Recent scholarship on the role of the state in designing regulatory policies in industrialized democracies has identified a shift from the increasingly direct role of the state in the 1970s to a diminishing role in the 1980s. The question of the changing role of the state is particularly interesting in the Italian case, where direct state intervention has been extensive but also highly inefficient and susceptible to the pressures of private interests. The essays in this volume provide a systematic analysis of the contemporary means of regulation employed in a range of economic and social policy areas in Italy. They support the general thesis that policy in Italy is characterized by a complex interaction of state, market and social regulation, rather than by a general trend away from state intervention. Originally published in Italian in 1988.