The corporate governance and the options between equity and debt capital. Considerations on access to credit in Italian reality (part I)

To conduct a business today one needs intuitive skills and, therefore, an ability to respond to the new and numerous challenges that the market requires. These challenges are economic, but not only. A continuous and steady development involves actually the need to go beyond the limits, not only in the case of traditional companies, but also of those in the start up phase. To be in a multilateral and global economic system - as the present one – supposes a continuous upgrading of production technologies within companies, sometimes by undergoing serious reengineering processes. The updating of the company, however, cannot and should not be perceived as a simple and sudden initiative that is applied superficially just to conform to a market trend. It involves a certain difficulty, and especially the demand for new and ongoing investment in the sector of competence, therefore, it requires a careful process of analysis to relate multiple aspects of the company, including the availability of equity or the need to resort to foreign capital, such as to the bond market, to national or European facilitating tools or to foreign intervention of banking nature, on short or medium-long term, calibrating these interventions based on business needs. It is this delicate "step" in the life of a company - which requires a coherent, appropriate and stable organization of the governance of the company – that we want to tackle within this paper, as well as its interaction with the banking system, which in our specific case is the Italian one, all these by a brief empirical analysis of the relationship that links corporate governance to the access to finances, in the current banking context