We generalize the analytic solutions presented in Pantoni et al. by including a simple yet effective description of
wind recycling and galactic fountains, with the aim of self-consistently investigating the spatially averaged time
evolution of the gas, stellar, metal, and dust content in disk-dominated late-type galaxies (LTGs). Our analytic
solutions, when supplemented with specific prescriptions for parameter setting and with halo accretion rates from
N-body simulations, can be exploited to reproduce the main statistical relationships followed by local LTGs; these
involve, as a function of the stellar mass, the star formation efficiency, the gas mass fraction, the gas/stellar
metallicity, the dust mass, the star formation rate, the specific angular momentum, and the overall mass/metal
budget. Our analytic solutions allow us to easily disentangle the diverse role of the main physical processes ruling
galaxy formation in LTGs; in particular, we highlight the crucial relevance of wind recycling and galactic fountains
in efficiently refurnishing the gas mass, extending the star formation timescale, and boosting the metal enrichment
in gas and stars. All in all, our analytic solutions constitute a transparent, handy, and fast tool that can provide a
basis for improving the (sub-grid) physical recipes presently implemented in more sophisticated semi-analytic
models and numerical simulations, and can serve as a benchmark for interpreting and forecasting current and future
spatially averaged observations of local and higher redshift LTGs.
