FRANCESCO CIRO RAMPULLA e LIVIO PIETRO TRONCONI

Le attività pattizie della Pubblica Amministrazione. Un processo inarrestabile

208

Gennaio-Aprile 2005

Anno LXX    n. 1

Summary - While the contractual activity of the public administration was traditionally limited to supply contracts, over the last twenty years it has expanded to include agreements between administrations and other bodies, program agreements and service conferences, substitutive provision agreements and constitutive agreements, contracts attached to allowances, collective and individual labour agreements, business contracts and atypical contracts.This broad range of contractual agreements points to a particular model of administration, because it transfers basic relations of drawing up and carrying out contracts from administrative law to the normal civil discipline of contracts and obligations, with a dialectical evaluation of the contrasting interests of the public and others.The reasons for this enlargement are to be found, on the one hand, in the exponential growth in administrative functions, and on the other hand, in the influences of European law. Another relevant factor is that of the public administration’s organizational, managerial and financial problems.This has led to the emergence of a model of administration by contract, which renders administrative action less cumbersome, involves lower costs and greater certainty of results, and which constitutes, for a vast segment, the traditional authoritative power by means of which public interests are specified in accordance with the law.