Introduction and Overview

This book provides an up-to-date analytical and empirical treatment of some important interactions between paid and unpaid labour and the social economy. The emphasis on the preferences of paid and unpaid labour and on their role in the efficient provision of social services makes a contribution to clarifying the definition of social economy, a concept which has attracted considerable interest in the recent literature on the welfare system. A first set of papers focuses on the conceptual and theoretical treatment of preferences of paid and unpaid labour and human resource management in the third sector, the incentive and remuneration system, ownership structure and risk, choice-theoretical analysis of unpaid labour and household production. The remaining papers are essentially of an empirical nature. The main target of the empirical studies is the Italian social economy, whose growth in recent years has been impressive. Yet, empirical analyses also deal with other countries. Descriptive evidence about the role of paid and unpaid labour within the nonprofit sector, is provided for countries (CEE, CIS, Malta, Spain) where there is relatively little information on these matters. State-of-the-art quantitative techniques are also applied to a dataset for the US never previously utilized.