Abstract

The work tackles the theme of regulation beginning from the profound changes that contemporary societies experienced at the end of the twentieth century. These changes have regarded both social structures and socio-economic institutions: the globalisation of trade, integration of the markets, and growing interdependence of societies bring into question the very form and principles that configure the form of the State as it has been known up to now in Europe. These transformations bear heavily as much on the characterisation of its functions as on the structures created in order to respond to the phenomenon of globalisation. In particular, the forms of public intervention and control have undergone a profound change. The central object of the work is constituted precisely by an examination of the different profiles that characterise one of the principal public powers of advanced democracies, namely public intervention in the economy as a guarantee of social equity, first of all through an exploration of the elements that differentiate it from previous public policies in the matter.