Italian Industrial Districts: influence of the governance on performance and financial distress of firms. An explorative study.

The objective of the research is to verify the existence of a relation between quality of industrial districts (IDs) governance, economic-financial performance and financial distress risks of firms belonging to IDsAdopting a systemic perspective of the analysis (Freeman, 1984; Golinelli, 2005), in this paper it is assumed that the model and the quality of IDs governance has a significant impact on the financial performance and the risk of financial distress of companies located there. Evidently, the districts have different performance and, therefore, different risks, but in the light of the literature and empirical evidence, the districts are characterized by effective governance mechanisms which have shown greater resilience during the years of economic and financial crisis, which was confirmed by a minor reduction in the number of enterprises and the number of employees.