In the XVII legislature 2013-2018, the three successive governments (Letta, Renzi, Gentiloni) implemented an industrial policy aimed in practice at the following five objectives:
1) management (inherited) of corporate crises, through the so-called ministerial tables and the occasional recourse to the arbitrary and distorting definition of "strategic sector";
2) birth of Startups Innovative;
3) renewal of the production machinery park, with the Nuova Sabatini;
4) revival of industrial investments, thanks to a 140% super-depreciation;
5) Industry 4.0, national plan for greater production flexibility and a speed of industrialization of innovative technologies that increase the productivity, quality and competitiveness of businesses, thanks to Ultra-Broadband and 250% Hyper-depreciation.
The effects of this policy have been measured here by crossing and processing data updated to August 2017 from the most authoritative sources (Bank of Italy, Istat, Mediobanca, Ministry of Economic Development, Wef, Imd). The effects were positive, but slow, of limited extent and all in all not yet sufficient with respect to the needs, not suitable for overcoming territorial dualisms nor for trigger a generational change of Italian entrepreneurship. However, the effects herald a further positive impact in a short period of time. These are non-temporary effects, but certainly only prodromal of future truly structural recoveries. The definition of "cyclical and non-structural" recovery, used by the governor of the Bank of Italy on 25 August 2017, should be read in this sense.
In a nutshell, this work shows that in the five years of the legislature businesses showed an appreciable recovery of their industrial content, in terms of added value (which rose from 16,4 per cent of turnover at the end of 2012 to 19,7 per cent in 2016) and also of labor productivity.
This recovery turns out to be almost exclusively due to a better use of production capacity installed capacity (which rose from an average of 71 per cent in 2012 to 80 per cent in 2016), thanks to an expansion in aggregate demand.
The imaterial investments, the only ones that can generate new real manufacturing job opportunities (since the same cannot be said of the incentives to hire without an expansion of production activities), have been reported starting from mid-2016 and, considering the technical construction and launch times of their respective new products, will unfold their beneficial effects on the economy only in the first months of the next legislature. Therefore, it will not be easy for the majority parties to brag about it during the electoral campaign in the next general elections.
The two data, i.e. the high utilization of the plants and the incipient investments for expansion or restructuring, are consistent with each other because a company thinks about investing only when the factories are almost saturated.
It has been demonstrated by the Bank of Italy that the most effective tool for the purpose of the ongoing relaunch of investments is the so-called Super depreciation at 140 percent, which the government launched taking inspiration from a proposal I formulated in May 2015, identical in principle but unlimited in scope. I wrote: «The next legislature would start with the turbo». Few believed it.
Meanwhile, the means of production are further aged: Average seniority rose from 17,1 years in 2012 to 19,7 in 2016, an increase of two and a half years in the past four years.
The companies have maintained the managerial efficiency they already had. They have further improved their patrimonial and financial health: the ratio between financial debt and equity capital has decreased from 0,86 in 2012 to 0,69 in 2016, because with the non-reinvested cash they have repaid financial debts.
This confirms that the cause of their reluctance to invest should not be sought in a lack of resources, ie in a credit insufficiency. Symmetrically, a disproportionate increase in the mass of bank credit would be inelastic and useless. L'employment in medium and large industries I predict that at the end of the term it will return to the same levels existing at the beginning, in the spring of 2013.
As for the other tools launched, the small manufacturing companies committed to modernizing their machinery thanks to the New Sabatini they appear to be large in number, but the extent of the modernization is modest and the affected area is only the one where there is already the greatest density of SMEs (Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, Tuscany). In the southern regions the Nuova Sabatini brought little benefit.
Analogous speech for the Startups Innovative. The Minister of Economic Development, Carlo Calenda, argued that they should be "credited for proposing a new entrepreneurial paradigm characterized by the ambition to grow rapidly, by an international vocation, by a commitment to permanent innovation and by a propensity for cross-sector contamination and atopen innovation. These values, if they become systemic, will be able to renew the entire entrepreneurial fabric, including the more traditional one».
Even the first effects of this tool are positive and promising, limited more or less to the same regions of Nuova Sabatini but with the surprising addition of Campania. Furthermore, at this rate (6.457 new Startups in four years, from June 2013 to June 2017, at a uniform rate of 1.614 per year), it would take more than a thousand years to replace the current one million six hundred thousand Italian capital companies, biblical times. So, they are not enough Startups Innovative, it is necessary that all the projects underway in the Ministry of Economic Development proceed successfully. Perhaps for this reason the minister said "if they become systemic".
Therefore, the noon Sabatini remains with little and, with the pleasant exception of Campania, with few Startups Innovative. On the other hand, where there is little small, medium and innovative industry, there are few conditions for growth of the real economy. The southern question remains the most neglected, thorny and unresolved aspect also in the field of industrial policy.
In the pamphlet Let's go back to industry. Ninety years after the great crisis, published in 2016 in this same series, I had argued that deindustrialization had begun in late 1998 when the uncertainty in the system had reached its maximum levels, the entrepreneurs had preferred to postpone the launch of almost all the investments already planned, and since then without brakes the country had also lost productivity, and therefore competitiveness.
However, the causes of the uncertainty had matured in the previous years, between 1990 and 1998 when, under international pressure, even before theentry of the lira into the euro and in the absence of corrective policies, the main instruments of public intervention in the economy that the fascist regime had set up sixty years earlier to castle, protect and isolate Italy from the effects of the stock market crisis and financial year of 1929. Public intervention which Italian entrepreneurs, addicted to, at the end of the XNUMXs discovered they could not do without.
One of the most promising aspects today is that, during this legislature, from the end of 2012 to June 2017, the uncertainty index presented a progressive fall, falling to those historic lows that had only been reached a couple of times in recent decades. This bodes well for the near future, because the ongoing relaunch of productive investments thanks to super-depreciation could, indeed should, be strengthened, without further postponements. Provided that this tool is increased or, at least, replicated and not weakened for 2018.
In this picture, the Industry 4.0 plan generates high expectations, both because it is part of a global process (economic, industrial, technological, social), and because it arrives in Italy in synchrony with the low uncertainty, the full use of the plants, a return of the propensity to invest. That global process was called Industry 4.0 and, since 2011, the fourth industrial revolution. In Italy it had as its archetype a technology transfer matrix built experimentally four or five years earlier by the ipi, an agency later suppressed by the Ministry of Economic Development. In the rows of the matrix there were 18 industrial sectors and in the columns 10 supply chains or technological areas (from nano- and bio-technologies to information technology, telecommunications, to management technologies).
The evolutionary step from the matrix to the fourth revolution has been impressive: the columns of ten have become an infinity; from parallel and independent they have become interacting and cross-fertilizers; in the past, in order to seed the sectors, there was a need for technology transfer, for the relative operators (a sort of bee that brings pollen to the flowers) and for a long time. Now, everything is spontaneous, instantaneous, almost uncontrollable. Furthermore, from the strictly manufacturing sphere, the fourth industrial revolution spreads in management, in the network of suppliers and customers, in the world of work, in society, but it has a jobless. It is no longer just technology, it is all-round knowledge.
The most advanced research centers report that the critical nodes are training and institutional infrastructures. As for the first, research updated to August 2017 shows that Italy is behind both in terms of quality and quantity of demand for future professions, as well as their salary and school organization, but they also say that trust in this field towards of Italy who knows why it is growing.
Some recent positive data on theindustrial occupation in Italy they do not deny that the fourth industrial revolution is jobless, if anything they show that this revolution has not yet arrived in our country. As for institutional infrastructures, the question touches on the absence of a regulatory framework, the low awareness of the country's political and ruling class. On all these nodes, the expectations towards the Industry 4.0 project of the Ministry of Economic Development are enormous.
The first concrete results must be analyzed very carefully. From a first reading, I think we can argue: that the Ministry of Economic Development is well aware of the systemic and overall nature of the process of technological transformation underway in the industry; that the ministry is doing well the part of its strict administrative competence; that the credit for the strong increase recorded in the purchases of innovative machinery in the first five months of 2017 must go to Hyper-depreciation rather than to the political impact of the Government Plan; that in fact the impact on training and work organization is absolutely lacking; that therefore the implementation of the Industry 4.0 Plan is disjointed, segmented, uncoordinated, ultimately ineffective.
These considerations highlight that two other important questions are still unresolved.
1) Italy's competitiveness in 2017 showed a downturnand, perhaps a disappointing rebound, in the world rankings it returned to the same levels as at the beginning of the legislature. In particular, in basic infrastructure.
2) Among these are natural monopoly networks, subject to the regulation of the so-called authorities. The companies that manage these networks (transmission of very high voltage electricity, gas transport, motorway services) enjoy generous tariffs and tolls and can boast gigantic economic margins, equal to three or four times those of industrial companies which are eroded by the cost of those same networks.
For each of the two questions, I have publicly made a proposal for some time, which has so far gone unheeded. On the networks in natural monopoly, I suggest that the new government report to Parliament and that this immediately make an in-depth and independent reflection on the facts, without witch hunts and without trials.
On the competitiveness, as I noted in chapter 2, I consider it very important that the president of Confindustria has indicated this issue as a basic objective to be pursued. I start from the consideration that in the organizational chart of the government there are so-called vertical structures, some of which are appointed to govern capital in its various forms (the Economy governs financial capital, the Infrastructures the fixed tangible one, the Cultural Heritage the immaterial one), others govern work in its various phases (Labour and social policies, Education and university).
On the other hand, there is a lack of a structure used to elaborate a project to recover the competitiveness of the production system, to verify and solicit its implementation, a structure that operates horizontally and across the major ministries.
My proposal is that the next government draws up and engineers a legislative project on Italy's competitiveness, in which the Mezzogiorno camps out, approves it and entrusts its verification and solicitation to the Ministry of Economic Development. Since competitiveness is inter-ministerial, the new minister will have to be careful not to invade other people's fields, he will have to limit himself to measuring the times and extent of the recovery, identifying any deviations and delays, reporting them to Palazzo Chigi, proposing corrective measures. In short, he will have to perform the function of an industrious and silent solicitor of competitiveness, thus interpreting a revised script of industrial policy, more modern and respectful of the market.
The Ministry of Economic Development is equipped with skills that are already suitable for the task or that can be easily integrated.
