems of economic growth and work productivity, as mainly apparent from the second half of the 1990s. This is also due to the limited development of the decentralised level of collective bargaining, as introduced by the 1993 Ciampi Protocol. And this also reflects a weakness in the Italian institutional context as well as the difficulties associated with the altering of industrial relations in global market economies more generally.