The serious crisis of the last seven years has justified public intervention in many cases, such as that of Ilva in Taranto. In other cases we have seen large and medium-sized private groups give way to important foreign investors, without having the possibility to counteract this drift. In essence, private entrepreneurship too often has not proved to be up to the management of large companies in a global world. The few large international companies that have remained have become stateless, have moved their headquarters to London or Amsterdam, where the fiscal, but above all administrative and financial conditions are more favorable than those in force in the Italian context.
But the right answer to these industrial problems is not that of a return of the State to the direct management of enterprises. On this point, all the speakers who spoke at the conference on the "History of IRI" organized by the Bank of Italy and the Accademia dei Lincei agreed. From Pierluigi Ciocca, editor of the massive work on the history of IRI in six volumes, to the Governor of the Bank of Italy Ignazio Visco to the former presidents of IRI Romano Prodi and Gros Pietro, to Giuliano Amato, everyone has recognized that that experience unrepeatable, and not even desirable, given that today, as Visco explained, what is needed is not a producer state, but a regulatory state capable of removing obstacles to the proper functioning of markets and guaranteeing a favorable environment for business activity .
Even though IRI had a very positive role in the post-war period when it created basic industry and the infrastructures essential for the Italian economy to take off, over the years it had degenerated due to the heavy influences of the parties who imposed a logic different from that of efficiency and profitability, thus causing catastrophic losses that the State was no longer able to cover with the increase in endowment funds. This led to the total privatization of the Institute and of many of its most important holdings. Several pieces of industry remained in the public arena, but many industrial and financial skills that IRI had formed over the years were lost, and above all the governments were unable to initiate a new way of conceiving industrial policy, i.e. of assuming that role of strategic guidance and support for the growth of companies that other market economy countries, starting with the United States, have never abandoned.
The result is what we have before our eyes. There is no public industry to act as a driving force (a role which however with the advent of globalization it was no longer able to play), but neither are there large private groups capable of paving the way towards the growth of the entire economy . On what to do, Visco was very clear. The State must encourage the dimensional growth of companies, it must stimulate innovation both with basic research and with ad hoc incentives, and above all it must intervene in the formation of human capital by focusing on raising the quantity and quality of people with high school education.
Then there is the question of good finance for the company. Many have put forward the idea of recreating institutions such as IMI capable of financing investments, others think that a financial market is needed capable of accepting corporate bond and share issues. Surely we cannot continue to view banks with suspicion. On the contrary, it is necessary to help them to relieve themselves of the many non-performing loans with a public bad bank.
Ultimately, two opposing visions emerge from the debate on the role of the state in industrial policy: on the one hand, those who wish for a pure and simple return of the entrepreneurial state, and on the other, those who bet on the possibility for Italy to play its game on the international scene by creating that environment favorable to the enterprise which can attract capital, Italian or foreign, it matters little. The IRI was born in an era of triumph of nationalisms, often not democratic, and in relatively closed economic systems (and which were heading towards autarchy), and to propose it again today in open systems would be a serious mistake. In this way, not only will we fail to overcome the ancient vices of Italian capitalism, but we would end up perpetuating them and therefore cutting ourselves off from the powerful flow of globalisation.
