La Proiezione Internazionale dell'Italia

Despite a declining trend in its world export market share since the beginning of the 90s, Italy is still today the world’s 7th exporter and importer, 7th as share of world GDP, 25th in the ranking of world per capita incomes in PPP terms. However Italy’s potential growth of output and productivity is dragged by its quite anomalous industrial structure and patterns of trade: a very high relative share of manufacturing firms with less than 50-100 employees and corresponding very low share of large firms at the opposite end of size distribution; a genuine weakness in most scale intensive and high-tech industries. Italy’s remarkable competitive advantages in top quality traditional consumer goods (personal care, housing) and in many segments of intermediate and producer durable goods (mechanical engineering, electrical and non electrical) are supported by a substantial amount of product and process innovation. But these patterns of output specialisation are increasingly inadequate to assure creation and training of high-skill jobs, propensity to invest in R&D-based innovation (less exposed to imitation by low-cost countries in their catching-up development process), capacity to invest in durable brandnames and robust worldwide distributive networks, ability to compete with multinational strategies and oligopolistic rivalry.