Il mimetismo della nozione di pubblica amministrazione. Un’analisi empirica

The research aims to address the problem of the delimitation of the Italian public administration’s boundaries. Given the lack of a legislation which sets out, in auniform way, the conditions under the “public” character may be attributed to privateentities pursuing public interests, there are many issues which concern the notion of public administration, of which the lowest common denominator is the recurrent crisissituations (economic and health). It is well known that the latter have put a strain on public administration’s resilience, effectiveness and efficiency. In particular, the relevanceof the European legal system’s influence on the domestic one can be noted by theattribution to the Italian National Institute of Statistics of the task of identifyingannually the entities that contribute to the budgetary balance and the sustainabilityof the public debt. Well, on one hand, the “public-private” dichotomy shouldn’t beconsidered obsolete and, on the other, the rationalisation of the administration inthe private way plays an essential role in containing public spending. Therefore, acriterion for the attribution of public nature, based on the use of public resources andthe assessment of the public character on a case-by-case basis, would allow to simplifythe framework of the wider public sector, in the prism of flexibility and dynamism.