Less immobile than it seems: it is the portrait of the Italian productive fabric that the economist Innocent Cipolletta publishes in his latest work, a short essay entitled "Italy in the XNUMXs: little growth, much restructuring".
The text, in the realization of which he also participated Sergio De Nardis, traces quickly but effectively the stages of Italian development in the first ten years of the new millennium, analyzing the economic trends of Italy from a global perspective. Not without some welcome news.
First, an indisputable fact: the Italian economy has not grown for many years. Especially when compared to the more dynamic European countries, the GDP of the boot has been at the bottom of the rankings for years. But macroeconomic analysis sometimes risks leaving behind what the big numbers hide.
And here a far from negative picture emerges regarding the industrial and manufacturing structure of the country: in a context of economic stagnation and growing globalization of markets, the Italian economy has undergone an internal "remixing" of the productive fabric which, at the microeconomic level, has been able to adapt and specialize, taking up the challenge of the oriental competition.
In the five-year period 2000-2005, for example, the entry of new producers “it helped to increase manufacturing output by 25 percentage points, but the fall in firms led to a similar fall. The change has been equally marked within companies…the addition of new products has increased overall output by 24 percentage points; the simultaneous elimination of productions caused a drop of 23 points”.
In essence, according to Cipolletta, the Italian economy has simply started a profound process of "productive specializationRicardian style.
The direction of specialization - unequivocally - indicates that the country has chosen to focus on the goods of high quality, leaving the production of low-value-added, unskilled-labour-intensive goods to nations emerging, where wage competitiveness and currency devaluation make production hypercompetitive.
Unable to adapt to the macroeconomic dynamics of the Asian continent, Italian producers coordinated themselves towards the production of high quality manufactured goods and products, genres in which the Asian giants are not yet competitive.
The "natural selection” has played a primary role within the production fabric: many inefficient companies have left the market, replaced by more competitive and export-oriented production units. Even the numbers on the productivity are not entirely negative: on the contrary, total factor productivity in the industrial sector has returned to positive ground since 2003 and, while failing to match the German performance, has nonetheless gained ground against other European industries.
However, this improvement hashad limited effects on the entire economy e – Cipolletta continues – the impact for Italy would be appreciable only if the assumption of the German product per employee rate were extended to the rest of the economy, i.e. to that 80% of productive activities that do not involve industrial transformations: a much more a large part of the manufacturing sector must be activated in order to return to greater economic growth".
Services and public administration, therefore, are the two main burdens that weigh on the Italian performance.
In this context, the excellence of Italian industry fails to drive the entire economy, even though it stands out in the international context in specific product sectors with a very high degree of "Customization” of the product: it is the legacy of the traditional wisdom of local producers, particularly skilled in understanding the needs of the individual customer and capable of adapting production to them.
A process of transformation of factors totally opposite to serialization on which the competitive advantages of Asian chains with low added value are based.
It is even more surprising that Italian industry has successfully taken up the challenge imposed by globalisation, if one considers that all of this took place without any industrial policy formulation by the State, also committed - starting from the end of the 90s - In the financial recoveryprerogative upon entry into the monetary union.
In this context, indeed, the privatizations have not been accompanied by a parallel process of market opening, so much so that huge capitals (think of the Telecom case) have flown into sectors protected, guarantors of monopoly income.
However, some progress has been made with the labor reforms which have increased the employment rate, eliminating the rigidities of the market. Note Cipolletta's position on the dilemma of "lower growth in productivity, which has so worried and still worries many Italian economists": precisely the labor market rigidity before the Treu law (1997) would have reduced the unitary work content, favoring theintensive use of capital. The real concern of the current rules on the subject remains, in any case, the dualism of the market.
The measures in the field of labor law between 1997 and 2003, on the other hand, increased the share of work per unit, thereby reducing total factor productivity. Cipolletta considers the data “a success, rather than a problem“, since the reduced production per employee is an index of a higher employment rate.
In a context of rapid and profound changes, concludes the economist, “the positive fact is precisely the ability of companies to react. The negative fact that emerges is that this reaction did not have an industrial policy orientation and therefore was essentially carried out on the basis of microeconomic conveniences on the part of companies".
In the presence of industrial policies aimed at "making a system" and coordinating from above the trends and challenges faced by the Italian manufacturing world, the result, from a macroeconomic point of view, would probably have been better.
