Società in house e performance economico-patrimoniale: osservazioni sulla sostenibilità derivante dall’analisi del trend di alcuni indici di bilancio

The issue of public shareholdings is particularly delicate due to the extent of the phenomenon, the impact on the community of their activities and the amount of public money invested in them. The objective of this work – which should be considered as a first and concise analysis that can be further investigated – is to highlight, in the face of the particular operating conditions reserved for in-house companies, some aspects of the economic performance of this company type of companies. To this end, the tool for analyzing the balance sheet by index is applied to a statistical population of municipal in-house companies (no. 135, equal to all those owned by the provincial capitals of Italy). In addition, in order to verify the existence of a link between some structural elements of the in-house companies (related to the labor factor) and their performance, a further empirical analysis was performed using the regression tools. The results show how, in the first instance, the performance of the companies investigated are characterized by some critical issues, demonstrating weak economic and financial conditions for the sustainability of the activities of the in-house companies and highlighting the ineffectiveness of the preventive assessment of economic adequacy required by the regulations for the establishment of these companies (in the case of awarding services available on the market under a competitive regime). Furthermore, the empirical analysis conducted through the regression allowed to highlight links between the number of employees and the cost of the same and a large part of the financial ratios examined. The conclusions suggest some food for thought for the legislator and management regarding in-house companies and some possible evolutions of the analysis carried out in this article.