FEDERICO TARGETTI

Terzo settore tra stato e mercato nelle economie post-industriali: 

alcuni elementi di valutazione  

N. 178

Summary — In the last two decades, the changes in the structure of needs and in the welfare systems have caused a fast growth of the Third Sector in many industrialized countries. The increasing importance of the role of nonprofit organizations in the market economies has originated a growing body of literature that try to explain the competitive advantages that such organizations have over the other economic institutions. The scope of this article is to review the main economic theories of nonprofit organizations pointing out their main weaknesses.

In the first two sections the demand and supply side theories that have been developed in the last fifteen years are revised. The scope of all these theories is to analyse the comparative advantages that nonprofit firms have in the provision of goods and services with respect to Government and to capitalistic firms. The main conclusion that can be derived is that these theories are not mutually exclusive and nor the first ones neither the second ones can be considered as a unified and well developed theory of nonprofit organizations The Government Failure Theory cannot account for the increasing role of nonprofit firms as providers of private goods and services. The Contract Failure Theory considers the nonprofit firm as a black box and so failing to explain why an entrepreneur has incentives to set up a nonprofit firm.

In the third section the internal organization of nonprofit firms is analysed. In particular the author tries to address the question of how the relational capital that originate from this specific form of organization can be a source of comparative advantages with respect to capitalistic firms and how much the relational capital can improve the competitiveness of such kind of firms in the market place.