Reinventing IRI is grotesque but where has industrial policy gone?

Even the current debate in the budget session in Parliament revolves, as it has for at least two decades, on how to relaunch the growth of the Italian economy, for some time locked up in a phase that we could define as secular stagnation. Except for the grillini, well-known justicialist spreaders and supporters of a forestry-pastoral economy subjected to the pervasiveness of criminal law (see the abolition of the statute of limitations in trials), all political forces hope for the recovery of businesses and the creation of new ones. In doing so they support Confindustria, which however has always limited itself to knocking on the door of the public budget. They prevail like this ramshackle proposals of any support of internal demand which they would like to attribute to poor Keynes, who having been dead for some time cannot rebel against the considerations of a sports bar that disgrace him.

Since companies are not born by divine or invisible hand, but are born, grow and die depending on the innovative capacity of the entrepreneur, the question that arises is if in Italy there is a lack of companies or if there is a lack of private entrepreneurs that they create and develop businesses capable of facing the challenges of an economy not enclosed in the comforting rooms of autocratic sovereignty and not dominated by internal protectionism, as in the times of the torrential competitive devaluations on prices before the euro, in the regime of irrevocably fixed exchange rates.

Take a look at the Italian Stock Exchange that is not limited to yesterday can help to give some explanation to the Italian economic stagnation.

in 1951, with the old Iri functioning as an engine, also cultural, of the country's industrial policy, the top three listed companies by capitalization were Edison, Montecatini and Snia Viscosa. Ten years later, the old IRI still functioning, were Edison, Fiat and Montecatini; Still in 1971 they were Fiat, Montecatini and Sip.

Then the markets began to open under the regime variable changes with the consequent competitive devaluations, however not sufficient for the survival and growth of companies lacking in product and process innovations. Thus it was that the IRI became the place where lame dualism reigned in the ambit of the mixed economy. In other words, private individuals, instead of acquiring control of IRI's jewels, had their companies bought by IRI itself. In 2018, of the top three companies listed on the Stock Exchange, two are publicly controlled, Enel and Eni, followed by Intesa San Paolo, controlled by the Foundation. Private entrepreneurs have dissolved, at least in the Borsa Italiana ranking, and the desire for IRI returns, in disguise, as the site of a renewed lame dualism.

It could be that the free market hasn't been able to guide the choices of entrepreneurs with its invisible hand that hasn't yet shriveled up and that the raining subsidies appreciated by entrepreneurs reluctant to innovate have altered their innovative market risk choices, but it could also be That the abandonment of any hypothesis of industrial policy by governments has contributed to not orienting the strategic choices of Italian entrepreneurs.

If it is impossible and perhaps grotesque to reinvent IRI as it once was, the engine of industrial policy, the renunciation by the State of any and all hypothesis of industrial policy that guides and encourages Italian entrepreneurs to renew themselves in this new industrial revolution is also astonishing . A situation that cannot be tackled with a one-hundred share and citizen's income, but not even with the traditional transfers to equally traditional companies and with reductions in the cost of labor equally indiscriminately.