SMEs: Trust and judicial system

Abstract

Italian SMEs share capabilities and routines that permit them to reach high level of competition. But in a global system that is affected by structural deficiencies and negative performance of judicial system, it is very hard to maintain high performances. In this work, starting from the resilience capacity of a group of SMEs of surviving to the crisis, we try to analyse the quality of the expectations of a sample of resilient firms. Our study leads to the hypothesis that the economic crisis is in line with a crisis of confidence in the judicial system. This is all the more serious when considering that this distrust is rooted in those firms located in Southern Italy, where the inefficiency of the judicial system is particularly pronounced.