To improve the fortunes of Italian industry, it would be necessary to act on five fundamental levers: 1) productive specialization; 2) internationalization; 3) company size; 4) access to credit; 5) productivity.
Let's start with the most important of all: productive specialization. The earthquake in Emilia made Italians discover a district, the biomedical one, of which most were unaware of its existence. But it has also shaken the entire global biomedical chain of which the Italian district is an essential component because it supplies intermediates and finished products that are essential for its proper functioning. There are also other districts equally specialized and well integrated in the global value chain in Italy and precisely in those sectors that experts believe are destined to be the engines of a new industrial revolution and which are: those of Comfort (food, clothing, furniture), dell'Power (mobility, light, heating), of the Safety(health, armaments, environment) and of theInformation.. These are already global and globalized sectors today, with a high R&D content, highly innovative and growing.
We are present in each of them, but we are not always adequately present, not even in those in which we excel. The case of the acquisition of Bulgari, Fendi and Valentino by large foreign operators in the sector or that of Parmalat by the French Lactalis confirm the difficulty of Italian entrepreneurship in reaching (and maintaining) the financial and industrial size necessary to carry out a function of global leadership in the reference sectors. A similar argument could also be made for tourism, large-scale distribution or the enhancement of cultural heritage. If specialization cannot be imposed from above because, as the experience of Italian districts itself demonstrates, it is a process that can only start from the bottom up, the limits of this process and the fragility of the companies that are called upon to promote it can be instead, intervene. First of all, start withInternationalization, which is the second lever on which to act.
Far from representing a danger, globalization offers our companies an extraordinary opportunity for growth. The productions that matter are already global today and their value chain is global. To be part of it, the low cost of labor counts less and less while specialization counts more and more: knowing how to do well, that is, something that is useful for the proper functioning of the entire production cycle. While Italy has little chance of taking the lead in each of these sectors, it does have a great chance of occupying an important niche in each of them.
Know-how, undoubted engineering skills, inventiveness, research, design, taste and our own cultural heritage are all ingredients that allow us to play an important role not only in fashion and furniture but also in mechanics of precision, in the automotive, fine chemicals, biomedical, energy and, pace of the judges of Taranto, also in the steel industry (Arvedi docet). To do this, however, we need to project ourselves abroad, as we did after the war and in this the State can and must lend a hand by truly assisting companies operating abroad, attracting direct investments from abroad and, above all, strengthening (judges and journalists permitting) the few large national companies (starting with ENI, Enel and Finmeccanica) which can drag the others into the globalization process.
It is from this point of view that the leverage of theCredit, that of sizing of businesses and that ofProductivity. Small and medium-sized Italian enterprises are mostly family-run, often undercapitalized and lacking an adequate management structure. Helping them to grow, to give themselves adequate governance and a healthy financial structure is (or should be) the interest of banks, investment funds and the country. But this interest is struggling to manifest itself, as evidenced by the continuing credit "lockout" which not only risks suffocating businesses but also favors an easy acquisition of the best of them by foreign speculative funds (not internationalization but the cannibalization of businesses ). This is a knot that the government must propose to solve with its own funds, by talking to the banking system and, above all, by involving Europe.
Finally, the problem of problems remains: that of Productivity, whose unstoppable fall is the unequivocal signal of our decline. Reversing this trend will not be easy because productivity depends only in part on innovation, research and investment while it depends more and more on the human factor. It is the human factor that is truly decisive and this takes us back to the two great unsolved knots of Italian society: that of the School, where human capital is formed, and that of industrial relations, where it is valued. The School should be refounded and industrial relations should be radically changed and opened up to co-management. But that's right against school reform e against that of industrial relations which in Italy stands the most formidable of the conservative blocs ,which includes trade unions, various corporations and parties of both the left and the right.
After all, English moves from this bitter observation The Economist, when he states that if Italy does not want to become one of the poorest countries in Europe it must carry out "far more extensive reforms" (much more profound reforms) than those carried out up to now.
In short, without profound institutional, economic and social reforms, Italy is doomed to decline. For this reason, the next electoral contest, rather than between centre-right and centre-left, should be a confrontation between Reformists and Conservatives.
