In Italy state-owned enterprise (SOE) has assumed a particular role and weight since the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, one of the most important Italian historiographers, Rosario Romeo (1988, 135), stated that in the late 1930s the country was second only to the Soviet Union in the extent of its state property ownership. A complete apparatus of SOEs was active in Italy from the 1930s on. This apparatus was made up of state companies such as the national railways, founded in 1905, which were considered “autonomous organizations inside the public administration that manage directly, in the name of the competent ministry, specific production or service activities that belong to primary state tasks” (Bianchi 1994, 591). There are also state concerns such as INA (the National Insurance Institute, created in 1912 to operate the state life insurance monopoly), concerns that “should manage, according to a style typical of private business, activities considered public but which, unlike the state companies, remain outside the public administration” (Bianchi 1994, 591). Finally there are also state shareholding companies such as IRI (the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction), which will be examined in this essay. State shareholding companies are “subject to private corporate law while the majority of the outstanding shares are controlled by a state concern.” This essay will focus on the last category, partly for reasons of space, partly because of the availability of detailed historiographical information about state shareholding companies, and finally because this is probably where Italy made the most original contribution to the phenomenon of SOE.