Abstract
The technical (plant) and legal (company) units normally used in official statistics do not take into consideration the phenomenon of business groups: i.e. sets of companies controlled by the same entrepreneur. The main aims of this paper are to assess the presence of such groups in the Italian small firm manufacturing sector and to examine the causes of their formation. Two data sets are used: the first is a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms while the second is a small sample of groups localized in the Region of the Marches. They show that groups are widely present among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Starting from the premise that the group is the result of the expansion of activities controlled by the same entrepreneur, this paper reports a first attempt to discriminate among three alternative propositions regarding the causes of such growth and the reasons for the adoption of the group form: (1) as the result of the firm's growth policy; (2) as the result of entrepreneurial dynamics; and (3) as the result of the capital accumulation process on the part of the entrepreneur or his/her family. The empirical analysis on the whole favours the first hypothesis.
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