ll contributo è stato sottoposto a peer-review anonima da un revisore selezionato dalla Direzione della collana. Ricevuto il 21/05/2018; accettato il 16/07/2018; pubblicato il 25/09/2018.
Il saggio trae spunto dalla relazione tenuta nello workshop su “Incentivi assunzionali e aiuti di Stato” al Convegno Nazionale A.G.I. di Torino del 14-16 settembre 2017 su “Concorrenza lavoro diritti”.

The essay examines, in an historical perspective, the relationship between the incentives for recruitment and, more generally, the active labour market policies, which belong to national states competence, and the UE State Aid law. It is remarked that the protection of free trade and competition is only one of the union targets, as other social targets such as the increase of employment rate (up to 75% under the Europe 2020 strategy), are pursued. In this perspective the original ban for state aids has been supplemented by the new General Block Exemption Regulation, which justifies some specific state aids related to general union’s targets, among which the mentioned increase of employment rate. After a review of the development of EU State Aid regulation, the Italian incentives for recruitment and their compatibility with the EU law are dealt with. The difficulty to distinguish between the measures related to national active labour policies and the ones which fall under the EU State Aid regime is particularly stressed. In the end, the GBER seems to have two implications: on the one hand, it reduces the strictness of the State Aid law while, on the other, it takes away space to the national labour policies as far as the topics disciplined by the GBER are concerned, which partly seems to safeguard the internal coherence of the system, rather than protect free trade and competition.