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The purpose of the paper is to examine and contrast director duties in health and safety in the UK and Australian jurisdictions, the former influencing the latter's health and safety regime until Australia introduced a new more progressive regime.

The authors are practitioners who have combined desk based research with professional knowledge of how the law in both jurisdictions is applied. The approach was a comparative study of the underlying principles behind the enforcement regimes.

The paper found that the UK position could be strengthened but whilst the new Australian position could be a preferable development, it is too early to tell whether or not the Australian model would be more effective.

Research was desk‐based only.

Practitioners in both jurisdictions should consider potential developments in the area of director duties, particularly in the UK where Section 37 could arguably be strengthened.

This is the first comparison of the UK and Australian jurisdictions in respect of health and safety and examines an alternative to the consent, connivance and neglect model used in the UK to attach culpability to directors and officers. It also examines the possibility of introducing due diligence in the UK.

The hypothesis is that social inequalities tend to increase in the historical phases characterized by a high level of integration of the international economy, generating protectionism-oriented pressures. The analysis of the capitalistic evolution in the last centuries is oriented to outline the strict connection between deep international economy integration and high level of social inequalities in advanced economies.

Recent deep integration in international economy generated, in advanced economies, a significant increase in socio-economic inequalities, with negative effects on social cohesion and democratic dynamics. The paper, examining the historical evolution of capitalism, analyses the consequences generated by the deep integration, achieved by the international economy, on social inequalities in advanced countries. The discussion is focussed on three models of capitalism: competitive capitalism, Fordist capitalism and cognitive capitalism.

As a result, for governments, two alternatives open up in the hyper-globalization phases: to preserve deep international economic integration, with risks for democracy; to preserve internal social cohesion, with risks of protectionism and closure to the international economy.

The article is oriented to underline the intrinsic incompatibility between hyper-globalization and democracy, for the strong negative effects generated by hyper-globalization on social inequalities and on social cohesion.

In this chapter, I examine the populism of the Northern League and Berlusconi. I attempt to provide an institutional explanation as to why Italy, more so than other Western European democracies, has experienced such diverse forms of populism. Stated in full, the thesis advanced is that the rise and persistence populism in Western European democracies, such as Italy, is an indication of an institutional crisis of representation.

Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) has been increasingly adopted worldwide to tackle issues of size and cost reduction in the provision of public services. Although the determinants of cooperation among municipalities have been widely investigated in the prior literature, little is known about the link between a municipality's financial health and that of the supra-municipal entity formed under IMC. The purpose of this study is to fill this research gap by analyzing the case of municipal unions (MUs) in Italy.

A quantitative approach has been used, applying OLS and quantile regression on financial information and other variables of municipalities and their MUs.

The study finds that the most important condition of operation for IMC, that is, financial sustainability, is directly linked to the financial health of member municipalities and the functional integration reached with the supra-municipal entity.

The study analyses all MUs in Italy, focusing on the factors affecting their financial sustainability. In doing so, it sheds light on the factors that influence the financial sustainability of second-tier governments, which rely on external funding.