Italy is not a country for large industries: the private one has practically disappeared, while the public one, apart from Leonardo-Finmeccanica, is well positioned only in the services sector, above all in energy. Yet despite the structural crisis to which a profound and prolonged economic crisis has been added in the last ten years, ours is still the second manufacturing country in Europe after Germany and seems to be holding up quite well on international markets as demonstrated by the volume of exports and the strong balance of trade.
How can this extraordinary phenomenon be explained and how does our country manage to stand still despite the serious structural deficiencies that have led to the disappearance of large-scale industry which in all advanced countries is in any case the backbone of innovation and the conquest of the most far away? A book by Beniamino A. Piccone published by Vitale & Co. illustrates with ample data and quotations the evolution of Italian industry in the last 30-40 years, goes back to the root causes of our weaknesses, but also indicates what our strengths are and how we could further exploit them to return to growth at rates at least similar to those of other European countries close to us.
The volume that is titled with a hint of controversy Italy: many capitals, few capitalists it is edited by Piccone who is not a university researcher, but a financial operator who is passionately dedicated to the study of the underlying causes that have brought our industrial and banking system to the situation in which it finds itself.
The push that continues to come from the industry is substantial but manufacturing alone cannot drive the entire economy Italy towards higher growth rates, necessary to remedy the many imbalances that still weigh on our country.
An interesting explanation of the reasons why our great industry collapsed is offered by Francesco Giavazzi in the preface of the volume. In his opinion, the impetuous development of our large companies that occurred especially after the Second World War was based on imitative processes, i.e. on imports of the most modern techniques and products from other more advanced countries and managing to supply the market with manufactured goods at competitive prices. But that phase is over our large company should have taken the path of innovation for which capital, organizational structures and owners were required superior to those hitherto fielded by families.
A leap that our big companies have not wanted or been able to make. Our capitalists have closed in defensedefended themselves around Mediobanca which, together with the companies, also defended the ownership structures thinking that the two things were closely linked, while at times it was precisely the proprietary castling that limited the growth of the company.
Naturally the political-legislative context played against growth. The financial market has not been developed due both to political short-sightedness and to the opposition of the banking lobbies which saw the affirmation of an alternative channel in corporate financing as a danger.
Piccone's book examines the various aspects of the Italian production system starting from household savings which have been abundant for a long time, but which have not found the suitable channels to finance innovative production. It has often been intermediated by the State which has not used it for investments capable of raising the competitiveness of the entire system. Then the strong presence of public industry led private individuals to adopt a defensive attitude based also on the request to the State for concessions capable of compensating for the "environmental disadvantages" that the State itself created or was unable to remove.
In short, Italy, as stated by Stefano Zamagni and Innocenzo Cipolletta, is a country of inventors but not of innovators, because the system blocks and suffocates the action of those who want to innovate so much as to push them to go and implement their ideas abroad.
What is needed is not a public industrial policy, as we often hear, but a "industrial policy” which is quite a different thing. In other words, we don't need a state indication on what and where to produce, but a change of the system that must become a "friend" of those who undertake and are willing to take risks. As Guido Roberto Vitale states, we need a different, less intrusive but more efficient political system and therefore greater certainty of the law and credible assurance of fiscal stability over time.
In the absence of these general requirements a relational capitalism has developed here, aimed at protecting itself from the market and competition, led to dealing with political power on the basis of the division of the relative spheres of influence.
Banks neglected creditworthiness and also granted loans based on friendships or more speculative transactions. It has arisen a distrust of public opinion towards the business in general which led, as soon as things took a turn for the worse, to the denunciation of speculation and the conspiracy hatched from time to time by bankers or by hidden foreign powers in order to destroy Italy's competitiveness.
Fairy tales that in recent years have been well ridden by populist and sovereignist parties and which have offered a platform for political victory fueled by envy, resentment, and nostalgia for a past which, being now far away in time, no one remembers well anymore.
Luckily the disappearance of big business has not left the desert. In its place were placed medium-large companies, which have been able to innovate both from a technological and marketing point of view. These are a few miles of companies that today are the backbone of the Italian system, which should be supported not with the classic incentives, but with general measures such as the proper functioning of justice, the functioning of the PA on the basis of the results achieved, education and research placed at the center of public action to make human capital available to new technologies and new jobs.
Many entrepreneurs who work in this type of company are so absorbed in their business that they pay little attention to the general framework in which they have to move. The risk is that they will not notice in time that this new political class, now in government, intends to destroy precisely what they live on: work, merit, competition.
It is important to remember what Luigi Einaudi wrote in 1924 when fascism was building the regime: “Against illegalism, threats, the suppression of freedom of the press, journalists protested. the lawyers, the liberals who are in opposition. Only the captains of economic Italy are silent."
Now, in truth, in recent months there have been voices of open and strong criticism of the industrialists of the North, willing to resist the veiled threats of government representatives. It is hoped that we have the firmness to resist for as long as necessary to avoid disastrous policies for the whole country.
