Alitalia, or the inability to align regulation with industrial policies

ABSTRACTThis article aims to frame Alitalia’s crisis in the processes that have characterized the regulatory and industrial policies of the aviation industry over the last twenty years. The reasons that led to Alitalia’s state of insolvency, which have been widely documented, will only be surveyed here. Instead, this work highlights the ‘public policy’ dimension of Alitalia’s failure, that is to say the key strategic decisions, their coherence over time, and the choices made in other countries for similar cases. If the Alitalia crisis is essentially a business crisis that not concern the national airline industry, this does not necessarily mean that the public and regulatory choices that have been made in Italy over the last twenty years have not influenced discernible managerial choices and cases of poor management. The interpretive hypothesis followed in this article concerns the ability to coordinate and integrate regulatory policies and industrial policies. The first section of the article introduces ...