Mariana Mazzucato's article – Transforming the state and its role to address post virus challenges, Il Sole 24 Ore, 30 April 2020 - contains elements of considerable suggestion, above all where the author concretely identifies - indeed, not first - the areas of intervention in the green deal and in the technological updating of SMEs, as great opportunities not to be missed. However, it raises many doubts when it entrusts the State with a gigantic demiurgic role.
"The state - he says - it cannot limit itself to repairing the economic damage caused by the financial crisis and the epidemic. It must give a new form to markets, productive organizations and social and labor relations, which rewards the creation of value and social and environmental resilience".
Now, for the State to take charge of the task indicated by a competent person like Mario Draghi, to introduce liquidity into the economic system and to send real money to citizens and businessesseems realistic, but we know the Italian state too well to believe that it can do much more.
A strategic guiding role, which Mazzucato correctly evokes, is one thing (elsewhere they call it "economic policy"), but the titanic commitment to redesign the country's economy at all levels – markets, labor and social relations, property e governance of businesses – appears like a coup de theater in which the protagonists invested with the role are superheroes who move in a parallel universe, forgetting the reality of the country.
You can invoke a "structural change" but, when you have responsibilities for governing the economy, one cannot forget the existing structure, in particular the most dynamic part of the Italian economy – districts and fourth capitalism – as well as the most backward part – will we finally have an industrial policy capable of resolving the North-South divide? – to superimpose a statist bet on the last chance to relaunch the national economy.
My contribution is to remember the complexity of historical events referred to by Mazzucato as examples of "excellence" of state interventions in the economy of the respective countries, waiting for the general declarations, widely shared, to be followed by concrete projects on which to set up a well-founded and fruitful debate.
In the post-war period, the protagonists of reconstruction in Italy were businesses, not the state. It was Vittorio Valletta – who went to Washington and demonstrated to the American financiers of the Marshall plan that he knew his company, its sector and therefore its needs perfectly – who obtained the large sum which he needed to rebuild Fiat.
It was Oscar Sinigaglia, with incredible intelligence and tenacity, who gave the country the large Cornigliano steel production plant. It was Enrico Mattei, who even contributed his own money, who ensured that Agip was not dismantled for "state reasons", but rather was strengthened and included within a large holding company, ENI. The State, or rather politics, especially in the person of De Gasperi, had the merit of not hindering these initiatives and their consequent success.
Le Japanese technocracies, which I studied right in the golden years of prodigious Japanese development, acting for moral suasion e guidelines they have achieved great successes in a sector such as steel, but they have also offered examples of bad planning, such as when the legendary MITI wanted to bring together all the automotive companies in a single company, which fortunately managed to avoid this drift. Nor can we ignore the fact that in the last thirty years these same technocracies are co-responsible for the stagnation of the country.
I believe that the real contribution that the Italian State can make, through the CDP and the MEF, and enhance entrepreneurial and managerial resources of the companies it controls and to ensure that competitive companies on global markets are entrusted to the "suitable hands", according to the skills, and independently of the political consortia and momentary alignments. This is the great lesson of IRI, in the years in which it made a decisive contribution to the rebirth and modernization of an economically ruined country.
°°°°°°The author is Senior Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University in Milan
