Economic crises and the counter-cyclical profile of the Non-Profit Organisations: some empirical evidences from the Italian context.

The post-crisis economic recovery is the result of a joint effort of many actors: citizens, profit oriented companies, non-profit organizations and public institutions. In this complex process, it is possible to observe that the innate propensity of the non-profit organizations to assume an ethical connotation can also be taken as a valid premise to the enunciation of the counter-cyclical profile. Following a managerial approach, the paper – which has as reference the Italian context – tries to discover and systemize the causes of empirical evidence that emerges by comparing statistical data of Italian censuses carried out in 2001 and 2011 by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (INIS). The central part of the paper – oriented to business ethics – concerns the declination of the underlying model due to the non-profit organization, while the final thought can be summarized as follows: the focused characteristics of these subjects that should also be internalized in business models related to other kinds of companies, in order to give the same greater ability to react to the current economic crisis.