International Crisis and the Italian Productive System: An Analysis of Firm-Level Data

This paper examines the impact on the Italian productive system of the recent and severe (the deepest since the Second World War) economic and financial crisis. The picture offered by aggregate national accounts data is supplemented with information at firm level drawn from the Bank of Italy’s annual Survey of Industrial and Service Firms (also known as the Invind Survey) and with the accounts of in-depth interviews that a group of Bank of Italy economists conducted between the end of April and the first ten days of May 2009 with some 70 top managers and executives of Italian firms. The main motivation of this analysis lies in the conviction that the recovery of the Italian economy will depend, more than in the past, on its ability to respond to the heightened competitive pressure in a flexible and innovative way. The rich and heterogeneous set of data and observations collected in this work make it possible, by distinguishing firms by size, sector and propensity to export, to study a wide variety of questions that help sketching a comprehensive picture of the effects of the crisis on the Italian productive system, a crisis that caught it in a phase of deep-going albeit partial restructuring that was beginning to bear fruit. While all firms were heavily hit by the recession those that in the past started to innovate proved more resilient and their experience might point to the right strategy to successfully ri-emerge from the current critical situation.