While the specter of technical recession advances, with a GDP that for Italy is expected to be heavily negative this year and still below zero next year, in Bergamo tomorrow at the annual conference promoted by the Italcementi Foundation: “Industry: a company. The real economy from the present to the near future” will be a sort of check-up on the state of health of businesses in a country that has now forgotten how to grow. Together with a range of economists and entrepreneurs, Emma Marcegaglia, president of Confindustria, and Susanna Camusso, national secretary of the CGIL, will do this check-up in a predictable meeting-clash of opinions and related therapies.
The question everyone is called to answer is whether industry capable of creating development and well-being is now destined to be a prerogative no longer of Italy (and of Europe in general) but only of emerging markets. In fact, year after year we are witnessing a country that is increasingly struggling to reposition itself on the road to real growth, with the real economy at the center of a sustainable development model. And this is a fact made explicit by the stagnation of GDP. For decades in our culture the "factory" has been a source of pride and Italian industry has made itself known and appreciated throughout the world for its quality and innovative capacity, creating wealth and jobs. Today, lost or expelled from strategic sectors, we are slipping further and further behind, almost absent from the inventions that changed the world. Italy, in particular, gives the impression of suffering more than others from the backlash of a West that has succumbed to the charm of deindustrialization and of creating "money from money", typical of finance.
For a long time, the social effects linked to this transformation and to globalization were considered a marginal price to pay compared to the benefits of the transition towards an "immaterial" society, with the overcoming of the concept of work, understood in its concreteness of "acting to transform ”, as a necessary engine of growth. The crisis that hit the Eurozone, centered on sovereign debts, requires a change of course by bringing the primacy of doing and therefore of business back to the center of the engine of the economy.
Too many optimistic forecasts have collapsed under the test of facts. Even the relationship with the new emerging economies was initially presented as a "development" towards a model in which the disappeared industrial work would be replaced by jobs with high added value in the service sector. But the emergence of realities such as the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – has profoundly changed this scenario. And while Western countries are losing ground and seem incapable of getting out of the crisis, those who have invested in their own factories in recent decades and have been able to attract industrial investments from more mature markets, today seem capable of guaranteeing themselves a new development scenario. It is starting from this reference framework that the Bergamo conference "proposes to discuss - as explained to the Italcementi Foundation - on doing business to create value, work and culture, where quality and innovation can reaffirm the country's competitiveness, in a world of new oriented towards the normality of the real economy”.
